The Nature and Origins of Ecological World Views: An Australian Study.

This article presents a study to determine the world views on nature and origins of ecological world. The study upon which this paper is based is one of a number of preliminary projects being conducted in Melbourne and Munich as the first stage in the development of a cross-national study between Australia and Germany. It has addressed the environmental attitudes and behaviour of undergraduate tertiary students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and of a sample of residents in the Melbourne metropolitan area. On all the major variables, and particularly on the measure of ecological world view, the distributions from these three samples are almost identical. Hence, the two student samples have been combined, and, for much of the analysis, so have the student and community samples. The mean item scores for the combined sample range from 4.43 to 2.32, with a mean of 373 for the total scores. it is worth noting that the five items concerned with the role of science and technology in solving environmental problems are to be found amongst the seven items with the lowest scores.