“Tied to the Land”: Climate Change Activism Among U.S. Hunters and Fishers

Abstract

This paper investigates climate change activism among sportsmen and sportswomen, or hunters and fishers-a politically conservative group with historically deep roots to environmental conservation. Recently members of this community have created an NGO that focuses solely on climate change action-Conservation Hawks-and several other long-standing organizations have begun to include climate communication and activism within their mission. This article draws on fieldwork conducted throughout the rural western U.S., including ethnographic interviews with sportsmen/sportswomen, participant observation in hunter education courses and conservation events, and publicly-available media produced by hunting-oriented conservation organizations. Using an ethnographic and discourse analytic approach, I find that three primary discursive practices are particularly important within hunting and fishing community-a performed closeness to wildlife and wild places, a privileging of experiential and embodied epistemologies, and a valorization of the past wilderness. In both interviews and sportsmen-oriented media, these discourses can be drawn on when creating doubt and climate skepticism. Increasingly, however, activist groups use the same rhetorical strategies to promote climate change action. I argue that such shared discursive practices can thus mobilize collective identities, challenge political polarization, and create new political subjectivities around climate change in the rural western United States. I also argue that these discursive practices shape the actions portrayed as reasonable responses to the climate crisis within this community. This analysis thus illuminates climate activism within an understudied group, showing the depth of the civic movement on climate change. It also specifically highlights the importance of shared discursive practices to both climate skepticism and climate activism among one politically-conservative group in the United States, rural white hunters, and fishers.

Measuring pro-environmental orientation: Testing and building scales

“…Indeed, many political conservatives also support pro-environmental policies (Ehret, Sparks, & Sherman, 2017) and engage in pro-environmental behaviors from recycling (DeSilver, 2016) to alternative transportation, and installing solar panels (Mildenberger, Howe, & Miljanich, 2019). Further, politically conservative groups such as fishers and hunters have long been champions of environmental conservation (Love-Nichols, 2020). We observe that existing measures, on their face, have items that appeal to progressives and may alienate conservationists on the political right.…”

Adapted to Climate Change? Issue Portfolios of Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in the Americas

“…Drawing on Boscarino (2015), we chose wildlife-focused organizations as the reference category for assessing the likelihood of ENGOs to tackle climate change as we expected that this organization type would have to make the widest stretch to address climate change given its organizational goals and the interests of its members and supporters (see also Love-Nichols, 2020). While the author studied U.S.-based ENGOs only, our empirical findings confirmed that compared with wildlife organizations, specialist organizations working on sustainable development and natural resources as well as forest conservation have a higher likelihood of identifying climate change as a priority of their work, which represents our third contribution to the literature.…”

“…What is more, the leadership of the organization stated that it hesitates to create a connection with climate change because the wider public is considered to be skeptical of it, which could have an adverse effect on the organization’s environmentalist work (Boscarino, 2015, p. 106). Love-Nichols (2020) states that members of the wildlife community have recently started to pay attention to climate change, but also that they are a politically conservative group. Based on this, we expect that wildlife organizations are the least likely specialist ENGOs to tackle climate change.…”

“…For example, E. W. Johnson's studies (2006Johnson's studies ( , 2008 on the issue portfolios of ENGOs provide valuable insights, but only for ones based in the United States. This holds even more true for the small body of research investigating how ENGOs position themselves on climate change (see, for example, Boscarino, 2015;Love-Nichols, 2020). An exception is the study by Partelow et al (2020) which does provide regional comparative insights into different environmental discourses of ENGOs.…”

Language and climate justice: A research agenda

“…In addition, we suggest that the communicative strategies of activists can be a productive area of further research (c.f. Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Love-Nichols, 2020). In light of the rise of digital climate action, digital contexts may be especially fruitful and timely research sites: for example, Shapiro and Park (2018) (Bell, 1994;Boykoff, 2011;Carvalho, 2007;Weingart et al, 2000;cited in Hanson-Easy et al, 2015).…”