In 2007, environmental writer Bill McKibben asked climate scientist James Hansen what the safe limit would be for carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (Monastersky, 2009). Hansen took some time to do the calculations and came back with a target figure of 350 parts per million (ppm) that humanity should aim not to exceed if it “wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted” (Hansen et al., 2008; p. 217). That was then, a moment in human history when one could still be confident about the planet’s future without sounding naïve and out-of-touch. 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a target figure now certainly looks like a wishful thinking for a future that would never be. In April 2017, atmospheric concentrations breached the 410 ppm threshold (Kahn, 2017). How dangerous the current trajectory of growth in carbon dioxide emissions is can be estimated by a recent report that predicts that there is now only a 5% chance that we will be able to meet the Paris Climate Accord ’s aspirational goal to keep the global temperature rise below the widely perceived critical tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius (Raftery, Zimmer, Frierson, Startz, & Liu, 2017). As if the threat from runaway climate change was not enough, the planet is being continuously buffeted by a growing number of other grave ecological crises, such as the ongoing sixth mass extinction and the increasing scarcity of fresh water, that have already begun to wreak havoc on the lives of marginalized human communities as well as numerous other species (Barnosky et al., 2011; Pearce, 2006). As a result, scientists have begun wondering if a global collapse of human civilizations is imminent (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2013). After all, ecological problems have been the prime culprits in the collapse of several civilizations in the past (Diamond, 2013). Many people in the United States and other industrialized nations may find such talk unduly alarmist because when they look around they see few obvious signs of ecological distress. But civilizational collapse doesn’t happen in a year or even a decade. It took more than 400 years for the Mayan civilization to collapse and many more centuries for the Indus Valley civilization. We would do well to remember that industrialized societies have been around for only about 300 years, and the alarm bells being rung by the scientific community for imminent danger to human existence are already too loud to ignore.

The good news, as we explore this crisis, is that it is not just the scientific community that is worried about the fate of the planet. Worrying about the ecological health of the planet has also become a constituent part of the precarity of life for all of us living in the current Anthropocene Epoch . For instance, in a recent opinion poll, about three-quarters of US adults were concerned about the environment and wished that the country did whatever it took to protect it (Anderson, 2017). A lay environmentalism has indeed become a core value that most people in the United States can be said to share (Dietz, Fitzgerald, & Showm, 2005; Kempton, Boster, & Hartley, 1995; Sellers, 2012). Though, as Turin (2014) suggests , “environmental concerns, which on a spectrum of political goods might be considered ‘third-order’ goods, are particularly susceptible to being overwhelmed by other issues possessing more immediate and tangible impacts” (“Conclusion”, para. 47). However, it cannot be denied that, when asked, US adults convey a broad support for taking environmental action, both at the individual and institutional level, to overcome ecological challenges.

In times of economic security, general peace, and prosperity, when US citizens are not feeling economic distress and don’t have pressing concerns about their security, this support has the potential to lead to effective systemic changes that tackle ecological challenges. But what if people’s environmental concerns and support for action rest on mistaken assumptions and inadequate understandings about the world? Does that make us inclined to support ideas and actions that are at best benignly ineffective? These questions are pertinent because research indicates a broad support for environmental actions that have been shown to be of dubious value in terms of their effectiveness. For instance, a clear majority of US population believes that new technology will solve current and future ecological problems, such as climate change . As a result, there is a broad support for technical and technocratic solutions in the United States (Funk & Kennedy, 2016; Turin, 2014). However, it has been clear for a long time that ecological issues, such as climate change, are, at their core, societal issues that have resulted from the current political situation, the dominant economic system, and the anthropogenic transformation of the biosphere since the industrial revolution (Brulle, 2000; Clark & York, 2005; Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2007; Turin, 2014). As a result, technical solutions on their own are highly unlikely to be effective in tackling our ecological woes. For instance, there is strong support at the policy level, in the marketplace, and among the public for planting trees to soak up the excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus mitigate the impact of climate change (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2006; McGrath, 2017; Melnick, Pearl, & Warfield, 2015). However, scientists now generally agree that removal of carbon dioxide through afforestation is a failed strategy. For instance, a recent paper calculated the extent of terrestrial carbon dioxide removal through planting of trees that would be needed if we are not able to achieve reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide to prevent global mean temperature rise of 2.5% above pre-industrial level (Boysen et al., 2017). The scientists found that planting of trees or other ways of managed biomass growth will be “unable to counteract ‘business-as-usual’ emissions without eliminating virtually all natural ecosystems” (p. 463). In fact, the study concluded that even if considerable emissions reductions are assumed, terrestrial carbon dioxide removal strategies will require “> 1.1 Gha of the most productive agricultural areas or the elimination of >50% of natural forests” (p. 463). Similarly, there is a distinct worry among the scientists that geoengineering solutions might end up harming rather than helping our efforts to tackle climate change (Stephen, 2016; Shepherd, Iglesias-Rodriguez, & Yool, 2007).

Further, many people in the United States have come to see environmentalism as an individual personal virtue rather than as a matter of collective public action (Crowell & Schunn, 2014; Dryzek, 2013; Treanor, 2010). As a result, the approximately 20% US adults who actually do take regular actions to protect the environment, rarely go beyond individual actions, such as using re-usable shopping bags for trips to the grocery store (Funk & Kennedy, 2016). Here we clearly see a mismatching of ecological and sociological scales between the problems and the solutions practiced by individuals. This is because while personal actions, such as recycling, are local in scale, the ecological problems that bedevil our planet occur on local as well as larger regional, national, and international scales—both socially and ecologically. Research shows that individual environmental actions can be effective only when they are situated in the context of just and democratic governance of ecological resources (Dietz, Ostrom, & Stern, 2003; Hempel, 1996). In the absence of fair and democratic management of ecological commons, individuals have more to lose and little to gain through reduce, reuse, and recycle types of virtuous environmental actions—a situation that invariably leads to unsustainable exploitation of common property resources resulting in what has been called the tragedy of commons (Hardin, 2009).

People’s support for ineffective and misdirected environmental solutions likely originates from a complex and situationally contingent interplay of diverse social, cultural, political, and economic factors that operate on multiple scales and material-discursive planes. One of the key factors in this complex causal web is people’s (mis)understanding of the nonhuman world and their relationship with it. Environmental sociologists argue that there exists a dominant worldview, referred to as the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) , in Western industrialized societies, such as the United States, that reflects and shapes people’s understanding on human’s place in the world. This worldview is defined by the following themes:This Dominant Social Paradigm derives much of its support and legitimacy from the currently dominant discourses in the West, such as neoliberalism, scientific and conservative Judeo-Christian religious discourses that naturalize human exceptionalism, and the commodification of nature. This paradigm also corresponds closely with people’s rather limited or incorrect scientific understanding of the basic ecological processes and phenomena that govern life on Earth (Ranney & Clark, 2016; Jenkins, 2003). In fact, a study showed that even highly educated adults, such as the graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, failed to conserve matter and showed other widespread misunderstanding in their explanations of the fundamental processes regarding greenhouse gas emissions (Sterman & Sweeney, 2007). Unsurprisingly, currently only about 28% of US adults can be said to be civic-scientifically literate in terms of their ability to “find, make sense of, and use information about science or technology to engage in a public discussion of policy choices involving science or technology” (Miller, 2016; p. 2). This rate of scientific illiteracy may not look bad in terms of international comparisons (National Science Board, 2016). But, we ne...