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Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552 ; Why do people who care about the environment adopt behaviours that are not consistent with their beliefs? Previous studies approach this as a case of cognitive dissonance, researchers looking into the strategies through which people reduce gaps between their attitudes and their behaviours. Here we start from the premise that there is no dissonance, and that people have consistent reasons of why they are doing what they are doing. The research task is then to shed light on these reasons. Using Q-methodology, a mixed quantitative- qualitative approach, we interviewed 42 environmentally-minded researchers asking them why they eat meat. Our interviewees were aware of and cared about the environmental and ethical impacts of meat eating, but reasoned that they eat meat because either technological, or political changes are more important than what they personally do, because of doubts about the impact of personal action in a complex world, or simply because they lack the determination to stop eating meat. Our analysis suggests that policies and messages that try to educate or guilt meat-eaters are unlikely to work with those well aware of the impacts of their actions.

In this partial equilibrium and static model, the impact of environmentalism on two countries' environmental policies is presented. First, the only (indirect) way environmentalists influence the choice of pollution taxes is through a negative term in the welfare function in Home. It is defined as passive environmentalism (PE). Second, this article is a first attempt to consider domestic environmentalists lobbying a foreign government. It is defined as active environmentalism (AE). Our contribution is threefold. We emphasize first that the way environmentalists act is paramount to study the consequences of their actions. Passive or active environmentalisms have very different impacts on environmental policies. Second, we show that lobbying activities can be counter-productive for environmentalists. Third, we characterize cases in which the presence of environmentalists has a non-ambiguous positive impact on welfare.

In Citizen Environmentalists, James Longhurst demonstrates that historical explanations of the modern environmental movement must take local context and political power into account. The book focuses on the proliferation of small, grassroots environmental advocacy groups in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It features a case study of one such organization in Pittsburgh: GASP (Group Against Smog and Pollution). By stressing local rather than national events, and by integrating a political-science perspective with urban social history, Longhurst provides new insights into the sources and development of environmental activism.

Among environmentalists today, there is a widespread opposition to the "Enlightenment project." Deep ecologists, in particular, aspire to ground environmental ethics and politics in premodern modes of life and thought. This move fails to account for the myriad important connections between Enlightenment themes and those of contemporary ecophilosophy. Notions of a public sphere, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and deep time, as well as new approaches to the self and doubts about the market, persist from the Enlightenment into current environmental theory and practice. The essay warns against severing environmentalism from its Enlightenment antecedents and urges instead an ethic drawn from the revered nature writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold, who was profoundly indebted to Enlightenment ideals.In recent years a rift has opened up between some currents of environmental philosophy and the legacy of the Enlightenment. Prominent eco-philosophers have blamed the latter for our contemporary environmental crisis. William Ophuls, for example, describes the Enlightenment as a desperate attempt to defy the ecological implications of the laws of thermodynamics by erecting a political order based on untrammeled growth rather than selflimiting virtue. One of the reviewers of Ophuls's book regards this indictment as "old news"; he criticizes Ophuls, in fact, for clinging to the Enlightenment paradigm in seeking to derive environmental ethics from natural laws. It would be fair to say that many, if not most, green intellectuals have come to define their enterprise as a counter-Enlightenment.

Despite the New York Times' gaslighting, bureaucrats and politicians are coming for your stoves.