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ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES OF ALABAMA COASTAL RESIDENTS: PUBLIC OPINION POLLS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Impact/Purpose:
Since the 1960's, environmental issues increasingly have become major concerns among members of the US population. Environmental awareness among Americans was heightened with the publishing of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, the first televised oil spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1967 and increased dramatically in the late 1980s with the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Despite these concerns about the environment, Arcury and others have concluded that environmental knowledge among Americans is actually quite low. For managers, these findings are particularly problematic since the successful regulation of the environment depends on the population having a considerable degree of environmental knowledge. While policy is implemented to preserve a particular resource, it is the activities of humans who utilize the resource, in essence, which are managed. Consequently, the willingness of the human population to accept and comply with regulatory policy is contingent upon the amount of information or environmental knowledge they have about the condition of the resource under question and the necessity of regulations. As Arcury (1990, p.303) points out: "If a future for positive and effective environmental policy is to be ensured, greater effort must be directed to finding and implementing tactics to increase public knowledge."1
Description:
Given these conclusions at the national level, it follows that the continued health and vitality of the Alabama coastal zone is associated with the current environmental knowledge of Mobile and Baldwin county residents. In this research, we collected information from coastal county residents of Alabama and assessed their environmental knowledge and attitudes. Specifically, this research focused on coastal residents' general environmental knowledge as well as their specific awareness about the coastal zone and its future, its health and the major stakeholders who utilize the resources of the coastal zone of Alabama. This research provides baseline information on environmental knowledge and attitudes of residents of the Coastal Alabama region. Once these baseline observations are collected, we recommend that a similar survey be repeated over subsequent years.
1Arcury, T. 1990. "Environmental attitude and environmental knowledge." Human Organization 49 (4): 300-304.