The Rearguard of Modernity: Environmental Skepticism as a Struggle of Citizenship

Abstract

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is "deep anthropocentrism," or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming, 2001–2010

“…On the other hand, conservative think tanks and the Republican Party have regularly disparaged mainstream scientists and the pronouncements of the scientific community's most prestigious bodies, while promoting the largely debunked claims of a handful of climate change contrarians (McCright and Dunlap 2003; Lahsen 2005; Demeritt 2006). This conflict reflects a deeper division between those who levy critiques of the industrial capitalist order and those who defend the economic system from such challenges (Jacques 2006; McCright and Dunlap 2010; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Our results provide strong evidence that the long‐term divide over global warming between elites and organizations on the Left and the Right has in recent years emerged within the general public as well.…”

“…Political psychologists find that conservatives are more likely to express system justification tendencies, while liberals are more amenable to critiques of the established order (e.g., Feygina, Jost, and Goldsmith 2010). Compared with local environmental problems such as water and air pollution, global environmental problems like climate change pose a stronger challenge to conservatives' faith in unfettered industrial capitalism as the desirable and inevitable path to progress (Jacques 2006). More specifically, the possibility of an internationally binding treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions is viewed as a direct threat to sustained economic growth, the spread of free markets, the maintenance of national sovereignty, and the continued abolition of governmental regulations—key goals of conservatives (Oreskes and Conway 2010).…”

“…For two decades, European‐based reflexive modernization theorists (e.g., Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994; Mol 1996) have argued that forces of reflexivity, particularly science and environmentalism, compel us to confront threats to societal persistence such as climate change 2 . In contrast, stimulated by the United States's long‐term, laggard response to climate change, a growing number of scholars have begun calling attention to forces of “anti‐reflexivity” (McCright and Dunlap 2010)—particularly the industrial sector and the conservative movement—that defend the industrial capitalist order from critique by denying the significance of problems such as climate change (also see, e.g., Lahsen 2005; Demeritt 2006; Jacques 2006). Analyzing the growing tension between reflexive and anti‐reflexive forces is crucial for assessing the potential for effective societal responses to global environmental problems such as climate change.…”

“We Don’t Take the Pledge”: Environmentality and environmental skepticism at the epicenter of US wind energy development

“…''Environmental skepticism'' is a subject position that operates in the arena of environmental regulation and politics in the United States (Jacques, 2006;Jacques et al, 2008;Jacques, 2008;Jacques, 2009;McCright and Dunlap, 2010;Jenkins, 2011). Environmental skeptics reject the authenticity of ecological problems, particularly those at the global scale, and further deny that ecological problems threaten modern civilization, a view reflected in Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001).…”

Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist “trio” supporting the backlash against global warming

“…Asked whether they believed it to have been ''proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution,'' only 23% of Republicans answered in the affirmative, by contrast to 98% of the Democrats. 4 Yet other evidence of the continued impact of contrarian arguments can be found in a 2003 Congressional report prepared for Congressman Henry Waxman, 5 a 2004 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 6 books such as Chris Mooney's Republican War on Science (2005) and popular magazines such as Newsweek (Begley, 2007), and in scholars' analyses in academic journals (e.g., Jacques, 2006;Krosnick et al, 2006;Leiserowitz, 2006;McCright and Dunlap, 2003;Oreskes, 2005). A 2005 peerreviewed study of US media coverage (Antilla, 2005) identified a large amount of articles which framed climate change in terms of debate, controversy, or uncertainty.…”