Methodology · EcoAxes

In brief

EcoAxes places your answers on fourteen scales of environmental thought, each scored from 0 to 100. It then compares your scores with profiles of seventy-seven traditions and ranks the ones you are closest to.

The profiles are the author’s reading of each tradition’s literature. Nobody surveyed the traditions’ members to make them. The whole thing is an open beta and has never been validated, so treat it as a way to explore and find things to read. It cannot measure anyone.

Your answers stay in your browser unless you choose to share them. If you do share them, they are anonymous and they are never sold. Data and privacy has the details.

What EcoAxes is, and is not

EcoAxes is an independent educational project about environmental politics. It is not a validated psychological, scientific or academic test. Its results are not a diagnosis or an assessment of anyone’s beliefs, character or politics, and nothing on the site is professional, legal or political advice. No movement, organisation, religion or person named here has endorsed EcoAxes or has any connection with it.

Scores and matches come from one author’s reading of the literature and from the rules set out on this page. They can be wrong. Another reader would draw some of the profiles differently. Please don’t use EcoAxes results to make decisions about anyone, in hiring, teaching, research or anywhere else. EcoAxes is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind.

The dimensions

Each dimension runs between two named positions, such as Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism, or Centralized Authority and Local Autonomy. A score of 0 sits wholly at the first and 100 wholly at the second.

Both ends are views that people hold and defend. Neither is the right answer. The dimensions page explains each scale and lists the traditions that helped define it.

The survey

Three lengths

All three surveys draw on one bank of questions. A longer survey asks everything in the shorter one and more besides, so if you move up a length you only answer the new questions. Your earlier answers carry over.

Survey	Questions on the dimensions	Total, with marker and paired questions
Light	14 (1 per dimension)	25
Balanced	70 (5 per dimension)	85
Extensive	154 (11 per dimension)	185

Most questions are statements you agree or disagree with. Each dimension also has two scenarios, which describe a concrete situation and offer five responses from one end of the scale to the other.

Wording and order

On every dimension, half the statements lean toward one end and half toward the other. Someone who agrees with everything ends up near the middle, not at an extreme. The questions are mixed so that two in a row seldom concern the same dimension.

Markers

A few traditions are defined by a commitment that the fourteen dimensions do not measure. Twenty-one marker questions cover seven of these, three questions each:

gender and care (ecofeminism)
animals as individuals (compassionate conservation, biocentrism)
workers’ control (eco-syndicalism)
national belonging (environmental nationalism)
inheritance and tradition (green conservatism and its relatives)
control of seeds and land (food sovereignty)
animals as property (animal liberation)

Without them, those traditions would differ from their neighbours only on things the survey never asked about, and they would almost never come out on top.

Paired questions

Environmental views often depend on circumstances. Whose land is it? Which country? Which species? Ten questions are followed straight away by a twin that changes only that detail. One pair asks about conservation alongside Indigenous communities and then alongside recent settlers. Another asks about strict protection in wealthy countries and then in poorer ones. A third asks about killing a native predator and then an introduced one.

The twin does not count toward its dimension. What counts is the gap between your two answers, which works as a marker (see Markers adjust the ranking). If you give the same answer both times, nothing changes.

Why the survey hides your scores

You won’t see your scores move while you answer. When people watch a score shift, they start steering toward a result they want. Your results open once you have answered every Light question, and they show exactly what each answer did.

Scoring

From answers to a score

Each answer becomes a number from −2 (strongly disagree) to +2 (strongly agree). Scenario responses carry their own numbers on the same scale. Statements worded toward the second end of a dimension count as given, and statements worded toward the first end count with the sign reversed.

A dimension’s score is the average of these numbers, converted from the range −2 to +2 onto 0 to 100. An average of 0 gives a score of 50.

It follows that each answer moves its dimension by its value × 25, divided by the number of answers that count. The results page lists every answer under its dimension with that figure beside it, and the figures add up to the score’s distance from 50.

Unsure and It depends

Both are recorded, and neither counts toward a dimension. They are not treated as the middle of the scale, because not knowing is different from holding a balanced view, and a view that depends on the case is not the same as a moderate one.

