Fans of green politics and those interested in public opinion and the rational behavior of consumers should read this book. It accomplishes what another recent work, Eric R. A. N. Smith's (2002) Energy, the Environment, and Public Opinion has also deftly done: It provides not only an important analysis of its subject, but it is also an excellent work on public opinion more broadly. Deborah Lynn Guber focuses on the nature of, and influences on, public opinion toward the environment, covering broad aspects of this topic in a number of novel chapters.

Although V. O. Key never tackled environmental issues, his insights about consensus are central to this book. Key saw consensus as a nice theoretical notion that is illusive, given the actual nature of public opinion. For public opinion on specific issues, the devil is in the details: An apparent consensus to deal with a problem by moving in a particular direction turns into ambivalence and far less than certainty when the public confronts what specific remedies to support. While not noted by Guber, this phenomenon is apparent for other major issues, such as racial inequality, health-care reform, antipoverty assistance, Social Security, national defense, and activism in foreign affairs (on “ambivalence” generally, see John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, 1992). Guber shows this persuasively for the environment: What looks like a consensus on the surface—with the environment looking like a mom and apple pie “valence” issue—conceals fundamental ideological disagreements that require deeper digging to observe and understand. That environmental policy is more divisive than it appears makes it susceptible to a particular type of politics and leadership.

Aside from some minor methodological and related problems, the book's chapters overall are nicely developed and written. The first two chapters present the data confirming that the public overwhelmingly sees the environment as a serious problem requiring some kind of concerted action. But what kind of action? Some data show that at best, a plurality of the public prefers government regulations, whereas, when other response options are offered, sizable percentages prefer market or other incentives as remedies or report that they “don't know.” The strength or intensity of these environmentalist attitudes declines as contingencies, constraints, costs, and trade-offs, such as taxes or economic consequences, are attached to particular choices, or if we expect to find a commitment to action, not just a consensus based on words. Indeed, the public's low level of knowledge about the relevant details of environmental problems, solutions, and their consequences makes the public's uncertainty quite understandable. While there is a consensus on broad goals—though the level of consensus may be overestimated somewhat due to the effects of question wording and the different ways of measuring the relative importance of an issue—there is also an underlying ambivalence on how to reach these goals.

The third chapter is short but its multivariate analysis of what influences public support for government action, as measured by support for increased spending, has a big payoff: Support has increased due to the entry of a new generation that has been more concerned about the environment than its predecessors, and due to the increase in media coverage of environmental problems. Support has fallen off during periods of declining economic conditions and, in “thermostat” fashion, after government spending on natural resources and the environment has increased. Here the author missed the opportunity, through additional analyses involving Granger causality tests, to strengthen her causal inferences and, most important, to examine the crucial “so what” question: To what extent has public opinion influenced government spending? The influences on opinion that are found show the public's collective intelligence and also, of political importance, what factors work for and against environmental activism at the national level.

Chapter 4 explores further the influences on individuals, expanding the multivariate analysis to include environmentally related economic behavior and activism (though the reliabilities of the scales examined are not reported, and no attention is paid to the variables' causal orderings, which bear on the causal processes at work). The main finding is the overall lack of variation in attitudes and behavior, providing little evidence for an environmental “elitism” among the young and those with more education and income, and confirming how the issue has penetrated the national consciousness widely. There are ideological and partisan cleavages that remain in policy preferences, and while younger cohorts have more pro-environment opinions, this is not reflected in their behavior, such as recycling, cutting back on driving, or avoiding produce grown with pesticides.

Chapter 5 finds striking unidimensional ideological consistency in the public's environmental attitudes (the consistency is clear in the correlations and does not seem to require the further statistical tweaking that is done). Guber first describes this in a way that emphasizes the public's sophistication, but she then backs off on the dimensionality quandary and questions the importance of this for environmental activism. The next chapter then shows that environmental opinions have had no significant consequences for voting in presidential elections. It will be of no surprise to students of voting that any possible effects these opinions might have had on presidential voting in 1996 and 2000 (for the environment either as a “hard” issue or an “easy” one that candidates can dance around) are swamped by other well-established influences—no doubt, even if alternate decisions were made to improve the models estimated and the measures that were used.

Chapter 7 makes up for the earlier missed chance to examine the opinion-policy connection by presenting new and original data that show how concern for the environment is reflected in the increasing number of environmental ballot propositions at the state level. While environmental propositions pass at about the same rate as others, there are differences by type of environmental issue. Case studies suggest that the nature of the campaigns fought by those on both sides and the ways in which they framed their arguments had effects beyond the characteristics of the issues themselves, although Guber does not consider how the nature of the issues may affect the arguments that can be made and whether they might evoke the public's ambivalence and thereby thwart a ballot's passage (e.g., the difference between the threat posed by toxic waste versus bottles that are not recycled).

Chapter 8 offers a highly original and intriguing analysis showing that in the case of the environment, the economic marketplace seems to defy economic rationality and resembles the political marketplace. Although Guber should have addressed how well survey responses reflect actual behavior here, the data show that economic self-interest (income) is not related to self-reports of buying green products. Environmental advertising appears to matter, and ideology does as well—though less so than for reported political behavior but more than might be expected—and there is even some correlation with efficacy (my emphasis on particular variables here differs somewhat from Guber's discussion).

The concluding chapter of The Grassroots of a Green Revolution draws on the marketplace findings in making recommendations on how to marshal public support for environmental issues. Politically, the public's false consensus that Guber emphasizes gives leaders considerable latitude to engage in symbolic “cheap talk” or to develop policies with or without engaging the public, and to use political campaigns to pursue their goals through leadership—or manipulation. How public opinion affects national- and state-level environmental policymaking and how political rhetoric and issue framing by leaders affect public opinion are important subjects for future research.