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Filtering perceptions of climate change and biotechnology: values and views among Colorado farmers and ranchers

Climatic Change volume 159, pages 121–139 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Though a small fraction of the US citizenry, agricultural producers are directly responsible for the stewardship of almost half of the country’s land. This group is therefore an especially important one to understand from the standpoint of how they process and respond to science as it relates to agroecological phenomena. Data from a sample (n = 111) of farmers and ranchers located in the US state of Colorado are used to expand our understanding of how food producers process scientific claims. These insights, I argue, help us think through public understandings of science more generally. Using semi-structured interviews, the paper unpacks an identified asymmetry in how respondents perceive climate science and the science associated with genetically modified food and seed. These tensions are interrogated with the help of a novel methodological design that generated data converted to shading matrices—also known as heat maps. The heat maps illuminate certain cultural values among respondents, which were reinforced by motivated reasoning. This allows for an interrogation of tensions and inconsistencies in respondents’ remarks about a variety of scientific claims. The heat maps, coupled with the qualitative data, allow for an exploration into how respondents perceive certain salient socio-technical issues.

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Notes

  1. Referring to heat maps and climate change could incorrectly lead one to think the maps are relaying information about temperature. That is not the case. A heat map is a graphical representation of, in this case, social science data.

  2. This particular study (Hochschild and Sen 2015) involved interviews with scientific and medical elites, which were coupled with an analysis of 750 articles by prominent social scientists, law professors, and biologists who have written about the genomic sciences.

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  1. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Michael Carolan

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Carolan, M. Filtering perceptions of climate change and biotechnology: values and views among Colorado farmers and ranchers. Climatic Change 159, 121–139 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02625-0

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Keywords

  • Global warming
  • GMOs
  • Attitudes
  • Mitigation
  • Adaptation
  • Motivated reasoning