Demonstrating once again that “greenery” is reliant on affordability (making it a luxury good?). Whatever, only societies generating a societal surplus can afford environmentalism. I bet it really burns anti-capitalist greenies that they and their “issues” are completely dependent on wealth generation. Just look what a great job the US EPA is doing of destroying US environmentalism by assaulting the cheap abundant energy on which America’s wealth generation depends.
“The amount of “green” advertising rises and falls in conjunction with key indicators of economic growth. That’s what three Penn State researchers found when they examined 30 years of environmental advertising in National Geographic Magazine, America’s leading nature publication, and compared it to what was happening with the gross domestic product at various points in time.”
“Because advertisers do a lot of research into public attitudes before they create and place ads, we took advertising as a reliable proxy for environmental concern,” said Lee Ahern, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising/Public Relations in the College of Communications. “We found that changes in GDP do indeed predict the level of ‘green’ advertising.”
Ahern, Denise Bortree, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising/Public Relations, and Alexandra N. Smith, a doctoral candidate in the College of Communications, are the authors of a paper in the journal, Public Understanding of Science, which is available online now and is forthcoming in print. Their work was supported by a grant from the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication.
The researchers learned that between January 1979 and December 2008, National Geographic ran 692 pages of “green” ads. These were defined as ” … all ads that invoked environmental protection in some meaningful way.” Most were placed by corporations. Some came from advocacy organizations and business association or industry front groups.
They found a significant statistical correlation between the health of the gross domestic product and the number of green ads. For the past three decades, there has been a theorized relationship between economic well being and environmental concern (known as Inglehart’s post-materialist values shift thesis). This study is one of few to offer empirical evidence of this connection.
“Marketers have their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment,” Ahern said. “Using the level of green advertising as a proxy for general environmental concern, we can see that economic trends significantly produce this ‘greenness’ indicator.”
