“In my view, climate change is real and it is an existential threat.”
“My inclination is to take dams down.”
“The toxic chemicals that pollute our air, our water, our soils end up in our own bodies. They ruin our health in the same way that they ruin nature.”
Those might sound like comments from a pretty typical environmentalist: a liberal Democrat who probably reveres the outdoors and enjoys hiking, thinks about their carbon footprint, and tries to eat less meat.
Instead, they were spoken by a figure who’s now closely allied to President Donald Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In recent years, when he’s appeared on podcasts and campaign ads, Kennedy — Trump’s pick to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services — often brought up environmental concerns, like how pesticides are poisoning Americans, and sang the virtues of healthy soil. Kennedy is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee for his confirmation hearing on January 29.
“I’m an environmentalist,” he told right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro last April.
Kennedy has the credentials. He spent more than two decades working as an environmental attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a mainstream green group, and later helped found the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for clean water. He fought polluters including the coal industry, chemical companies, and the US Navy.
That’s what makes his current political alignment so surprising: Kennedy is now firmly enmeshed in the far right, and part of Team Trump — “the single worst environmental president our country has ever had,” according to some of Kennedy’s former colleagues. Trump, a climate-science skeptic, rolled back more than 100 environmental rules during his first term. And on his first day in office, he signed a raft of executive orders to boost oil and gas production and roll back environmental safeguards.
Kennedy was a longtime Democrat, and his migration to the far right has shocked many of those who have known him. But he’s not alone in this journey. It’s part of a much broader shift in the environmental movement.
For decades, most mainstream green advocacy groups and top environmental scientists have been largely aligned with Democratic policies and leaders. Now, however, many people who are advocating for conservation, including clean water, air, and soil, have fallen into the far right and voted Trump into power. It’s not uncommon to hear right-wing influencers talk about regenerative agriculture or Kennedy supporters raising concerns about environmental pollutants. While it’s not clear how much power they will ultimately wield in the Trump administration, they represent a new and increasingly visible right-wing environmentalism — or what sociologist Holly Jean Buck has called para-environmentalism.
“Kennedy’s rightward trajectory and new position within the MAGA movement are the latest indication that ideas that were once a core part of environmentalism are veering in a strange direction,” Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, wrote in Compact magazine in November. “Call it para-environmentalism. Like other para-phenomena, such as paramilitaries or the paranormal, para-environmentalism exists outside of the realm of official institutions and structures — at least for now.”
Across even the farthest stretches of the political spectrum are shared environmental goals: healthier land and healthier people. Everyone wants that. What stands in the way of a more unified environmental movement is that different political blocs have wildly different approaches to making the planet healthier. People on the far-right tend to distrust institutions including science agencies and big green groups, which form the backbone of the mainstream environmental movement. Members of this group also oppose action that centers on carbon and climate change; their concerns are more local, whether about water quality or immigration and grocery prices.
This leaves the modern green movement in a tough spot as it stares down four more years under Trump. How can its leaders work with a coalition of people who see them, the mainstream, as part of the problem — and should they?
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Meet the far-right environmentalist
Conserving nature wasn’t always considered at odds with the Republican Party. In fact, the movement to protect wildlife was born from the minds and actions of GOP leaders. More than a century ago, elite, Republican hunters — most famously, Teddy Roosevelt — witnessed the decline of charismatic species like bison and used their power to protect them. They supported, and in some cases helped create, environmental institutions like the national parks system.
That legacy of conservation lives on to an extent in the modern Republican Party. The waning number of hunters and anglers of today still lean more conservative, partly due to their stance on gun rights. And by and large, they back mainstream conservation policies, such as protecting public access to federal land, said Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a group that advocates for public lands. There’s also a crop of moderate conservatives, including many youth, who worry about climate change and support conservation and clean energy.
This new brand of far-right environmentalism that Kennedy embodies is something different. My reporting, including more than a dozen interviews with sociologists, conservative influencers, and mainstream environmentalists, identified two loose and partly overlapping strains. One consists of those who rail against environmental toxins as part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition. Another comprises back-to-the-land libertarians who see salvation in growing one’s own food, maintaining healthy soil, and embracing self-sufficiency.
MAHA environmentalism is rooted in a fear that we’re all being poisoned — that pesticides, food additives, seed oils, and chemicals in the air are the root of chronic illness in America. The perpetrators, they claim, are Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, and other big corporations. A core belief is that industries have infiltrated federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration that should be keeping Americans safe.
Many of the most outspoken MAHA figures promote and sell alternatives to conventional foods and health care, such as nutritional supplements. (MAHA figures including Kennedy also frequently assert that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism. Neither claims are supported by decades of scientific research.)
