| This dissertation is a qualitative examination of how environmental activists create approaches to handle environmental problems. Using transcripts from forty-five in-depth interviews with environmental activists, I document how environmental activists talk about environmentalism, social change, and legal action. I illustrate how consciousness of each of these three concepts plays a central role in how environmental activists conceptualize and seek environmental change. I explore each of these three types of consciousness separately in each of the first three substantive chapters, and I show how each of them relates to one another in the fourth chapter.;Recently, some scholars have called for a precise method for studying the social psychology of movement activism. I present a schema blending approach to activism that provides such a precise methodology. This manuscript borrows the concept of 'schema blending' from cognitive social science to illustrate the relationships between the schemas that comprise each type of consciousness. Environmental activists must find ways to make sense of environmentalism, social change, and legal action in order to create viable strategies and tactics. By taking different aspects---or elements---from the schemas of each type of consciousness, activists create new blended forms of consciousness that contain within them the conceptual tools needed to create strategies and tactics. By blending different types of schemas, activists create agency from the cultural constraints of preexisting schemas. I devote the first three chapters to consciousness of environmentalism, social change, and legal action, respectively, before I show how each of them blend together in chapter four.;Activists show seven distinct forms of environmental consciousness, three forms of social change consciousness, and five forms of legal action consciousness. When activists talk about building strategies and tactics to handle environmental problems, they blend the forms from the three types of consciousness in complex ways, forming seven distinct forms of blended oppositional consciousness: Oppositional Radicalism, Environmental Justice, Mainstream, Eco-Change, Consumption-Based, Aesthetic, and Market-Based. These forms of blended consciousness characterize the major oppositional orientations present in the contemporary environmental movement and influence how environmental activists choose their strategies and tactics. |
