Who’s Environmentalist? Everyone, Study Suggests : Ecology: UCI professor’s survey reveals that Americans--from Earth First! members to laid-off sawmill workers--see themselves as nature lovers.

James Boster began his academic career by slogging through the sticky jungles of Peru to study the agricultural habits of Amazon natives.

More recently, Boster, a UCI anthropology professor, used some of the same techniques to slog through the cities of the United States.

Interviewing hundreds of people ranging from laid-off sawmill workers to radical environmentalists, Boster and two associates made a surprising discovery: nearly everybody considers themselves environmentalists.

“It seems that environmentalism is an American value,” says Boster, 44. “This holds true even for groups that you would think would violently disagree.”

The findings are chronicled in a new book published earlier this month by MIT Press. Entitled “Environmental Values in American Culture,” it is based on years of detailed interviews with people selected for what the authors assumed would be their divergent environmental views.

For Boster, the study is only the latest accomplishment in a career full of pursuits combining anthropology and environmentalism. Born in Washington, D.C., he later studied at Harvard and UC Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate in anthropology. In the late 1970s, Boster spent two years working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and later as a biological technician for the state’s forest service.

It was during that experience, he says, that he first became interested in anthropology as a way of exploring “the nature of other people’s understanding of the natural world.” So as a graduate student several years later, he began his academic career by traveling to the rim of the Amazon basin in Peru to study the agricultural habits of the indigenous peoples.

“It was a study in the genetic diversity” of crops, Boster recalls. “I was trying to understand how they maintain different varieties of their main crop.”

After writing a doctoral dissertation based on that experience, Boster taught at the University of Kentucky and conducted research at the University of Pittsburg. Later, he spent several months on the Eastern Seaboard documenting recreational fishermen’s knowledge of their prey, and in Europe studying the views that inhabitants of various countries held of each other.

Five years ago he came to UCI.

It was about that time, Boster said, that he began talking with a colleague--University of Delaware Prof. Willett Kempton--about collaborating on a book about American environmental values.

“We wanted to move out of the rain forest,” Boster said. “We wanted to do a piece of anthropology, to use exactly the same methods we would use in an exotic setting--like Mexico or Peru--to understand our own society.”

The pair enlisted the aid of a third collaborator, Jennifer Hartley, a doctoral student at Brown University.

The findings are being hailed by some as a milestone in the ongoing national discussion on the environment.

“It’s a path-breaking book,” said Tom Dietz, a sociologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who is reviewing it for a professional journal. “This is the first major effort to figure out how people really think about this issue.”

*

In researching the book, they interviewed 185 people throughout the United States over a period of three years. Unlike earlier studies on environmental values that had relied on broad surveys, Boster said, this one was based on in-depth interviews. And instead of interviewing people at random, he said, the researchers talked to members of several distinct groups chosen for what the authors expected to be their divergent environmental views.

Those interviewed included members of Earth First!, an environmental group often perceived as radical; the Sierra Club, a more moderate environmental group; dry cleaners who had been forced to install expensive filtering equipment because of air quality laws, and sawmill workers out of work due to what they perceived as the country’s environmental agenda.

What stood out, Boster said, was the extent to which everyone agreed on basic environmental values. When asked whether they had a “moral duty” to leave the earth in as good or better shape than they found it, for instance, 96% of the sawmill workers and 100% of Earth First! members said yes. Most also agreed with the statement that “we have to protect the environment for our children . . . even if it means reducing our standard of living today” and that “because God created the natural world, it is wrong to abuse it.”

“Talk about the environment summons up talk about children from people who don’t have children and of God from people who don’t go to church,” Boster said. “Over and over, people kept bringing this up. We were very moved; it summons up other values that are important parts of being an American.”

The conclusions strike some environmentalists as potentially important ammunition in dissuading Washington lawmakers whom they say are ready to dismantle existing environmental protections.

“What the book says is that the vast majority of American people support that protection,” said Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming and energy program. “I hope that Congress wakes up and pays attention.”

Boster maintains that his only agenda is academic, not political.

He said he is already deeply involved in his next project--a study of how people living at the South Pole relate to each other in such severely adverse conditions. “It’s a model for space flight,” Boster said. “We want to find out how they manage to get along.”