Law Commons^™

Responsible Environmental Behavior, Energy Conservation, And Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: You Can Lead A Horse To Water, But Can You Make It Drink?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite professing to care about the environment and supporting environmental causes, individuals behave in environmentally irresponsible ways like driving when they can take public transportation, littering, or disposing of toxic materials in unsound ways. This is the author's fourth exploration of how to encourage individuals to stop behaving irresponsibly about the environment they allege to care deeply about. The prior three articles all explored how the norm of environmental protection could be enlisted in this effort; this article applies those theoretical conclusions to the very practical task of getting people to switch the type of light bulb they use.

To …

Civic Republicanism Provides Theoretical Support For Making Individuals More Environmentally Responsible, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The genesis for this essay is the recognition that individual behavior is contributing in a significant way to the remaining environmental problems we have. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the difficulty of trying to identify and then regulate all of these individual sources to the political backlash that might result if such regulation was tried, efforts to control that behavior have either failed or not been tried. The phenomenon of individuals as irresponsible environmental actors seems counter-intuitive given the durability of the environmental protection norm and polls that consistently show that people contribute to environmental causes, are willing …