The religion of anti-environmentalism

A thoughtful left-liberal reader writes:

A question about the state of the conservative movement that puzzles me: why has the either irrelevance or falsity of global warming become such a touchstone? To me, it has something of the quality of a portion of the academic left denying the reality of Al Qaeda, not least in its refusal to accept the expert consensus.

But perhaps I'm missing something. I certainly think of myself as an opinonated person (too opinionated at times, in fact), but I am astonished to read people with no expertise on such matters confidently dismissing the views of the vast majority
of the scientific community. Without in any way making a cult of expertise, it seems to me that one needs a very good reason to challenge an expert consensus and
apart from an allergy to people like Al Gore, I don't see that reason.

Anyhow, I'd love to know how you view this.

I've had this question in my in-box for a few days, trying to figure out how to answer it. I do share this reader's puzzlement over the intense emotion that so many on the right invest in fighting the idea that humans have anything to do with the globe warming. I don't think I have a clear answer for him, but I do have some thoughts:

The environment is to conservatives what defense is to liberals: the big issue that we don't instinctively get, and that makes us suspicious. It's an instinctive thing. Whenever many conservatives think "environmentalist," they think of Beavis & Butt-head's Mr. Van Driessen. I was this way for a long time, and never gave it a second thought (because no one I knew did) until reading former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's "Dominion," which makes a conservative case for treating animals and the natural world in general with respect. As I later wrote about in "Crunchy Cons," it had never occurred to me that the hunting culture I'd grown up in was full of environmentalists, after a fashion, but they called themselves "conservationists." And if memory serves, they limited their conservationism to maintaining good hunting and fishing grounds -- which isn't nothing, and in fact forms a common-ground basis on which environmentalists might have reached out to them.

But the problem with environmentalists (and I'm generalizing) is that they're culturally out of sync with conservationists. Both sides, I think, tend to view each other with mutual suspicion. Conservationists tend to be cultural conservatives, outdoorsmen, and hunters. Environmentalists tend to be liberals who use the outdoors recreationally, but don't like hunting. There's a whole package of cultural assumptions that come with both. That's one reason I thought Jerome Ringo, a Louisiana hunter with working-class black roots, was such an inspired choice to head the National Wildlife Federation in 2005. He told Mother Jones:

MJ: You spoke just a moment ago of being a conservationist who happens to be black. There’s a popular stereotype that environmentalists are white and wear fleeces and that the roots of environmentalism date back to the 1960s. But I think environmentalism is far broader historically, ideologically, and culturally.

JR: Well, you go back in history—the National Wildlife Federation was formed in the 1930's when many of the conservation organizations were first organized. FDR was a conservationist; he was a president that truly promoted conservation. He was also a sportsman. During that time, the majority of environmentalists/conservationists were sportsmen. Those folks that were members of organized conservation and environmental organizations were those folks that I say that would fish to hang on the wall.

People that fished to put the fish on the plate, didn't join clubs! They fished to eat. So therefore, the organized movement was mainly made of those sportsman did not include people who couldn't afford to join clubs and who were off feeding their families. And unfortunately, that was many people of color and poor people. Over the years, the movement has evolved to where those sportsmen now recognized the impacts of their actions and society's actions on their sporting and lifestyle. If the air is dirty or the water is dirty there are surely less fish and deer and animals to hunt.

So there has been a marriage between sportsman, environmentalists, and conservationists, because we all focus on pretty much the same thing, and that's protecting the earth for generations to come. Now, the National Wildlife Federation as well as many other conservation organizations realize that they will not be successful in their future if they don't build broad coalitions that involve African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics… This country's a melting pot – we all drink the air, we all drink the water, therefore, we should all be involved in the process.

I'm digressing. The point I wanted to make was that there is a visceral distrust for environmentalism on the right. It's an ill-informed distrust in many cases, but it's there, and it's a very, very difficult thing to overcome. The more extreme statements and actions from environmental activists don't help. I think you'd find a lot more people in this country who would agree with positions held by enviros, but would shun the label. Wendell Berry, who is nobody's idea of a right-winger, told me personally that though he can't abide corporations exploiting and tearing up the land, he keeps professional environmentalists at arm's length, because he can't get them to recognize that people matter too, that people are part of the natural environment too. Man is not an alien, but is of nature.

Maybe that's it: conservatives have a feeling that environmentalists just don't like ordinary people. Right or wrong, there it is.

Which might explain the hard-to-fathom passion so many on the right bring to despising the global warming crowd. I don't have a problem with legitimate challenges of scientific claims, but when you do some reading in the area, and you grasp how overwhelming the basic scientific consensus is, you wonder why on earth so many conservatives seem desperate to believe that it's all a hoax. Not arguing around the margins, but denying the basic premise of human-forced climate change.

Could it really be because they don't want to confront the possibility that they will have to change their way of life? Are they like those gay men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the ones Randy Shilts wrote about in "And the Band Played On," who blamed Reagan and everybody else for the epidemic rather than confront the role their own behavior played? Surely that's part of it. But I don't think it can explain all of it.

As for me, I'd really rather not believe in global warming, certainly not living where I do, in one of the most miserably hot areas in the country. But the facts are so overwhelming, and the denial is so pervasive and emotional, that anti-environmentalism (re: global warming) strikes one as a dogmatic religious commitment. The idea that man-made climate change is a hoax seems to fulfill some deep emotional need in quite a few people on the right.

But it must be said that -- in my observation at least -- it does the same thing for many on the left. Harper's Magazine ran a piece last year calling the climate change apocalypse the left's version of "Left Behind." We are all prisoners of Truthiness to some degree.

Anyway, via NRO's Planet Gore blog, here's Roger Pielke, Jr.'s thoughtful discussion of why the science of climate change has become so politicized in this country. Excerpt:

[I]t is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participants ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.

First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes -- remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.

Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.