Anti-environmentalism is on the rise but it’s full of contradictions
Alastair Bonnett, Newcastle University
Anti-environmentalism is gaining ground. Attacks on the net zero goal and hostility to conservation measures and anti-pollution targets are becoming more common. And, as recent election results have shown, these tactics are reshaping politics in Britain and across the west.
Anti-environmentalism is a rejection of both environmental initiatives and activism. But despite its sudden rise and bold rhetoric, it is built on shaky foundations. The messages it offers are often contradictory and row against the tide of everyday experience.
Take the US president, Donald Trump. He dismantled many environmental protections in his last term of office, and is now removing those that are left – including support for research that even mentions the word climate. Yet he told a rally in Wisconsin in 2024: “I’m an environmentalist. I want clean air and clean water. Really clean water. Really clean air.”
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Some of the contradictions of anti-environmentalism reflect its departure from traditional conservatism. Although routinely identified as “conservative”, the populist anti-green politics of Republicans in the US and Reform in the UK, along with the AfD in Germany and National Rally in France, represent a radical challenge to the ideals of continuity and conservation that were once at the heart of conservatism.
The Conservative Environment Network is an organisation which pitches itself as an “independent forum for conservatives in the UK and around the world who support net zero, nature restoration and resource security”. Much of this network’s work involves reminding people that important environmental protections, from America’s national parks to controls on pollution and climate change in Britain and elsewhere, were introduced by conservatives.
But few on the right appear to be listening. A populist tide is washing this conservative tradition away, despite the fact that support for environmental protection remains very popular.
Polling indicates that 80% of people in the UK worry about climate change. Public backing for the work of the US Environmental Protection Agency is also overwhelming, including among Republican voters.
In part, this support reflects the fact that environmental damage is an everyday reality: unpredictable weather, the collapse of animal and insect populations, and a range of other challenges are not just on the TV, they are outside the window.
In my research for a forthcoming book on environmental nostalgia across the world, I keep bumping into an irony. In western nations, voices from the right say they want their country back, yet appear hostile to environmental policies that would protect their country and ensure its survival.
There are many reasons for this disconnect, including resentment against initiatives that require lifestyle and livelihood changes. However, the enmity and disengagement is more complicated than a simple rejection of nature.
Many people – including Trump himself – claim they are environmentalists even when the evidence suggests otherwise. The signs and symbols of environmental care are knitted into every aspect of our commercial and cultural life: if wildlife could sue for copyright, there would a lot of rich bears.
I argue that a distinction can be made between what I call “cold” and “hot” forms of environmentalism. The former values and mourns the loss of nature, but as a spectacle to be observed – a set of appealing images of flora and fauna – while the latter feels implicated and anxious.
The former position allows people to claim they love nature yet be indifferent or even hostile to initiatives to save it. However, the line between cold and hot, or between anti- and pro-environmentalist, is neither fixed nor hard.
Another quality of anti-environmentalism is that its beliefs are changeable, even quixotic. Climate change is an example.
Reform’s leaders have long flirted with climate change denial. “Climate change has happened for millions of years,” explained former Reform UK leader Richard Tice in 2024, adding that “the idea that you can stop the power of the Sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous”. Tice has not changed his views but later the same year, the party’s new leader, Nigel Farage, told the BBC that he was “not arguing the science”.
Like other populist parties, Reform adopts a mobile position on the environment, moving between denying that climate change is happening or that humans are causing it, and the very different contention that anthropogenic climate change is real but that environmental targets are unreachable and unfair, given that other nations (China is often mentioned) supposedly do so little.
A post-western paradox
Researchers are only just starting to think about anti-environmentalism. One key analysis is environmental politics researcher John Hultgren’s The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States. This new book explains how Republicans managed to convince working-class voters that there is “zero-sum dichotomy between jobs and environmental protection, workers and environmentalists”.
This kind of binary has also been found by contributors to The Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism, who identify and critique the stereotyping of environmentalism as middle-class and elite in several western countries.
Yet the geographical focus of these pioneering works misses yet another of the paradoxes of anti-environmentalism: that although its rhetoric often accuses China and other non-western countries of doing little, there has been a significant environmental turn in both policy and public attitudes beyond Europe and the US.
Environmentalism is becoming post-western. This is partly because the realities of environmental damage are so stark across much of Asia and Africa.
Extreme temperatures and unpredictable rainfall are leading to food insecurity and community displacement. Environmentalism in the African Sahel and south Asia might better be called “survivalism”.
And despite its continuing reliance on fossil fuels, China’s state-led vision of a transition to a conservationist and decarbonised “ecological civilisation” is positioning it as a global environmental leader.
Stereotypes of environmentalism being primarily a western concern are crumbling. Because of this, along with the many contradictions that beset it, the rise of anti-environmentalism appears not only complex, but curious and unsustainable.
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Alastair Bonnett, Professor of Geography, Newcastle University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A man walks on a hot summer day in Srinagar, India-controlled Kashmir, July 25, 2024