How often you answer “It depends” is a marker in its own right. It points toward environmental pragmatism, the tradition that makes case-by-case judgement its method. The marker counts from your first “It depends” and reaches full weight when a fifth of your answers are “It depends”.

A dimension needs at least two answers that count before it gets a score. The Light survey asks one question per dimension, so there one is enough.

Bands

The rules for issues, families and tensions read scores in five bands.

Score	Band
Below 20	Strongly toward the first end
20 to 40	Leaning toward the first end
40 to 60	Near the middle
60 to 80	Leaning toward the second end
80 and above	Strongly toward the second end

Short surveys give rough scores

A score of 70 means the same thing whichever survey produced it. The difference is how much evidence sits behind it. In the Light survey each dimension rests on one answer, so a score can only be 0, 25, 50, 75 or 100. The longer surveys give finer, steadier scores.

The reference profiles

Every tradition has a profile. For each dimension where the tradition holds a clear position, the profile records two numbers. The first is a central value from 0 to 100. The second is an uncertainty band, showing how far either side of that value the tradition’s adherents plausibly sit. The band is wide where a tradition argues among itself or the dimension fits it awkwardly, and narrow where its position is explicit.

If a tradition has no characteristic position on a dimension, the profile leaves that dimension out. It is not set to the middle. A note under each profile chart explains the choices made.

The author drew the profiles from the primary and secondary sources listed in each entry. No adherents were surveyed, and a different reader would place some values differently. The uncertainty bands are there to say so.

Comparing you with a tradition

Similarity

The comparison uses every dimension on which you have a score. On each one, your distance is the gap between your score and the tradition’s central value. Gaps count for more where the tradition’s band is narrow and for less where it is wide.

A dimension missing from a tradition’s profile is still counted, as a wide band around 50 with little weight. Otherwise a thinly described tradition could rank highly just because it offers fewer chances to disagree with you.

The match percentage is 100 minus twice the weighted root-mean-square distance, with a floor of 0 and a ceiling of 99. There is no zone of perfect agreement around a tradition’s central value, so no one ever gets a 100% match and two traditions cannot tie for first place.

A tradition is only ranked if it shares at least seven scored dimensions with you. With fewer, it is described dimension by dimension instead, so that it cannot look closer or further than the evidence allows.

Markers adjust the ranking

After the dimensions are compared, each marker moves the traditions it belongs to by up to eight points. Full agreement adds eight. Full disagreement takes eight away. A neutral or unanswered marker changes nothing. Eight points is enough to separate close neighbours, and too little to lift a distant tradition to the top.

The paired questions adjust the ranking in the same way. Answering the Indigenous version more favourably than the settler version lifts the Indigenous, Land Back, decolonial and rights-based traditions. Holding wealthy countries to stricter duties than poorer ones lifts climate justice, political ecology, environmental justice and decolonial ecology. Judging introduced species more harshly than native ones lifts restoration, rewilding and ecocentrism.

A match measures how closely your answers resemble the author’s reading of a tradition. It says nothing about whether you belong to it, would endorse it, or will act like its members.

What the results show

Your results open with your closest movement: the top of the ranking, with nothing added. Under it are the dimensions where you agree with that movement, the ones where you differ most, and the next five closest movements.

Further down the page:

Matches lists the ten closest and the six furthest ranked traditions, with their match percentages.
Dimensions shows your score on each scale, every answer behind it, and how far each answer moved it.
Issues reads twelve policy areas from weighted sets of dimensions and the questions tagged with each. For each issue you get an overall orientation, the sub-movements whose conditions your bands meet, and a confidence figure, which reflects only how many relevant questions you answered.
Families ranks groups of related traditions by the average similarity of their ranked members.
Convictions and tensions shows the dimensions where you sit furthest from the middle. It also shows combinations of positions that traditions usually keep apart, and any dimension where your own answers pulled hard in both directions. These are things to think about. They are not mistakes.

Data and privacy

Your answers never leave your browser unless you choose to share them. Without asking, the site records only two anonymous counts: how many visits it gets, and how far each visit got through the survey. If you share your answers for research, they are stored without anything that identifies you. They are used to improve EcoAxes and to publish anonymous statistics and data about environmental views, and they are never sold, rented, traded or used for advertising. EcoAxes shows no ads, uses no trackers and sets no cookies.

