The Importance of Moving in the Public Discourse

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I think people often ignore (or forget) how important it is to try to get ideas into the public discourse.  We have seen the power of ideas once they are embedded in the public conscience: for example, while nobody seemed much bothered by growing inequality, the Occupy Movement worked it into the public discourse and for a while we had staunchly conservative politicians paying attention to it.  Indeed, ideas, or the language with which we use to discuss social issues, can change the entire paradigm according to which we evaluate those issues.
Take climate change for example.  Much of the discussion on policies affecting the climate (or the environment) focuses on cost-benefit analysis.  For instance, commentators frequently talk about imposing pollution costs on coal-based technologies so that coal generated electricity reflects its "true" value as opposed to "subsidized" cost.  Such discourse is essentially economic in nature.  The premise is that as rational beings, humans behave to maximize individual well-being.  Hence the difficulty in enacting some kind of policy that extracts costs today and locally while providing benefits that are at best diffuse and potentially far into the future.  This framing of the environmental debate ignores the power of normative narratives -- in short, it ignores that a person also embraces a normative narrative of himself or herself that encodes his or her values and beliefs.  For example, although people like to reduce altruistic behavior to some probabilistic analysis of the likely future (and perhaps intangible) benefits of such behavior, a person is partially motivated to act in certain way by his or her preferences and beliefs about himself or herself as a person.
This is where raising certain ideas and normative goals into the national conscience comes into play.  Perhaps we should borrow a page from other disciplines that ask us to set ideals and goals for ourselves.  The Romantics viewed nature as a force that remains at the same time awe-inspiring (think sublimity and the terror that it inspires), while other movements regarded nature as a goal in itself, whose preservation should be aspired to without any regard for utilitarian arguments.  Regardless of the merits of such rationales, I think a good way to try to change the way environmental discourse is mediated is by trying to bring ideas into the language concerning environmental issues.  Once we do that, we can move away from the purely economic way of talking about environmental issues, which can camouflage the issue as one whose harms are potentially abstract while whose costs are immediately concrete.