**7.2. About attitudes**

Development of well-founded attitudes is a personal process for each of us. A "ripe" attitude is clear and conscious, and gives us motivation. We must be able to explain our attitude, and to defend it in discussions. In environmental debates, disagreements are often due to different attitudes. If people are unwilling or unable to explain the fundament of their attitudes, debates may become foggy and not very constructive. For instance, a person may find loss of species to be unproblematic, due to lack of biological knowledge. There are people who focus mainly on the "plate biodiversity", which are species we can eat or otherwise use in a practical way. Even among biologists, there have been discussions about "ecologically redundant species", which are species that could be removed without any ecological harm. However, this is a dangerous discussion, because we have several times discovered that "anonymous" species may have key functions in nature. One example is the mycorrhizal fungi which makes it possible to have forests on northern latitudes. In such discussions, the attitude expressed by the "precautionary principle" becomes important.

Concerning the danger of climate change, groups of "climate sceptics" are common. They do not find it sufficiently proven that climate change is due to human activity. Several of them find it wrong to use massive resources to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, some of them accept applying the precautionary principle; accepting that they might be wrong. For them, to act is an insurance for the future; we insure our houses even though the chance of it burning down is little.

People who love nature are strongly motivated to defend it. However, attitudes signalizing indifference to nature qualities are not uncommon. We see this attitude practised all over the world, and there are many companies which depend upon destroying nature.

Finally, political leadership is crucial. If political leaders do not act, even engaged people may loose motivation and think that perhaps problems are not so serious after all – since political leaders do not take them seriously. This creates a negative spiral, while the aim should be that people and politicians support each other in a positive spiral, making the necessary possible.

#### **7.3. About rhetoric**

While a concensus about concepts is obviously important, and clarifications of each other's attitudes can be crucial in environmental debates, why should we include rhetoric as a premise for success? The answer is that we are short of time. Environmental problems increase faster than we are able to solve them. Just as in literature, certain thorough formulations may have great mental power. The power of rhetoric can be used to take future generations seriously, to warn of environmental catastrophes, to expose in a pedagogic way ecological crime – or it enables us to describe possibilities, inspire individual action and create hope. Our leaders need inspiration to use the necessary resources to save biodiversity and halt climate change. Many of them know that it may be more difficult to try to repair damages in the future, than to prevent them, but they are still reluctant to act. Leaders who *want* to act, need rhetoric help to inspire people to cooperate.

Increased use of "sustainable rhetoric" is perhaps the most efficient single factor in order to create change. In debates, we must be ready to meet a "counter-rhetoric" which defends "business as usual". It is a challenge for debate leaders to identify foggy concepts, environ‐ mentally unfriendly attitudes, and argumentation based on our mental tendency to deny or suppress environmental problems.