I recently spoke with Reinette Senum, a blogger and former mayor of Nevada City, California, who has spoken out against what she says are covert efforts to manipulate the atmosphere. Senum, who identifies as MAHA, describes herself as a former environmentalist and “recovering climate change believer.”
A number of experiences fueled her distrust of climate science. More than a decade ago, when Senum worked for a building-efficiency organization in California, she raised questions about whether retrofitting buildings is so resource-intensive that it actually offsets the climate benefits, she said. The managing director of the organization, known then as the California Building Performance Contractors Association, told her that those calculations didn’t exist, she said. “I believed in alternative energy, and I realized it was a lie,” Senum said.
Senum later had a smart meter installed in her home. Shortly after, she said, she started having trouble sleeping and became extremely sensitive to sound — symptoms that she attributes to the smart meter. (Smart meters, as well as 5G and GMO foods, are all dubious for many in the MAHA movement, some of whom happen to reside in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa.)
Like many other MAHA followers, Senum said she is worried about the environment, and the dark forces that pollute it, whether or not they’re visible. And like some mainstream environmental organizations, she’s fighting against geo-engineering, large-scale modifications to the planet’s climate to limit warming, a field that is still largely experimental. The problem with left-wing green groups, Senum said, is that they’ve become too fixated on the climate change “boondoggle” and have ignored what people are actually concerned about.
“Nobody talks about water quality,” she said of left-wing environmentalists. “They don’t talk about air quality. They don’t talk about pollution. They don’t talk about heavy metals in the air. Or GMOs. The left environmental movement literally got infiltrated and usurped by climate change. They’re so hyperfocused on that that they’re no longer focusing on the environment.”
A representative from Kennedy’s team told Vox that Kennedy was unavailable for an interview, in December. The representative did not respond to subsequent emails, including a detailed request for comment.
The other, overlapping strand of far-right environmentalism is more focused on land and soil. A number of influential figures, including US Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and farmer Joel Salatin, advocate for locally grown food and farms that are free from the influence of Big Government and Big Business. Pastoral libertarians, as you might call them, glorify an earlier time before industrial agriculture, and are obsessed with the purity of what we eat and drink.
“What we are witnessing in the growing prominence of far-right environmentalism of recent years is a revival of an older kind of ecological and political thinking, a traditional attachment to home, to soil, to blood,” Leigh Phillips wrote in Noema.
Much of the far right has embraced “regenerative agriculture” — a squishy term that broadly refers to farming practices that are meant to regenerate, or improve, the health of land rather than degrade it. These practices include planting cover crops that can improve soil health and avoiding chemicals that degrade it.
Regenerative agriculture has caught on among far-right figures likely because it enables a person to have a more self-sufficient farm, requiring fewer inputs, such as pesticides made by big companies and subsidized by the federal government. Advocates of the practice say it also produces more nutritious food.
“Regenerative agriculture, it’s the truth,” said RC Carter, a rancher in Wyoming who sells what he calls nutrient-dense beef. He didn’t vote in the recent presidential election, doesn’t trust most Democratic or Republican leaders, and resists being clumped into any one group. “The only way you can get nutrient-dense food is if it comes from healthy soils,” Carter told me.
“People are so confused and so lost, and if you’re eating healthy food, that is a foundational piece to having clear thoughts.”
What unifies this new brand of environmentalism
The most apparent trait that unites these far-right perspectives is distrust — of the government, of large scientific organizations, of big corporations. Distrust is so potent that even quality information produced by these institutions, whether on vaccine safety or climate change, doesn’t break through and alter beliefs. I saw this firsthand in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment in early 2023. There were legitimate criticisms of the government response, but government data on air and water quality had little bearing on whether residents, the majority of whom voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, felt safe.
But there’s another, more opaque thread among right-wing environmental beliefs, according to Jesse Bryant, a sociologist at Yale University: a yearning for a religious or pseudo-religious purity. The idea here is that our ecosystems, our soils, our bodies, and our minds are polluted — whether by pesticides or by liberal ideas — and that makes it harder to access God, or spiritual enlightenment.
“It’s very clear having spent a lot of time in far-right online spaces that purity and pollution binaries drive a lot of [right-wing] ideologizing,” said Bryant, who studies environmental perspectives in far-right communities.
This perspective likely stems from Christian culture and beliefs, a powerful force in right-wing politics. According to Christian teachings, human bodies are made in God’s image, and so they are naturally pure. Pollution, or impurity, is akin to sin. And sin can weaken our relationship with God. Similarly, from a New Age spiritual perspective — more common among members of the MAHA coalition — loading our bodies with impurities, which could include pesticide-ridden foods, is considered an impediment to reaching spiritual enlightenment.
