Perspectives: core meaning

• A perspective is how a particular situation is viewed and understood by an individual.

• It is based on a mix of personal and collective assumptions, values and beliefs.

• Personal perspectives produce a wide range of different positions on environmental and social issues.

• Perspectives influence people’s choices and actions, linking how an issue is understood to how people respond.

Values and their influence

• Values are qualities or principles that people consider to have worth and importance in life.

• Values affect people’s priorities, judgements, perspectives and choices.

• Values are individual but are also shared with and shaped by communities.

• Underlying values can be identified through people’s communication and actions.

• Organizational values may be visible through advertisements, media, policies and actions.

• Different values can create tensions between individuals and organizations.

Worldviews

• Worldviews are lenses shared by groups through which people perceive, make sense of and act within their environment.

• They shape people’s values and perspectives through culture, philosophy, ideology, religion and politics.

• The internet and social media expose individuals to a wider variety of worldviews than their local community alone.

• Models that classify perspectives can be helpful but inaccurate.

• Individuals often hold a complex mix of positions, so one simple classification may not fully represent their worldview.

Influences on the environmental movement

• The environmental movement has been influenced by individuals, literature, media, disasters, agreements, technology and scientific discoveries.

• Individual environmental activist: select one named example.

• Author: select one named example.

• Media: An Inconvenient Truth (2006), No Impact Man (2009) or Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet (2021).

• Environmental disaster: Minamata (1956), Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima Daiichi (2011).

• International agreement: Rio Earth Summit (1992), Rio+20 (2012), COP21 (2015) or COP27 (2022).

• Technological development: the Green Revolution, reduction of energy inputs and enteric fermentation, or plant-based meats.

• Scientific discovery: pesticide and biocide toxicity, species loss or habitat degradation.

This satellite image records Chernobyl, one of the syllabus examples of a major environmental disaster. Such major events can influence the development of the environmental movement and public environmental perspectives. Source

What informs a perspective?

• Perspectives are informed and justified by sociocultural norms, scientific understandings, laws and religion.

• Other influences include economic conditions, local and global events and lived experience.

• A perspective is not the same as an argument.

• Arguments are made to support a personally held perspective or to counter a different perspective.

Values surveys and research skills

• Values surveys can investigate the perspectives a particular social group holds towards an environmental issue.

• Effective survey design should accommodate different perspectives towards the chosen issue.

• The survey should assess how those perspectives are likely to impact the issue.

• Design and carry out questionnaires, surveys or interviews, including through online collaborative survey tools.

• Correlate perspectives with attitudes towards environmental or sustainability issues and select a suitable statistical tool for analysis.

• Behaviour-time graphs may be developed to show changes in lifestyles.

Environmental value systems

• An environmental value system (EVS) is a model showing the inputs affecting our perspectives and the outputs resulting from them.

• EVS inputs include information from media, education and worldviews.

• EVS outputs include judgements, positions, choices and actions.

• The EVS model therefore connects influences on perspectives with the responses that result from those perspectives.

Changing perspectives over time

• Perspectives and the beliefs underpinning them change over time in all societies.

• Changes may be influenced by government campaigns or non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns.

• Social and demographic change can also alter perspectives.

• Interpret behaviour-time graphs to identify changes in behaviour and lifestyles.

• Syllabus examples include smoking, littering, eating meat and replacement of traditional indigenous lifestyles by modern ones.

Environmental perspective categories