In 2021, I began following a group of conservative climate activists for a documentary. The film, titled The [Conserv]atives, grew out of months I spent in Louisiana on a Smithsonian project about coastal erosion, where I watched conservatives engage seriously on environmental issues, on their own terms and in their own language. I saw the ways they had contributed to conservation progress, mostly from inside the Republican tent.
I am ashamed to say I was surprised. Any historian can tell you that conservatives have a long legacy of environmental engagement. Yet that commitment has been lost in our national discourse, drowned out by years of media attention trained on Republican legislators who have largely abandoned those historical values in service of a deregulatory corporatism. What I was experiencing, I would later learn, is what researchers call the “perception gap,” a roughly 30 percentage point distance between what Americans actually believe
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