The Formation of Environmental Consciousness: From Conscious of Money to Conscious of Environment

According to the The East Asian survey on people’s sense of culture, life and environment (2010-2011) which was conducted by Doshisha Research Center for East Asian Studies, a relative high percentage of proenvironmental behaviors stem from the motivation of save money (Japan, 38.7%; Korea, 61.0%; Beijing city of China, 33.6%; Hangzhou city of China, 50.3%). While from this data we draw the conclusion that the environmental consciousness is not high, it is also valuable to focus on another consciousness, the frugal consciousness. The present study based on the theory of balancing of interest, takes Beichen village of China as the research object, and aims to clarify the collapse process of frugal consciousness and the formation process of environmental consciousness in this village. The hypothesis in this paper is that people’s behavior intention is the result of interest balance in one’s mind. Frugal consciousness comes from the helplessness of the life but also is a rational choice when facing the reality. It is the result of interaction of production mode, life style, social norm and personal norm. These factors which play critical roles in frugal consciousness also supply some benefit on the formation of environmental consciousness. This paper divides the frugal consciousness into different types and discusses the ways that how to transform them into environmental consciousness respectively. The result of this paper indicates that in the formation process of environmental consciousness, balancing of interest plays a fundamental role and social norm is also an important driving force.