The primary factors why most Americans no longer consider themselves environmentalists

Only 41% of Americans in 2021 still identified as environmentalists, down from 76% in 1989, according to Gallup.

According to numerous surveys, almost 70% of people support the government taking action to reduce air, water, and toxic waste pollution. The political polarization that has penetrated every facet of American political life has caused the image of environmentalism and environmental advocacy to become intertwined.

The environmental movement was viewed as a safe, uncontroversial topic when it initially became widely popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in contrast to the turbulent politics of the Vietnam War. Americans were aware that rivers shouldn’t catch fire and could see smog, although they did not grasp the “domino theory” of communism spreading swiftly. It was as American as apple pie to be ecologically minded.

The issue of climate change and the anti-regulatory mindset fostered by the Reagan Administration both had a role in the reputation of environmentalism’s decline.

Ronald Reagan could have been characterized as a moderate by modern Republican standards, but he believed that government and regulation were the cause of all of America’s problems. People assumed that environmental laws were to blame for factories closing.

Even while that did happen occasionally, technological developments (such as containerized shipping, which decreased the cost of shipping goods) and lower-cost foreign labour were mostly responsible for deindustrialization. The economy also underwent a transition, moving from one based on manufacturing to one based on services. Instead of producing clothing, New York City now designs, sells, and makes substantially more money than it ever did when it produced more than 90% of the nation’s clothing.

The mobility requirements of large suburban families who needed to travel around town while carrying children’s sporting equipment or of rural people who hunted and preserved meat to survive the winter were poorly understood by vegan urban environmentalists concerned with climate change and living modestly. Some well-known environmentalists opted to take the sanctimonious moral high ground rather than searching for areas of agreement in a shared love of nature.

The actual issue of climate change was last. Unlike air and water pollution, which is typically local and is perceptible through the senses, climate change is generated globally. Furthermore, the pollution was caused by an invisible gas, and the impacts were more hypothetical than real.