The new ecological paradigm revisited: anchoring the NEP scale in environmental ethics

Abstract

The New Environmental or Ecological Paradigm (NEP) is widely acknowledged as a reliable multiple‐item scale to capture environmental attitudes or beliefs. It has been used in statistical analyses for almost 30 years, primarily by psychologists, but also by political scientists, sociologists and geographers. The scale's theoretical foundation is, however, seldom discussed and not comprehensively specified. This article explores the environmental ethics that underlies the scale, analysing which ethical positions on human—nature relations the scale seem to match. The study shows that pronounced forms of anthropocentrism are well captured by the scale, while the environmental position is ‘shallow’ rather than ‘deep green’ and misses crucial elements of the contemporary environmental ethics debate.

Acknowledgements

This research was financed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) and conducted within the research programme Sustainable Households: Attitudes, Resources and Policy (SHARP).

Notes

1. It is worth noting that humans, because of their position at the top of many food‐chains, are more dependent on animals and plants than vice versa.

2. The terms inherent value and intrinsic value are sometimes used synonymously (e.g. Devall & Sessions, 1985), but they are also given different meanings. Sessions (1992, p. 100) argues that an entity has ‘… intrinsic value when humans place a value on it for its own sake’. Inherent value, on the other hand, often means that the value of natural entities does not depend on the recognition or awareness of any other being (e.g. Regan, 1983). Mathews (1994) uses the terms in quite the opposite way, yet relying on similar definitions.

3. There are also a variety of ideological combinations. To use the ecological stance as an illustration, there are eco‐feminist expressions as well as eco‐socialist and even eco‐authoritarian versions (Dryzek & Schlosberg, 2001).

4. A classic democratic argument is that every individual (human being) is considered to have interests which, in turn, they also have the right to pursue. Goodin (1996) argues that this line of reasoning is applicable to a wider community of beings. Consequently, if natural entities have inherent worth, they can also be argued to have interests, and according to established conceptions of democracy, interests call for equal consideration in the democratic decision‐making process. This clearly does not mean that each living organism should be guaranteed certain rights, such as rights to life and development. Ecocentric theorists rather discuss basic guidelines for deciding what to do if/when human and non‐human rights come into conflict. For instance, animals or ecosystems should enjoy freedom from harm caused by humans, unless the interference is justified by the need to satisfy some vital human need (Naess, 1989).

5. Dunlap et al. (2000, p. 432) speak of the ‘possibility’ of an ecocrisis, which is an unfortunate wording in its positive overtones.