Associate Professor and Associate Head of UBC Sociology Emily Huddart Kennedy recently published her new book, Eco-Types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment. In the book, Kennedy shows that there is more than one way to care about the environment, outlining a spectrum of eco-social relationships that range from engagement to indifference.
Kennedy argues that when liberals feel they have a moral monopoly on environmental issues, polarization results. If we are serious about protecting the planet, we must acknowledge that we don’t all need to care about the environment in the same way.
We spoke to Prof. Kennedy about her new book.
Drawing on three years of interviews and research, Kennedy describes five archetypal relationships with the environment: the Eco-Engaged, often politically liberal, who have an acute level of concern about the environment, a moral commitment to protect it, and the conviction that an individual can make a difference; the Self-Effacing, who share the Eco-Engaged’s concerns but not the belief in their own efficacy; the Optimists, often politically conservative, who are confident in their relationship with the environment, doubt the severity of environmental problems, and resent insinuations that they don’t care; the Fatalists, who are pessimistic about environmental decline and feel little responsibility to adopt environment-friendly habits; and the Indifferent, who have no affinity for any part of the environmental movement.
Associate Professor Emily Huddart Kennedy
Associate Professor Emily Huddart Kennedy
Eco-social relationship is a core concept of your book, which is referred to as “the intensity and direction of a person’s orientation toward the planet.” Why is this concept crucial to explore and understand in environmental studies?
When I first started learning about environmental sociology, I came across thousands of studies of environmental values. Environmental values measures are often fairly good predictors of environmental attitudes (not as good at predicting behaviours, but that’s a topic for another day). But it always felt to me that the measures of values were missing a more emotional element. For instance, I do value cleanliness, but I don’t value it all that much, as a quick look at my floors would attest. When I read John Levi Martin’s book, The Explanation of Social Action, I felt like I had the first inklings of a solution. At one point, Martin gives the example of relationships being like magnets. We can attracted to or repelled by someone or something, and the intensity of that feeling can vary a lot. When I spoke with people about the environment, I didn’t encounter anyone repelled by the natural world, but I certainly saw a lot of variation in how central the environment was for people and wanted to account for that with the concept of an eco-social relationship.
Was there anything that surprised you during the interview process about how different participants have their own unique relationships with the environment?
An ah-ha moment that I had over and over was when I asked the people I interviewed to tell me how concerned they were about the environment on a 1-to-10 scale, many of the people who said 3 or 4 explained to me that they gave that answer because they didn’t feel like they had the power to effect any change in the environment. Since that question is used on so many surveys (including the General Social Survey) to measure environmental concern, noticing that theme of powerlessness really helped me in my data analysis.
“Noticing that theme of powerlessness really helped me in my data analysis.”
One of the five eco-types in your book is “the Indifferent”, which is often overlooked and underexplored, why is the Indiffrent worth studying and what potential does this eco-type have in terms of doing good for the environment?
I guess first I’ll note that as far as my survey data show, the Indifferent eco-type is the least common (only 6% of the population). This is a group that has the least affinity for the environment and feels the least capable of doing anything to protect the environment. When I’ve presented this research, I’ve had people tell me they don’t think the Indifferent care about the environment, but I disagree. I think that as sociologists, we have a fairly good understanding of the beliefs and practices of super eco-conscious people, but we have very few theories that can help us understand people who don’t identify as environmentalists at all. So one reason to study this eco-type is simply because we don’t really understand them well at all. Another reason is that while other eco-types (like the Optimists) can take antagonistic stances on climate change, the Indifferent did not come out against climate change with a great deal of confidence or vitriol. I think this is a group that would integrate many environmental practices into daily life if those practices were made more accessible because they rarely expressed a visceral frustration with environmentalism.
Could you share what you found about the connections between eco-social relationships and political polarization, and how might these findings bridge understanding between people who hold different political ideologies?
I see this as the central contribution of the book. My argument is that liberal eco-types are higher-status than conservative ones. There are some studies that help substantiate this, to varying degrees. Most directly is Kobe De Keere’s work published in Poetics (2020) that finds liberals are more likely to support climate action and that this view is related to high cultural and economic capital. Less directly, but just as intriguing is Clayton Childress and his co-authors’ recent paper in Sociological Science (2021) that showed people associate conservative tastes for things like country music as being low-status. Basically, I’m arguing that eco-types are perceived as hierarchically organized, with the liberal Eco-Engaged at the top of the hierarchy and conservative eco-types lower down. Cecilia Ridgeway and Sandra Nakagawa published a series of experiments where they tried to figure out why people at the bottom of a status hierarchy assent to their role. They argued it is because when low-status people challenge those at the top, they are seen as being unreasonable and they are disliked by the group. That is the pattern I suggest constitutes a cultural driver of environmental polarization: some conservatives reject the notion that their eco-type is low-status and seek to demean liberal eco-types. Their refusal to assent to the hierarchy causes others to deem them unreasonable and unlikeable. And these dynamics contribute to polarizing liberals and conservatives over environmental protection.
“That is the pattern I suggest constitutes a cultural driver of environmental polarization: some conservatives reject the notion that their eco-type is low-status and seek to demean liberal eco-types.”
