Environmental Literacy Differences Based on Gender Identity and Race: A Social Justice Concern

Abstract

Environmental literacy can empower students to make positive changes in their environment. Understanding the rates of environmental literacy in college students of color is particularly important because African American, Asian, and indigenous peoples (BIPOC) are most likely to be disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation. We administered a survey with questions regarding environmental literacy to undergraduate students at a comprehensive midwestern university in the fall of 2019 resulting in 2560 participants (about 25% of the student population). An ANOVA comparing environmental literacy summary scores demonstrated that Caucasian respondents had a statistically higher environmental literacy than African American and Native American students but were not statistically different from Asian, native Hawaiian, and mixed-race students, although all scores were low with Caucasian students scoring 39% and African American students scoring 31%. We also found that Caucasian and BIPOC women had a greater concern for the environment (F = 20.675, p < 0.001) and felt that their actions can make a difference following two separate tests (F = 18.916, p < 0.001; F = 19.003, p < 0.001) than men or gender-nonconforming students. Caucasian students have a slightly higher environmental literacy, but the scores overall are low. Women consistently report more concern for the environment and also greater empowerment to make a difference.

1. Introduction

The current global climate is experiencing unprecedented rates of change resulting from human interaction with the environment. In a report developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, human behaviors have caused a 0.8 °C to 1.2 °C increase in global temperature averages since the pre-industrial age. This increase could reach 1.5 °C before 2052 (possibly, as early as 2030) if drastic measures are not taken to curb warming [1]. These increases will result in potentially devastating effects on regional weather patterns, including more extreme temperature variations, more intense and frequent precipitation or droughts, loss of livable land, and damage to infrastructure as a result of rising sea levels [1]. Increased global temperature averages also cause intense and irreversible degradation of global biodiversity [2]. High global biodiversity is essential to food security (via pollination), medical treatments, economic systems, and human development [2]. Around 70% of new “small-molecule drugs” developed and distributed in the past quarter-century were derived from or inspired by natural systems [2]. Thirty-five percent of all global food production is at least partially reliant on animal-facilitated pollination, the loss of which would be devastating to food production and distribution [2]. Natural systems result in nearly 125 trillion U.S. dollars’ worth of economic activity globally and the loss of this economic activity, combined with an unstable global environment, could seriously stall or prevent further societal development [2].

Global warming and the degradation of biodiversity are a direct result of post-industrial human interactions with the environment [1]. Concentrated human intervention is required to stop and reverse the negative impacts of human actions [1,2]. To develop the tools necessary for the required intervention, people must receive environmental education [1], which will facilitate the development of strong environmental literacy. The Belgrade Charter in 1975, the Tbilisi Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in 1977, and Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlight the importance of environmental education and that the world population should be aware of and concerned about the environmental issues that affect their lives.

The degradation of the environment is particularly threatening to people of color. Environmental racism was brought into the national spotlight in the early 1980s when a group of poor, rural African Americans protested a landfill for polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-laced soil in their community [3]. In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice examined the relationship between hazardous waste facilities and the racial/socioeconomic composition of host families nationwide. The results from the study strongly suggested that the disproportionate amount of commercial hazardous facilities in racial and ethnic communities was not random. In 1988, New York City’s West Harlem community was negatively impacted by the North River Sewage Treatment Plant that had just opened. The treatment plant was not processing approximately 170 million gallons of raw sewage per day but was instead dumping the raw sewage into the river [4].

Environmental racism and its restorative counterpart, environmental justice, has been recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since the 1960s. Spurred by the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike [5], advocates of environmental justice argued for better working conditions for sanitation workers, along with other policies to protect the environment. Such efforts, while resulting in the implementation of a variety of policy advances (the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and laws regarding toxic waste), have primarily benefited upper-middle-class Caucasians, leaving people of color (i.e., those least empowered to effect policy change) to face continued and significant environmental health threats [6].

