🎯 Context

Last lesson was about perspectives, which belong to individuals. This lesson is about worldviews, which are shared by groups.

Switzerland is a useful place to study them. Voters are asked directly about environmental policy several times a year, and the results are published by canton and by commune. Between 2021 and 2025 there were four such votes. One passed and three were rejected.

By the end of the lesson you should be able to classify environmental worldviews, explain how values turn the same information into different decisions, and say where that classification breaks down.

Phase 1: What a worldview is

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1.1.6 Worldviews are the lenses shared by groups of people through which they perceive, make sense of and act within their environment. They shape people's values and perspectives through culture, philosophy, ideology, religion and politics.

With the development of the internet and social media, one's perspective can be influenced by a far greater variety of worldviews than just that of the local community. Consequently, models that attempt to classify perspectives, though helpful, are invariably inaccurate as individuals often have a complex mix of positions.

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A perspective belongs to a person. A worldview belongs to a group. The guide's word for it is a lens: something you look through rather than at, which is why people are usually much better at describing somebody else's worldview than their own.

The syllabus names five channels through which a worldview shapes what a group values.

• Culture: the practices, stories and habits you grow up inside, including what counts as normal food, normal travel and normal weather.
• Philosophy: the ideas a society holds about what a good life is, and about what humans owe to things that are not human.
• Ideology: an organised set of beliefs about how society ought to be arranged, usually with a political programme attached.
• Religion: teaching about creation, stewardship, harm and obligation, which for many people settles questions that evidence cannot.
• Politics: the party positions and public arguments that make some options seem normal and others seem extreme.

Until recently most people met only the worldviews present in their own community. That is no longer true. The guide is explicit that the internet and social media expose a person to a far wider range of worldviews than the local community alone, and that this is one reason why any attempt to sort people into neat categories is unreliable.

1. Distinguish between a perspective and a worldview. One sentence each.

2. Choose two of the five channels. For each one, give a specific way it has shaped what you personally think a river, a forest or an animal is for.

3. Two people in this room could share a worldview and still disagree about a particular environmental decision. Suggest how that is possible.

Phase 2: The environmental value system

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1.1.7 An environmental value system is a model that shows the inputs affecting our perspectives and the outputs resulting from our perspectives.

A value system has inputs (for example, information from media, education, worldviews) and outputs (for example, our judgements, positions, choices and actions).

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An environmental value system, usually shortened to EVS, is not a personality type and it is not a club you belong to. It is a model: a deliberately simplified representation of something complicated, built so that you can reason about it. The complicated thing being simplified here is a person, or a group of people like them.

The model has three parts.

• Inputs are what reaches the person: media, education, the worldviews around them, religion, culture, and what has actually happened in their life.
• The middle is the set of values and the worldview they already hold. This is what decides what an input means to them.
• Outputs are what comes out the other side: judgements, positions, choices and actions.

Drawing it this way separates the information from the response. Two people can receive exactly the same input, a documentary about a retreating Alpine glacier, and produce opposite outputs, because the middle of the model is different. That is the same result you reached last lesson with a table of beef figures that nobody disputed and everybody read differently. The EVS is that result written as a model.