The Social Bases of Agrarian Environmentalism: A Comparative Analysis of New York and Michigan Farm Operators.

This study is concerned with the factors that account variation in the environmental attitudes of farmers. Two competing frame-works for the analysis--one form environmental at attitudes research among the general public and the other from the emerging ecological critique of large-scale agriculture--are contrasted and used to develop reveal hypotheses. The empirical analysis is based on survey data collected from random samples of farmers in New York State and Michigan. The results indicate that education, which is typically considered to the most important variable in the environmental attitudes literature, bears with little relation with three indicators of concern about general and agricultural environmental problems. Farm size is inversely related to these attitudinal indexes of environmental concern, consistent with these ecological critique of large-scale agriculture. While these results lead us to we that the ecological critique framework tends to be most relevant in accounting for farmer environmental attitudes research tradition--Political liberalism--exhibits substantial positive relationships with the three indexes of general and agrarian environmentalism. In addition, the results show that non-economic orientation toward agriculture is an important antecedent of concern with soil erosion. Finally, some suggestive but inconclusive findings regarding the role of economic security in facilitating pro-environmental attitudes among farm operators are discussed and recommended as a focus for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]