Australians’ concern about the environment plummets
[cf. U.S. worry about water, air pollution at historic lows – Concern about global warming dead last] 30 April 2012
By Ben Cubby CONCERN for the environment has dwindled into a ”middling” issue that many people do not have strong feelings about, a major study into Australian attitudes towards society, politics and the economy has found. Food, health, local crime, safety and rights to basic public services – the tangible things that people confront on a daily basis – are dominant national concerns. ”Australians are effectively indifferent to global and societal issues, rating these significantly lower,” according to the report What Matters to Australians, produced by the Melbourne Business School and the University of Technology in Sydney, with the support of the Australian Research Council. ”What we see in these results is a picture of a relatively conservative society concerned with local issues that influence its members’ daily lives.” People’s concerns about industrial pollution, climate change, renewable energy and depletion of energy resources plummeted when compared to an identical study carried out in 2007, with only logging and habitat destruction remaining among the top 25 issues of concern. In 2007, environmental sustainability was the only set of global issues that was ranked as highly important. When the same questions were repeated in 2011, no global issues appeared among the nation’s top concerns. ”Overall, this reveals a startling decline in the Australian population’s concerns about environmental sustainability,” the researchers wrote. ”It is possible that 2007 was nothing more than an aberration when the debate about environmental sustainability became a matter of ordinary, everyday concern. ”What we now see in Australia and across Western countries is likely closer to a long-term trend in the value of environmental matters to the general population.” […]
