Environmental Protection: Why Do We Do It?

For what reason do we protect the environment?  Why might an elderly person plant a fruit tree even if it will not bear fruit for several decades?  There are many possible motivations for this behavior.

There are certainly some self-interested, economic incentives for preserving plant and animal species.  Frequently plants possess medicinal qualities, and certain types of endangered animals can attract tourism.  Perhaps when we see a picture of a polar bear balancing precariously on a thin sheet of ice, we feel compelled to donate merely so that we can ease the guilt we feel for living lives that pollute the environment.

We protect the environment to save ourselves.  Changing temperatures, ocean acidification, altered precipitation patterns, deforestation, etc. all have very tangible effects on human beings, not just plants and animals.  We describe climate change as a threat that we should be concerned about, and that narrative may just be the single best way to compel people to act because of its simplicity: it is rooted in the logic if self-preservation, for most people.

One interesting exception, however, is elderly adults.  The elderly adult who makes a concerted effort to protect the environment will probably not live to see the tangible effects of their work.  So why do it?  

Perhaps some elderly people have an altruistic urge to protect future generations.  If they have no children of their own, they are taking the time, and perhaps bearing an expense, in order to protect people that they have never even met and have no personal stake in.  But if people are acting out of compassion for their own children, then that begs a question of whether protecting your own children counts as an act of altruism.  It all depends on your definition.

And some acts of environmental protection have little foreseeable human consequence.  Thus, saving the kinds of plants and animals may not have any direct effect on humans can be considered a form of altruism.   More often than not, no one is motivated to save the last dozen exotic insects of some specific variety in the Amazon because it will radically alter the course of life for any human being.  Perhaps it is compassion and altruism drive this sort of endeavor purely for the sake of scientific knowledge.

It is only through understanding why people choose to engage in environmental protection that we can gauge how to best motivate them.  We should play simultaneously on people’s altruistic and self-interested tendencies: we should raise awareness so that people are sufficiently concerned for their own futures and we should imbue people with a love of nature so that they can have compassion for it.

Image from: http://www.boomsbeat.com/