Environmental Education
ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS
Environmental awareness is an integral part of the movement’s success. By spreading awareness to others that the physical environment is fragile and indispensable, we can begin fixing the issues that threaten it.
ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE
Environmental attitudes are important because they often, but not always, determine behavior that either increases or decreases environmental quality. Traditionally, attitudes have cognitive, affective, and conative elements, but environmental attitudes might be better described as having preservation and utilization dimensions. Pro-environmental attitudes rise and fall with current events and vary with age, gender, socioeconomic status, nation, urban-rural residence, religion, politics, values, personality, experience, education, and environmental knowledge. Environmental education aims to improve environmental attitudes but has mixed results. The mass media have been both helpful and harmful. Two prominent theories for explaining environmental attitude-behavior relations are the theory of planned behavior and value-beliefs-norm theory, which offer the benefit of parsimony and the shortcoming of incompleteness. Researchers have, for example, suggested additions to the theory of planned behavior, noting that pro-environmental behaviors vary in their effort to complete, which influences the attitude-behavior relation, and that many barriers to behavior change exist.