Racial justice movements are a crucial aspect of social justice and affect people across generations. Ginwright (2006) quoted Eccles and Gootman who stated, “strong moral character and commitment to civic engagement were key elements to fostering social development among you” [7]. African American youth have had to become activists due to problematic encounters with police, inequitable school systems, and limited access to other resources. The ongoing racial justice movement has facilitated African Americans and other youth of minoritized groups in developing a strong sense of racial identity, solidarity, and political awareness to help build a more just world. For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 when Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted. The Black Lives Matter movement’s mission, “is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” [8]. Civic engagement is one tool that the Black Lives Matter movement has used to achieve that mission.

Not only is the Black Lives Matter movement a pivotal organization but so is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While the Black Lives Matter movement is primarily focused on correcting the racial injustices that people of color face, the NAACP (which also focuses on racial justice) is taking steps to correct environmental injustices. Environmental injustice or environmental racism is the “disproportionate exposure of communities of color and the poor to pollution, and its concomitant effects on health and environment, as well as the unequal environmental protection and environmental quality, provided through laws, regulations, government programs, enforcement and policies” [9]. The NAACP has recognized this intersection between the environment and racism; they have introduced educational training for members, in addition to making legal services available to grassroots organizations. The NAACP has made great strides to correct racial injustice and environmental injustice since 2009, yet more work remains to be carried out.

To protect the Earth—and all living organisms—from ongoing environmental degradation, intentional education needs to be implemented. This education, dubbed environmental education, leads to an environmentally literate citizenry. Environmental literacy is an indicator of population education, health, and motivation, and the goal of environmental literacy is to influence human beings to act more sustainably [4]. Literature indicates that an environmentally literate citizenry is more likely to contribute enthusiastically to solving environmental problems facing the Earth [10].

In 1990, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the following definition of environmental literacy as a “basic functional education for all people, which provides them with the elementary knowledge, skills, and motives to cope with environmental needs and contribute to sustainable development” [11]. To further define environmental education and literacy, Roth (1992) categorized environmental literacy into three categories of nominal, functional, and operational. Simply put, Roth stated that nominal environmental literacy involves the use of simple terminology in interactions with the environment, functional literacy relates to the understanding of how social systems and natural systems interact and affect one another, and operational environmental literacy refers to using tools to affect change on ideas developed during the functional environmental literacy phase [12].

Mosely expanded on Roth’s work in 2000, further defining the three types of environmental literacy posited by Roth. Mosely found that individuals with nominal environmental literacy can identify and generally define basic environmental terms but this knowledge results in “no more than a casual commitment to environmental concerns and actions” [11]. Functionally environmentally literate people can employ their knowledge of basic environmental concepts to form positions on environmental matters and communicate their knowledge to a third party [11]. Operational environmental literacy is described by Moseley as the ideal type of environmental literacy—it entails the ability to recognize environmental issues, adequately research relevant information, understand and choose among environmental options, actively work to continue and further one’s knowledge of the environment, and employ analytical thought processes [11].

Chepesiuk [12] emphasized that environmental literacy is important in everyday decisions and actions such as going to work, cooking a meal, and buying items at the store. The purpose of environmental literacy is not to provide people with one “correct” answer or way of doing things but instead to help cultivate people’s ability to make well-informed and sustainable decisions [4]. Achieving sustainability relies on the four basic components of environmental literacy: knowledge, affect, cognitive skills, and behavior [13].

Environmental literacy provides skills that are beneficial at all stages of life; for instance, instead of having students memorize facts, environmental literacy instructors work to develop problem-solving skills and enable critical thinking skills among their students, noting the transfer of such skills across situations and outside of educational settings [4]. Furthermore, people of all ages make choices that impact the environment and are impacted by the negative sequelae of global climate change.

As Kruger, Savage, and Newsham [14] noted, older adults both affect and are affected by climate change and also have accumulated knowledge and wisdom regarding sustainability. For example, as the number of hot days and heat waves increase [15], older adults, whose ability to thermoregulate is diminished [16], will rely more heavily on energy-intensive air conditioning, contributing to the vicious cycle of global warming. In addition, heavy reliance on resource-intensive medical care (which has environmental consequences) [17], particularly by older adults, generates billions of pounds of medical waste [18], which, in turn, leads to contamination of various water sources [19,20]. However, older adults’ behaviors also have positive impacts on the environment. As Wright and Lund [21] noted, older adults report higher levels of stewardship and see protecting the environment as a generative act [21]. Thus, intergenerational educational interventions might be particularly well-suited to fostering environmental literacy [14].

