Cultural theory meets the community: Worldviews and local issues

This paper constitutes an attempt to clarify the relationship between “environmental hyperopia” (the discrepancy between environmental concern towards global and local targets) and cultural worldviews regarding nature. A 14-item scale was developed to assess the four views of nature identified by cultural theory. The results, obtained in a sample of 300 residents of an industrialized area, support the relationships predicted by the theory. Altogether, the results on environmental concern showed the “environmental hyperopia” effect: concern for local environmental issues was more attenuated than for global ones, risk perception of local sources of pollution was perceived as lower than distant threats, and global sources of information about the environment were considered more trustworthy than local ones. However, all these effects were influenced by the views people hold on nature. In particular, egalitarians were the ones who exacerbated these effects, and individualistic participants were the ones who were more immune to them. This last result indicates that individualistic residents may have the potential to be involved in local environmental issues. Egalitarian individuals also proved to be particularly responsive to the dimensions of social integration and belongingness to place attachment, and this can be the reason for their low sensitivity to local problems.