Perceptions of Environmental Quality

Now that the "environmental decade" is history, what does the public think has been accomplished in improving the quality of the environment? In the political arena, where perceptions are important, what the public believes may have a substantial influence on the future of the massive and expensive federal efforts to control air and water pollution.

In 1980, RFF conducted a National Environmental Survey for the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and several other federal agencies. Among other findings, the RFF survey discovered that when those who think the United States has made progress in environmental quality are balanced against those who think it has gone backwards, the public as a whole does not believe that the quality of the environment has improved, either nationwide or locally. Instead they believe it has stayed basically the same over the past five years and is likely to remain so in the near future.

To explore these questions, the RFF Poll used the ingenious self-anchored ladder technique developed by Hadley Cantril several decades ago. The technique has been used widely to study people's hopes and fears about their personal lives and their country, but the RFF survey marks the first time that it has been used to measure perceptions of change in environmental quality.

The interviewer handed each respondent a card showing a ladder whose eleven steps were labeled from zero at the bottom to ten at the top.

The interviewer then asked the person to imagine that the top of the ladder represented "the best possible natural environmental situation for our country" and the bottom "the worst possible environmental situation," and to indicate at which step on the ladder he or she perceived the environment to be at the present time (early 1980). This process was twice repeated; first to determine a step for "about five years ago," and finally for an estimate of five years hence "if things go pretty much as they are now." The same three-step procedure was repeated for ladders with anchor points of the best and worst possible quality of the "air in this area" and that of "the water in the lakes and streams in this area." Looking first at the relative levels of the average ratings for local air and water quality and overall national environmental quality, we find a clear rank order (see figure 1). The public rates past, present, and future local air quality as being somewhat higher than local water quality, and both are thought to be slightly higher than overall national environmental quality. With three exceptions, there is little difference in the ratings by the demographic categories of sex, age, income, education, region, and urban-rural residence. Black respondents tend to rate local air and water quality somewhat lower than white respondents do, and whether an individual lives in a city (250,000 population or over), a suburb, or in a nonmetropolitan area does have an effect on the rating given to local air and water quality but not on that given to national environmental quality. As would be expected, rural people, on the average, rate their local air and water quality significantly higher than city dwellers rank theirs, with the difference being especially pronounced for air quality. Those living in the Pacific and, especially, the Mountain states, rated their local air and water quality the highest and respondents from the South Atlantic region rated theirs the lowest of the nine census regions.

When the past, present, and future mean ladder rankings are compared, we find that the overall public rating of environmental quality shows no change from past to present despite the vast national pollution control effort of the 1970s. Since a change must be at least half a step before it can be considered statistically significant, the mean public expectation for the future also is for no change, although the change in the rating of local air quality from the past to the future approaches significance. To express this finding another way, those who think air quality will improve in the next five years are more than balanced by those who expect a decline.

Another way to examine these data is to divide the sample into three groups:

• The optimists—those who rate present or future environmental quality two or more ladder steps higher than the preceding level
• The pessimists—those who rate present or future environmental quality two or more ladder steps lower
• The steady-states—those whose rankings show less change or none at all.

Considering only views about national environmental quality, the 27 percent who are optimistic about the improvement made over the past five years are balanced by the 25 percent who believe it has declined by two or more ladder rungs. Twenty-eight percent of respondents are pessimistic about what will happen to future national environmental quality, whereas only 23 percent are optimistic.

What characterizes a person as being pessimistic or optimistic about environmental quality? The more education a person has, the more likely he or she is to believe that environmental quality has improved over the past five years. Respondents in the eighteen to twenty-five age bracket, those having low incomes and less education, women, and those who live in the western states tend to be more pessimistic about environmental improvement than those in other categories. This holds true whether the respondent was asked about past, present, or future environmental quality. Not surprisingly, those who hold a more pessimistic view of progress in cleaning up pollution at the national level are strong supporters of strict environmental protection.