The development of an environmentally literate citizenry has become the responsibility of educators, with a strong emphasis on colleges and universities, as institutions of higher education have unique resources (including human capital, scholars from multiple disciplines, and guiding missions often related to both education and global citizenship) to help ensure graduates develop environmental literacy [22,23]. Furthermore, scholars have emphasized that institutions of higher education have an ethical obligation to promote environmental literacy among their populations as environmental threats grow more dangerous [24].

Many institutions of higher education have indeed taken on this challenge, and “sustainability is shaping both physical infrastructure and curriculum planning on college campuses across the country…” [25]. The University of Maryland developed a system to measure their students’ environmental literacy and developed a system to help fill in the gaps that their students might be facing. In the literature, they identified learning outcomes such as “the meaning of sustainability, and the fundamental issues of sustainability, the implications of population growth on the environment, economy, and society…” [25]. They also included a section of Do’s that include “live sustainably, seek work that will contribute to a more sustainable society, etc.” [25]. The syllabus these authors shared makes sustainability achievable and teachable to students who may have trouble grasping sustainability.

Given the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on communities of color along with ongoing racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter (and the increasing realization that it is not just the responsibility of people of color to rectify historic and systemic injustices and disparities), it is important to understand the environmental literacy of college students (i.e., future leaders, educators, and policy-makers). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore differences in environmental literacy among minority undergraduate students and their Caucasian counterparts. An understanding of environmental literacy levels among college students of all races, as well as disparities in environmental literacy, will facilitate the development of tools and efforts to close gaps in environmental literacy and prepare future decision-makers and leaders with the requisite knowledge and skill to implement vital environmental protection actions.

Hypotheses:

• Race will have a role in environmental literacy.

H0. 

There will be no difference between Caucasian and BIPOC respondents.

Ha. 

Caucasian respondents will have a higher environmental literacy than BIPOC respondents.

2.

Gender will have a role in environmental literacy.

H0. 

There will be no difference between women, men, and gender-nonconforming people.

Ha. 

Women will have a higher environmental literacy than men or gender-nonconforming people.

3.

Environmental literacy will affect a person’s concern about the environment.

H0. 

There will be no difference between environmental concern for people with differing levels of environmental literacy.

Ha. 

A higher environmental literacy will lead to more concern about the environment.

4.

Environmental literacy will affect how empowered people are to make change.

H0. 

There will be no difference in empowerment for people with different levels of environmental literacy.

Ha. 

People with a higher environmental literacy will feel more empowered to make change.

2. Materials and Methods

Each year (beginning in the fall of 2010), the Earth and Environmental Systems department at a midwestern university has conducted a sustainability survey as a pedagogical tool to teach the scientific method and to assess environmental concern on campus [22,26]. This study (648765-2) has been deemed exempt by our Institutional Review Board in January 2018. The current study includes evaluation of a subset of the data from the larger study to examine environmental literacy, concern, and empowerment based on race and gender. Detailed description of data collection procedures for the overarching study are described by [26].

2.1. Participants

The students in an introductory environmental science class were encouraged to recruit 20 of their peers to take the Sustainable Futures survey. Students mostly posted the digital link to a Qualtrics survey on their social media pages, which resulted in over 2000 responses in most years and over 5000 responses in 2019. For the purposes of this study, only the responses provided by undergraduate students attending Indiana State University were analyzed for their environmental literacy (removing 2550 other responses from non-target participants). Next, we removed anyone who was under the age of 18 (49 individuals) and those that reported 100 or did not respond to age (100 was the top of our age slider and there was a natural break prior to these responses; 79 individuals removed). To make sure that the respondents were taking adequate time to read and understand the questions, we removed any responses that took less than 2 s per question (152 s total, which excluded 223 individuals). We removed individuals that did not respond to 50% of the environmental literacy questions (8 individuals), and those that had the exact same answer for all environmental concern and empowerment questions (42 individuals). Finally, we removed a set of responses that had flippant responses to gender identity (such as Apache Helicopter as a response to race; 9 individuals). In the end, we had 2560 respondents in our study from 2019, which was 25% of the undergraduate population in that year.

