Are we all environmentalists now? Rhetoric and reality in environmental action

Throughout the western world, public support for environmental protection measures has grown consistently during the past three decades. Endorsement for a wide array of measures to reduce the human impact on nature and conserve resources has been high among individuals in the UK, relating to a variety of environmental issues, such as transport, waste management, water quality and green consumerism. These stated concerns are somewhat in contrast to the behavioural responses which similar research projects have reported. This attitude-behaviour inconsistency, or more colloquially, the ‘value-action gap’, has become a major area of soul searching for policy makers who have used techniques such as contingent valuation and willingness to pay models to construct their policy measures. Accordingly, this paper presents an alternative means of investigating the attitude-behaviour inconsistency, with the use of research by social psychologists, sociologists and geographers. A framework of environmental behaviour is presented, so as to provide environmental researchers with a means of examining which variables modify the relationship between stated intention and action. The results indicate that whilst there is a moderately strong relationship between stated intention and behaviour, the factors influencing these two constructs are significantly different so as to suggest that public rhetoric towards environmental action may be influenced by different antecedents to that of actual behaviour. As such, the paper provides a fresh perspective on the difference between rhetoric and reality in environmental action.