While you take the survey

Your answers are saved in your own browser’s local storage. They are not sent anywhere, and the progress count described below contains none of them. Clearing your browser data, or pressing “Start over”, deletes them. “Export data” downloads your answers and scores as a file you can keep.

The results page has an optional form for sharing your answers. Nothing is sent unless you tick the consent box and press “Share anonymously”. You must be 16 or older to share.

What is collected. Your answers, your dimension scores and closest matches, which survey length you took, the question version, the page language and how long the survey took. Also any optional details you chose to fill in: how well your match describes you, which ideology you think describes you best, your country, age band, religion and where you place yourself from left to right.

What is not collected. Your name, email address, account, IP address, or anything else that identifies you. A shared response is not linked to you, and EcoAxes makes no attempt to work out who anyone is. Because of this, a response cannot be found again and withdrawn once it has been shared.

How it is used. To study and improve EcoAxes, for instance by testing whether its scores and matches hold up, and to publish statistics about environmental views, such as which positions are more common in which countries, age groups or religions. Statistics are only ever published for groups large enough that no individual can be singled out.

Open data. An anonymised copy of the dataset may be published so that others can study it. Before that happens, details are coarsened wherever needed. Exact times are cut to the month, for example, and rare combinations of country, age and religion are merged, so that no one can be picked out.

Where it is kept. In a database with a secure hosting provider. Only the EcoAxes author has access.

Never sold. Responses are not sold, rented or traded, and they are not passed to advertisers, data brokers or anyone else.

Anonymous visit counts

When you arrive at EcoAxes from another site or by typing the address, the site records which page you landed on, the date and the page language. That is all. There is no identifier and no cookie, and nothing is stored on your device. The count tells EcoAxes how many visits it gets. It cannot tell who made them.

Anonymous progress counts

When you leave the survey page having answered at least one question, the site records how many questions that visit answered out of how many, along with the survey length, question version and language. None of your answers are included, and there is no identifier. The point is to see where people give up, so the survey can be made easier to finish.

Support and tips

The “Support EcoAxes” links go to a donation page run by Stripe, a payment company. Nothing from Stripe loads on EcoAxes pages. Stripe handles the whole payment, and EcoAxes never sees your card details.

Technical logs

The services that host EcoAxes and its database may briefly keep standard logs of requests, as almost every website’s hosts do. These can include IP addresses and are kept for security and reliability. EcoAxes does not store them with responses and never uses them to identify anyone.

Changes

If what EcoAxes collects ever changes, this section will be updated before the change takes effect. Last updated 18 October 2026.

Use of AI

Generative AI tools were used in making EcoAxes: to help write the website’s code and to help draft/edit some of its text. The author directed and reviewed this work, and also chose sources and reference profiles.

Generative AI plays no part in results. Your scores, matches and profile are calculated by the fixed rules described on this page, the same way for everyone. Your answers are never sent to an AI service or used to train one. The images are public-domain artworks and photographs, not AI-generated; each is credited below.

Limitations

It has not been validated. Nobody has tested its reliability, its structure or whether it measures what it claims to. Read the scores as rough indications.
There are no norms. A score is the average of your own answers. It does not place you against any population.
One author drew the profiles. They are readings of the literature with stated uncertainty, not measurements of real adherents.
The labels come from fixed rules. Issue sub-movements and tensions are named by rules applied to your bands. They describe a pattern and nothing more.
It has a language and a viewpoint. The questions are in English and draw mostly on English-language scholarship. Some traditions, Indigenous and religious ones especially, hold positions that a scale with two ends can only approximate. Their entries say where.
Short surveys are rough. A Light score rests on one answer per dimension.
It will change. Questions, profiles and rules carry a version number and will be revised, so results from different versions are not strictly comparable.

Versions and corrections

The question bank, the dimensions and the profiles share a version number. It appears on the share card and in the exported data. Corrections are welcome for any entry, including disagreements with a profile value.

Image credits

All images are in the public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.