2.2. Measures

The survey was designed to assess attitudes and concerns about environmental issues and the awareness of the university’s activities related to these issues [26]. Surveys conducted during the fall semester of the 2019–2022 school years included ten multiple-choice questions meant to test the environmental literacy rates of the student population (see Appendix A for a list of these questions). We restricted our analysis to the 2019 data, which had the best representation (25%) of our student population because of a concerted effort in data collection that year. Each question was based on basic environmental topics that serve to indicate the overall environmental literacy of the survey-taker and every question acted as an indicator of different or all aspects of the definition of environmental literacy. Each question had four total options for answering—one correct answer, two incorrect answers, and “I don’t know”. Each question was worth 10% of each survey-taker’s overall environmental literacy score. If the survey-taker correctly answered the question, they were awarded a point for their answer. Incorrect answers, answering “I don’t know”, or failing to answer the question resulted in zero points toward the survey-taker’s final score. In addition, one question asked participants to rate their confidence that their actions could make an impact on the world (i.e., empowerment). The survey also included demographic questions.

2.3. Analysis

For each observation included in the final dataset, participants’ responses to the 10 environmental literacy questions were scored as correct or incorrect. After individual questions were scored, the percentage that reflected each participant’s overall environmental literacy was then calculated using the following formula: (total number of questions answered correctly/total number of questions) × 100. The hypotheses of this study were tested by comparing environmental literacy scores based on demographic categories to examine the extent to which gender and race were associated with environmental literacy using an ANOVA with a Fisher’s LSD post hoc test. We used a two-sample t-test, assuming unequal variance, to examine broad differences between Caucasian and all others with an alpha value of 0.05.

3. Results

With 2560 respondents in 2019, we found that Caucasian respondents had the highest environmental literacy but that was not statistically different from Asian, native Hawaiian, mixed-race, and other (R² = 0.017; F = 6.250; p < 0.001; Cronbach’s α = 0.67: Figure 1). African Americans (t stat = 6.807; p < 0.001; Cohen’s d = 0.345) and Native Americans (t stat = 3.158; p = 0.006; Cohen’s d = 0.508) had a significantly lower environmental literacy than those other groups. All races had less than an average score of 40% on the environmental literacy questions. There was no significant difference between men, women, and gender-nonconforming individuals in their environmental literacy scores (F stat = 1.88, p = 0.153). Women (whether Caucasian or BIPOC) have the greatest concern that humans are harming the environment (Figure 2). BIPOC gender-nonconforming individuals have the lowest concern that humans are harming the environment. Women also felt the most strongly that their everyday efforts (including energy conservation) make a difference in resolving sustainability issues (i.e., they felt empowered; Figure 2), while participants who were BIPOC gender-nonconforming reported feeling the least empowered.

Caucasians think that it is more important to conserve energy than all other ethnicities (Caucasian mean = 4.171; all other mean = 4.055; t stat = 2.6195; p = 0.0089; d = 0.122). Caucasians are more concerned that human behavior might permanently harm the environment than all others (Caucasian mean = 4.1436; all other mean = 4.0318; t stat = 2.5634; p = 0.0105; d = 0.116). There was no significant difference between Caucasians and all other ethnicities in the belief that they can make a difference with their own energy conservation efforts (Caucasian mean = 3.796; all others = 3.794) or that their everyday actions can resolve sustainability issues (Caucasian mean = 3.825; all others = 3.803) with both groups just above neutral on each question.

