"Trashing the Greens"

[flvegan]

I highly recommend checking out this article from the latest E! Magazine. I believe that editor Jim Motavelli did a great job weaving the Shellenberger/Nordhaus essay "The Death of Environmentalism" together with our recent governmental difficulties.

You can read it online here:
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2475

[phantom power]

1. hearts and minds

So it definitely comes down to a battle over both minds and hearts, with environmentalists needing to get much better at winning the latter.

This last paragraph reminds me of the old saying: "Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow."

Sooner or later, our environmental problems will have us all by the balls... :evilgrin:

[bloom]

2. In the 70s

It seems like there was some amount of public education campaign for environmentalism to bring it into the mainstream. Not any more.

In 1992, according to Canada-based Environics Research Group, 17 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “pollution necessary to preserve jobs.” In 2004, a whopping 29 percent agreed with it. In the same time span, there was also a significant increase in the percentage who think that the father of a family “must be master in his own house” (52 percent, compared to 21 percent in Canada), and who agree with the statement that “a widely advertised product is probably good” (45 percent). <snip>

The Republicans, meanwhile, have their own George Lakoff, a pollster and opinion researcher by the name of Frank Luntz. It was Luntz, the pollster for the “Contract with America,” who pointed out that Democrats have science on their side when it comes to global warming, but they will still lose if they go into battle with off-putting scientific jargon and complicated climate models. Meanwhile, the Republicans, using words like “healthy,” “clean” and “safe” to describe policies that are none of the above (ie, Healthy Forests Restoration Act, Clear Skies Initiative) will triumph. And as Lakoff points out in Don’t Think of an Elephant!, the right enforces “message discipline,” which includes repeating words and phrases like “love,” “from the heart” and “for the children” when talking to women audiences.

Luntz sounds just like Lakoff when he says things like, “When you’re talking issues like the environment, a straight recitation of facts is going to fall on deaf ears.” And he’s on the same track when he adds, “Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it’s something that’s inside you. How you think is on the outside, how you feel is on the inside, so that’s what I need to understand.”

I think emotions are manipulated as well - maybe it's more difficult - staging 9/11 for instance - but ads, etc. while appealing to emotions can also manipulate them.