Who is an Environmentalist? The Polysemy of Environmentalist Terms and Correlated Environmental Actions

Abstract Conducting and interpreting an interview is more problematic when informants use a word that has multiple meanings and interpretations. In this case, the problematic word, "environmentalist," labeled several socially-defined identities that were central to the study. The analysis is based on interviews with 156 members of 20 diverse environmental groups (and two comparison groups) in the Eastern United States, including their views on environmentalists, their history with the movement, their self-identification as an environmentalist, and their environmental actions. From these data, principles of classification and naming are used to distinguish the multiple meanings of the identity "environmentalist." We found that informants use the term to describe four distinct types of people: 1) those who say they care about the environment but take no public actions; 2) those who act to preserve local habitat often through private actions (also called "conservationists"); 3) those who act in the civic or political realm, by writing to representatives or attending hearings (also called "activists"); and 4) those who act via demonstrations, civil disobedience, or "direct action" such as blocking logging operations (also called "radicals"). These differing meanings are sometimes used strategically by participants to position themselves, or opponents, within the environmental movement. The polysemy of the word environmentalist renders it a poor choice for questions in surveys and interviews unless disambiguating paraphrases are added. Additionally, crosstabulation shows that named environmental identities are indicators of behavior-self-defined environmentalists also reported significantly more environmental actions. Words or paraphrases that distinguish among the multiple meanings of "environmentalist" further improve these identity terms as predictors of behavior. Introduction This paper examines how members of environmental groups and, to a lesser degree, the public define and use the word "environmentalist," and how such definitions of self relate to individual environmental actions. Although the meaning of "environmentalist" varies across individuals, and shifts as the same individual uses it on different occasions, we will show that these variations follow regular patterns. Decoding these semantic shifts can improve our understanding of identities within the environmental movement, better relate identity to behavior, and increase validity when using the term1 in survey or interview questions. In the beginning of what is now considered the American environmental movement, the term "environmentalist" was not used. Early thinkers, such as Thoreau, Emerson, Muir and Leopold wrote of nature or wilderness rather than the environment. By the late 1800s, the movement split into "conservationists" versus "preservationists." The conservationists, led by Gifford Pinchoc (cf. Miller 2004) sought to manage forests and other natural resources so as to efficiendy extract them for human use. In opposition, the preservationists, led by John Muir, worked to set natural resources aside, guarding them from human use and interference (for a first clear statement, see Muir 1898). The modern term "environmentalist" did not become widespread until the 1960s. In that decade, environmentalism evolved from an upper class attempt to save land for recreation to a movement to decrease pollution and other systemic stresses (Silveira 2001). The shift was partly based on scientists' popular writing (e.g., Carson 1962) and the resulting movement now cuts across class and race lines (Mohai 2003). The term "environmentalist," said to have been used in the 1960s to denote "people who were concerned about the physical environment, the pollution of our air and water," (Wiley 1998) is the term most widely used for those in the movement today, and is the primary subject of our analysis. Webster's New World Dictionary lists two definitions for the word "environmentalist. …