Participants with a higher environmental literacy score (40% or greater) significantly thought that they could make a difference with their conservation efforts more than lower-scoring participants (higher environmental literacy mean = 3.857; lower environmental literacy mean = 3.723; t stat = 3.2707; p = 0.0005; d = 0.130). These same participants have a greater concern that humans are harming the environment (higher environmental literacy mean = 4.2248; lower environmental literacy mean = 3.9821; t stat = 6.3523; p < 0.0001; d = 0.252).

4. Discussion

As we hypothesized, race played a role in lower environmental literacy scores for African Americans and Native Americans. Stevenson et al. [27] found similar results in sixth and eighth graders in North Carolina, with significantly lower environmental literacy scores for African American and Hispanic students. We found no significant difference between genders in environmental literacy, forcing us to reject our second hypothesis. This is contrary to some of the finer findings where girls pretested lower than boys in knowledge, but they improved more than boys from environment education [27]. These differences could be related to the difference in age and education levels as our study only included college-age students and adults rather than middle-school-age students.

Despite the lack of gender difference in environmental literacy, we did find that both Caucasian and BIPOC women were more concerned that humans are harming the environment and they felt more empowered than men and gender-nonconforming students in their ability to make a difference with their actions. This supports previous findings that women have more environmental concern than men, which McCright and Xiao [28] explained using gender socialization theory [28].

Both Caucasian and BIPOC women had more environmental concern and felt more empowered than men or gender-nonconforming individuals, although they did not have a significantly different environmental literacy. We found that people with a higher environmental literacy score had more concern for the environment and felt more empowered to make a difference. MacDonald and Hara [29] found that men were slightly more likely to express environmental concern than women [29]. Mohai [30] found that women had more concern, although they were less likely to engage in activism [30]. Our findings show that women have more concern than men and gender-nonconforming individuals and that women felt more empowered to make a difference with their actions, although we did not ask about engagement in activism.

Stapp et al. [31] first published on the concept of environmental education, provided a definition for the term, and argued for its importance. Fang et al. [32] expand on this concept and discuss the importance of the human species education in the environment because we depend on this environment for our existence. Environmental literacy is a basic measure of this understanding of the environment, and our work demonstrates that, in this midwestern university in the United States, we are far from achieving an environmentally literate population. Almost 50 years after the Belgrade Charter that emphasized the importance of environmental education, we can see that we still have much work to be carried out in basic environmental education. The World Commission on Environment and Development [33] laid out the need for sustainable development, along with the well-accepted definition of that term. It also catalogued some of the environmental issues exasperated by poverty and growth, and those environmental issues seem even more dire today. The IPCC Climate Change 2023 [34] report states that human activities have unequivocally caused global warming of 1.1 °C by 2011–2020 compared to the 1850–1900 baseline. Furthermore, it declares with high confidence that from 3.3 to 3.6 billion people are highly vulnerable to climate change. These clear scientific statements of anthropogenic warming, along with the vulnerability to our livelihoods, make it clear that we need to be more intentional with environmental education than ever before.

Multiple studies have shown [35,36,37] that BIPOC individuals will be more impacted by climate change and environmental degradation in the coming years. And, throughout the environmental movement, BIPOC people may have been left out of the conversations in some spaces. In terms of environmental literacy and understanding, no one should be left out, as climate change will impact all people. It is not the responsibility of individuals to increase their knowledge and understanding of environmental issues, but rather the institutions who instruct them. Here, in this paper, we see that no one group of people had an environmental literacy score higher than 40%, which demonstrates a lower environmental literacy for all ethnic groups. We suggest that the enhancement of environmental education in grades K–12, as well as mandatory courses in college, may help increase not only one’s education but also one’s awareness and ability to feel empowered to enact change.

5. Conclusions

We found that African American and Native American students had significantly lower environmental literacy out of all the races tested at this midwestern university, although all groups scored less than an average of 40% on the ten environmental literacy questions. Women did not score significantly differently from men or gender-nonconforming individuals, but women did have a significantly higher environmental concern and felt the most empowered out of the groups that we tested. Therefore, we must conclude all ethnic groups would benefit from a stronger environmental education program.