As the presidential election approaches, two insulated, polarized, and evenly divided Americas–one conservative, one liberal–face each other with mutual incomprehension. On almost every issue, from abortion to the war in Iraq, each side can reliably be expected to vehemently oppose the other.

Environmental protection, which, at least in general terms, more than 75 percent of Americans say they support, is one policy matter that doesn’t obviously bisect voters along conventional political lines. Even so–and despite a river of facts about everything from melting ice floes to declining air quality–anti-environmental legislation with Orwellian titles like the Healthy Forests Restoration Act and Clear Skies Initiative has made headway in a conservative Congress.

It’s not for want of solid facts and rational arguments that the environment has lost ground, says cognitive scientist George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, which has become a handbook for embattled progressive strategists. First published in 1996 and recently updated and reissued by the University of Chicago Press, the book argues that our political decisions are not rational, but filtered through unconscious metaphors that shape our thinking about everything from how children should be raised to how nature should be regarded to how the government should be run.

Lakoff, who teaches linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, is a specialist in "framing": the way that language shapes how we think. Most of our political thought, Lakoff argues, is formed by the metaphor of the nation as a family. Progressives, including many environmentalists, value an egalitarian "Nurturant Parent" family that stresses empathy, mutual cooperation, and a sense of interconnectedness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, idealize a traditional "Strict Father" family organized by rules, clear hierarchy, obedience, and discipline. Liberals and conservatives are not so much quibbling over facts, says Lakoff, but fighting a war of opposing visions rooted in these divergent images of ideal family life.

Over the past five years, Lakoff has advised dozens of environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, on how to effectively present issues to the public. Sierra interviewed him recently in the offices of the Rockridge Institute, a small progressive think tank in Berkeley that he helped found. Wearing dark slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, Lakoff comes across as professorial, rumpled, and kind–an embodiment of the nurturing parent "family values" he unapologetically favors.

Sierra: What is "framing"?

George Lakoff: Take "tax relief," a phrase used by the current White House. The word "relief" evokes a conceptual frame of some affliction–an afflicted party, and a reliever who performs the action of relieving. So taxes are an affliction, a reliever is a hero, and anyone who wants to stop him from the relief is a villain. You have just two words, yet all of that is embedded. If you oppose reducing taxes and you use that phrase–"tax relief"–you’ve already lost.

Sierra: How about "protecting the environment"? Is there a frame embedded there too?

Lakoff: The image you get is of the environment as something separate from you. It sounds as if there were this helpless environment out there and you were the big protector. There’s no notion that we owe our very existence to the environment, and that we are threatening what gives us life. It assumes that there’s an external threat. It doesn’t say that the threat is us.

Environmentalists have adopted a set of frames that doesn’t reflect the vital importance of the environment to everything on Earth. The term "the environment" suggests that this is an area of life separate from other areas of life like the economy and jobs, or health, or foreign policy. By not linking it to everyday issues, it sounds like a separate category, and a luxury in difficult times. Wilderness: a place for those in Birkenstocks to go hiking.

Sierra: What’s the alternative?

Lakoff: When environmental issues are cast in terms of health and security, which people already accept as vital and necessary, then the environment becomes important. It’s a health issue–clean air and clean water have to do with childhood asthma and with dysentery. Energy that is renewable and sustainable and doesn’t pollute–that is a crucial environmental issue, but it’s not just environmentalism. A crash program to develop alternative energy is a health issue. It’s a foreign policy issue. It’s a Third World development issue.

If we developed the technology for alternative energy, we wouldn’t be dependent on Middle East oil. We could then sell or give the technology to countries around the world, and no country would have to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund to buy oil and then owe interest. This would turn Third World countries into energy producers instead of consumers. And it’s a jobs issue because it would create millions of good jobs in this country. So thinking and talking about environmentalism in limited terms like preservation of wilderness is shooting yourself in the foot.

That’s why the frame is so important. Most environmentalists believe that the truth will make you free. So they tell people the raw facts. But frames trump the facts. Raw facts won’t help, except to further persuade the people who already agree with you.

Sierra: A raw fact like the disappearance of an entire species won’t help?

Lakoff: It won’t help with people who are not thinking in terms of species. Most conservatives aren’t.

Sierra: How does this connect with visions of the ideal family? It seems like a stretch.

Lakoff: Bear with me. We all think metaphorically without knowing it. We have a basic, unconscious metaphor of the nation as a family. We send our "sons and daughters to war." We have "founding fathers." It’s such a natural metaphor that you don’t even notice it’s there. And in our culture we also have two opposite models of how the family should be run: a Strict Father model and a Nurturant Parent model. The metaphor of the nation as family maps the values from those models onto our politics, creating conservative and liberal wings.

The Strict Father family metaphor–the conservative model–assumes that the world is a dangerous and difficult place. That is why you need a strict father who protects the family in the dangerous world, supports the family in a difficult world, and teaches his kids right from wrong by punishment. President Bush, for example, began his Meet the Press interview last spring by saying the world is a dangerous place and invoking the need for a strong authority. In this worldview, morality and power are supposed to go together.

Sierra: And now Strict Father values are ascendant politically. Does this have anything to do with September 11?

Lakoff: September 11 had a major effect. Fear activates the Strict Father model, because the world is seen as a dangerous place. But there’s more. One of the key organizing principles of this model–and this impacts environmentalism–is hierarchy: God above man, man above nature, adults above children, America above other countries, and Western culture above non-Western culture. When most conservatives talk about natural resources, they mean resources for human use. Simply giving them the facts about species destruction won’t change anything. The facts will not overwhelm the frame.

Sierra: And the liberal frame?

Lakoff: Liberal politics is based on a nurturant view of the family. In this view, both parents are responsible. Their job is to make the world a better place, and the assumption is that it can become a better place. Children are born good and can be made better. The parents’ job is to nurture their children through empathy and responsibility. From those two values all the other progressive values follow. If you empathize with your child, you want your child to have a happy, fulfilled life.

Protection follows from this, so you get consumer protection, worker protection–and environmental protection. Fairness. Fulfillment in life. In this model, there is a moral responsibility to be a happy, fulfilled person. Cooperation is a value, as is open, two-way communication in the family, and in government.

What does all this say about your relationship to nature? The parent is a nurturer, and so is nature. That means that you have a responsibility to nature, a moral responsibility.

Sierra: What if you’re having Thanksgiving dinner with your Aunt Mabel, and she says, "What’s more important, people or owls?"

Lakoff: If someone is willing to listen to you, you can speak from a moral perspective, shifting the frame your turf: "Here’s how I look at it. The issue really is the sacredness of species and of these wondrous parts of the earth. It would be immoral to destroy anything this remarkable and glorious." That’s very different from saying that the poor owls are dying.

Change the discussion to your frame. The old-growth forest is just one part of a general understanding of how you should live in the world as a moral being. You’ll get more respect with a moral worldview than by throwing facts and figures at people and trying to contradict them and show them that their figures are wrong. Environmentalism has tended to go scientific. The science is wonderful, but the sacred gets lost.

Sierra: Does conventional religion offer any openings?