The contemporary world that we live in is beset with different and multifaceted forms of environmental issues such as climate change, loss of habitat and biodiversity, land degradation and desertification, rapid deforestation and loss of greenery, air and water pollution, toxic waste accumulation, excessive solid waste generation, among many others. Combined, all these environmental problems lead to the current global ecological and environmental crisis. It has been established through well documented scientific research that our human species lies at the heart of these environmental problems, as its main causal agents. Our unsustainable lifestyle and unhealthy relationship with nature as exemplified through our current economic modes of production and consumption behavior lies at the core, further exacerbating and/ or compounding towards deterioration of our living environment.
Fixing the foreseeable ecological and existential threat to humans and other living species posed by the complexity of these environmental issues is one of the most fundamental challenges facing humanity today. In trying to solve resource management challenges while addressing some of the most pressing environmental issues as stated above, one should also be reminded that human beings are one of the most complex creatures among all living things, especially when it comes to understanding, predicting or shaping their behaviors in management of common property resources (e.g. land, water, forest). In the book: “Navigating Environmental Attitudes,” Heberlein (2012) (http://bit.ly/2NnzKiU) has proposed three environmental fixes mostly centered on an attempt to decipher human attitudes. They are: technological, cognitive, and structural fixes, by drawing compelling case study examples from countries around the world. He further recommends that in many environmentally challenging situations, all these three fixes are necessary together or in tandem.
A technological fix refers to using technology or engineering solutions to fix environmental problems without altering human behavior, such as building dams to withstand flood damage in coastal cities, withdrawing atmospheric carbon dioxide using carbon-capture machines to reduce the effect of global warming, and so on. One of the drawbacks of adopting a technological fix is that it addresses the problem temporarily by offering technical resolution while foregoing or relinquishing a path to moral absolution, thus obviating peoples’ responsibility and commitment towards behavioral modifications or other effective paths to finding lasting solutions. (Sarewitz & Nelson, 2008) The other two fixes require change in human behavior to solve environmental problems.
On the other hand, changing people’s behavior by providing them with knowledge and information – also known as the Cognitive fix doesn’t work in all situations and context either. Although people’s attitude and behavior are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Behaviors are seen, but attitudes are invisible. In Heberlein’s metaphorical language, he referred attitudes as like ghosts, since they are so difficult to specify and narrow down, let alone changing them, thus rendering the term as an abstract and stable entity by many social scientists who studied attitudes in finer detail. Yet, they all agreed that understanding attitudes are central in tackling environmental problems. Studies have shown that just by having knowledge or information and/ or a positive attitude towards the environment does not necessarily leads one to pro-environmental behavior. For example, a city dweller may have adequate knowledge as well as a positive attitude toward waste segregation and recycling at home or in the neighborhood, but when it comes down to decision making for actual application in real life, he or she may not actually do it in practice owing to various constraining factors (e.g., lack of land or space, social taboo, time-limitation, flexible or easygoing social norms, and so on).
Finally, when either of the two fixes, i.e., the technological and cognitive, failed to achieve effective environmental outcomes, the third one, structural fix holds promise. This fix influences peoples’ behavior by altering the social environment so that the context of the human behavior is modified. This fix doesn’t bypass or avoid attitudes altogether but tries to change peoples’ behavior instead without focusing on first changing their attitudes. For example, flood plain zoning by regulating authorities, and restricting loans by banks or lending institutions to potential homeowners, who are inclined to purchasing their property and building houses in flood-prone areas, is a structural fix. In this classic case, as cited in the Heberlein’s text, for the structural fix to work, actors are first identified who can change the situation’s structure, so that desirable change in human behavior follows. Another example of structural fix from the perspective of fishery resource management could be accomplished by establishing social norms (descriptive and injunctive) such as quota system to fisherfolk communities by setting maximum allowable fish volume and number of times per week to practice fishing activities in common pool resource, and/or by fixing the size and type of fishing gear, that is allowed or permissible by fishers, as well as by implementing time-of-use pricing i.e., by charging higher user fees for fishers to fish during the peak season, when chances of overexploitation of fishery resources is maximum.
In conclusion, for technological and structural fixes to work, it must be consistent with dominant public attitudes and values while the cognitive fix require change in attitude which then influence behavior. Furthermore, environmental attitudes of people are governed by key principles such as, the direct-experience principle: attitudes based on peoples’ direct experience are hard to change and more connected to our behavior; the identity principle: attitudes tied to our identities are also hard to change as it requires major restructuring of our belief system; the consistency principle: attitudes tend to be consistent, however, they do not act like gears following a lock-step process; and the specificity principle: more specific attitudes are better in predicting behaviors. (Heberlein, 2012) In a nutshell, the better are we able to navigate and conceptualize public attitudes, the easier it becomes for us to foresee, design and intervene in solving key environmental issues plaguing our generation.
References:
Sarewitz, D., & Nelson, R. (2008). Three rules for technological fixes. Nature, 456(7224), 871.
Heberlein, T. A. (2012). Navigating environmental attitudes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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