Anti-environmentalism is gaining floor. Assaults on the web zero aim and hostility to conservation measures and anti-pollution targets have gotten extra widespread. And, as latest election outcomes have proven, these techniques are reshaping politics in Britain and throughout the west.
Anti-environmentalism is a rejection of each environmental initiatives and activism. However regardless of its sudden rise and daring rhetoric, it’s constructed on shaky foundations. The messages it provides are sometimes contradictory and row in opposition to the tide of on a regular basis expertise.
Take the US president, Donald Trump. He dismantled many environmental protections in his final time period of workplace, and is now eradicating these which might be left – together with assist for analysis that even mentions the phrase local weather. But he instructed a rally in Wisconsin in 2024: “I’m an environmentalist. I want clean air and clean water. Really clean water. Really clean air.”
A number of the contradictions of anti-environmentalism replicate its departure from conventional conservatism. Though routinely recognized as “conservative”, the populist anti-green politics of Republicans within the US and Reform within the UK, together with the AfD in Germany and Nationwide Rally in France, characterize a radical problem to the beliefs of continuity and conservation that have been as soon as on the coronary heart of conservatism.
The Conservative Atmosphere Community 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”. A lot of this community’s work includes reminding folks that necessary environmental protections, from America’s nationwide parks to controls on air pollution and local weather change in Britain and elsewhere, have been launched by conservatives.
However few on the suitable seem like listening. A populist tide is washing this conservative custom away, even if assist for environmental safety stays extremely popular.
Polling signifies that 80% of individuals within the UK fear about local weather change. Public backing for the work of the US Environmental Safety Company can also be overwhelming, together with amongst Republican voters.
Partially, this assist displays the truth that environmental harm is an on a regular basis actuality: unpredictable climate, the collapse of animal and bug populations, and a spread of different challenges should not simply on the TV, they’re outdoors the window.
In my analysis for a forthcoming ebook on environmental nostalgia internationally, I hold bumping into an irony. In western nations, voices from the suitable say they need their nation again, but seem hostile to environmental insurance policies that might defend their nation and guarantee its survival.
There are lots of causes for this disconnect, together with resentment in opposition to initiatives that require life-style and livelihood adjustments. Nevertheless, the enmity and disengagement is extra sophisticated than a easy rejection of nature.
I argue {that a} distinction could be made between what I name “cold” and “hot” types of environmentalism. The previous values and mourns the lack of nature, however as a spectacle to be noticed – a set of interesting photographs of wildlife – whereas the latter feels implicated and anxious.
The previous place permits individuals to assert they love nature but be detached and even hostile to initiatives to put it aside. Nevertheless, the road between cold and warm, or between anti- and pro-environmentalist, is neither fastened nor laborious.
One other high quality of anti-environmentalism is that its beliefs are changeable, even quixotic. Local weather change is an instance.
Nigel Farage at a ‘Stop Ulez’ protest outdoors Downing Avenue in London in August 2023.
Waldemar Sikora / Alamy Inventory Photograph
Reform’s leaders have lengthy flirted with local weather change denial. “Climate change has happened for millions of years,” defined former Reform UK chief Richard Tice in 2024, including that “the idea that you can stop the power of the Sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous”. Tice has not modified his views however later the identical 12 months, the celebration’s new chief, Nigel Farage, instructed the BBC that he was “not arguing the science”.
Like different populist events, Reform adopts a cell place on the setting, shifting between denying that local weather change is going on or that people are inflicting it, and the very completely different competition that anthropogenic local weather change is actual however that environmental targets are unreachable and unfair, provided that different nations (China is usually talked about) supposedly achieve this little.
A post-western paradox
Researchers are solely simply beginning to consider anti-environmentalism. One key evaluation is environmental politics researcher John Hultgren’s The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Wrestle in america. This new ebook explains how Republicans managed to persuade working-class voters that there’s “zero-sum dichotomy between jobs and environmental protection, workers and environmentalists”.
This sort of binary has additionally been discovered by contributors to The Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism, who establish and critique the stereotyping of environmentalism as middle-class and elite in a number of western international locations.
But the geographical focus of those pioneering works misses yet one more of the paradoxes of anti-environmentalism: that though its rhetoric usually accuses China and different non-western international locations of doing little, there was a big environmental flip in each coverage and public attitudes past Europe and the US.
Environmentalism is turning into post-western. That is partly as a result of the realities of environmental harm are so stark throughout a lot of Asia and Africa.
Excessive temperatures and unpredictable rainfall are resulting in meals insecurity and neighborhood displacement. Environmentalism within the African Sahel and south Asia would possibly higher be known as “survivalism”.
And regardless of its persevering with reliance on fossil fuels, China’s state-led imaginative and prescient of a transition to a conservationist and decarbonised “ecological civilisation” is positioning it as a worldwide environmental chief.
Stereotypes of environmentalism being primarily a western concern are crumbling. Due to this, together with the numerous contradictions that beset it, the rise of anti-environmentalism seems not solely advanced, however curious and unsustainable.
