When I used the library database, I found an article that surprised me. Authors Malcom L. McCallum and Gwendolynn W. Bury wrote the article “Public Interest in the Environment is Falling: A Response to Ficeltola (2013)” that argues that Internet searches reveal a fall in the public’s interest in the environment. The evidence for their argument is from Internet search analysis using Google search queries. Google Trends is said to be “a battery of visual and statistical tests” (McCallum and Bury 2013). In the article, they also discuss that they define public in their study as a whole, and not members of the public. When the public shows interest in a subject or thinks an issue is important, Google Trends data shows a increase in searching about the subject. The article found that “proportional share of Google results held by environment fell” and this shows that environmental interest also fell (McCallum and Bury 2013).
This source has given me insight that maybe the public as a whole isn’t going to fix the environment any time soon. I really thought that people were realizing that the environment was an important issue. I know that wind turbines and recycling are starting to be a part of everyday life in some places, but this paper has raised new questions that maybe the public as a whole is not going to change. Even, with colleges like University of Delaware that has a big push toward environmental issues, we need to look at the public as a whole and see that changing public opinion may be harder than we thought. They may be people out there that think strongly about saving the planet , but is that going to be enough when we think about how environmental policies need to change. If the public as a whole does not care about environment, and policy change targets only what interests the public, then how our we suppose to get government and the public to realize the importance of environmental issues?
The evidence from the study conducted by this article is backed up with lots of citations linked to other studies done, which helps the authors’ argument to be credible to the audience. I can look into these other studies to get more information about the topic. The authors’ argument has made me realize my research topic should be about how the public as a whole is not going to save the planet, because the public is not good with change, and this means fixing environmental issues caused by humans may be even harder than we thought.
I think your article is interesting but I wish you could have gone into greater detail about how and why the public is losing interestin the environment. I think I read something elsewhere, if this helps that its because of the publics natural observations that the globe is not feeling hotter as was origionally proposed but in fact colder. Look at the winter weve had ad UD this year. How can we respect these scientific findings if our own observatiojs show that global warming is not happening
email me and I’ll send you a copy of all three papers, and maybe some of the supporting papers if you like! 🙂