That these ideas influence political views are supported by a 2012 study published in Psychological Science. It found that people who identify as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than those who identify as liberal, yet they are motivated to protect nature with messaging around purity. “We found that reframing pro-environmental rhetoric in terms of purity, a moral value resonating primarily among conservatives, largely eliminated the difference between liberals’ and conservatives’ environmental attitudes,” the authors wrote.
In a conversation with right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson in August, Kennedy said, “the reason that we protect the environment is because there’s a spiritual connection.”
“When we destroy nature,” Kennedy said, “we diminish our capacity to sense the divine, to understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.”
Ideas around purity and nature have also been used over the years to justify racism and abuse. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government, in the name of protecting nature, forcefully removed Indigenous people from their lands to establish national parks. The very definition of “wilderness” areas promoted the idea that an unpeopled, wild landscape was pristine, pure, and unspoiled, even though Indigenous people lived on such lands for tens of thousands of years.
These racist perspectives — that people, and especially brown people, are an impediment to achieving the ideal nature — were popular even among mainstream environmentalists in the 20th century. And they’ve lingered. Trump’s racist remarks about immigrants, such as saying in 2023 that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation,” is merely another iteration of a purity-pollution dichotomy that has long been present among environmentalists.
Seeds of truth
Many of the environmental concerns raised by members of the far right, MAHA and MAGA alike, are rooted in fact.
Pesticides can be dangerous, especially to farmworkers and native insects, including bees. Studies in rigorous journals have linked pesticide exposure to, for example, increased mortality in US adults, ADHD in children, and Alzheimer’s disease. Earlier this month, a study linked exposure to the herbicide Glyphosate to a reduction in birthweight.
Industrial farming has utterly devastated native ecosystems across the Midwest and completely removed at least a quarter of the topsoil in the Corn Belt. Compared to that loss, regenerative agriculture — no matter how you define it — is a more sustainable option.
More than a third of Americans have at least one major chronic disease, such as diabetes, especially people who are living in the Southeast. And the prevalence of these illnesses is increasing, in part, because of poor nutrition.
Big corporations and billionaires do influence US policy and government agencies, and it’s a problem. Federal and state lobbyists spent more than $46 billion between 2015 and 2023, according to OpenSecrets.
“Their concerns are grounded in real things,” said Buck, the University of Buffalo sociologist and author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.
But although the far right is pointing out legitimate problems — which concern mainstream environmentalists, too — supporting Trump and deregulation is likely only going to make them worse.
For example, if this new environmental coalition wants to solve the problem of corporate influence, they’re going to run into challenges: In Trump’s first two years in office, his administration “enabled unprecedented corporate capture of federal regulatory agencies,” according to a 2019 report. The report outlines how, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade association, sent his administration a wish list of 132 regulations to act on, and his government followed through on the bulk of them.
In his first term, Trump was incredibly friendly to polluters. His administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, including those meant to curb toxic air pollutants, limit pesticide exposure, and protect streams from coal mining debris — problems caused largely by big companies. Under his administration, some EPA scientists say they were pressured to downplay the risks of new chemicals, according to reporting by ProPublica.
Trump has already indicated that his new administration will be similarly favorable to Big Business and billionaires. In a December post on his platform Truth Social, he said, “any person or company investing one billion dollars, or more, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all environmental approvals.” The process for getting project approvals is partly meant to ensure they don’t harm US citizens or sensitive ecosystems. Trump, meanwhile, has already named former chemical industry executives to top posts at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Meanwhile, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — the world’s richest man, who helped propel Trump to victory — has shown his ability to influence high-stakes government decision-making. Musk and other tech titans were key players in Trump’s transition team, involved in hiring decisions for his incoming administration, the New York Times reported in December. Musk, along with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — who are collectively worth close to $1 trillion — attended Trump’s inauguration, and were seated in front of the president’s Cabinet picks.
More broadly, a push to deregulate — which Trump and his base widely support — is at odds with efforts to curtail harmful chemicals and our exposure to them. Regulations are designed to prevent harmful substances from entering our soil, water, and air. This doesn’t mean they’re working perfectly or doing enough or easy to follow, but pollution would likely be worse with fewer of those rules in place.
“Regulations are about setting a level playing field … so that business can go out and do its job and earn profits, but make sure that you don’t have bad actors out there skewing the playing field by harming folks because it benefits their bottom line,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health at NRDC. Without regulations, said Tejada, a former EPA senior staffer, “you get a race to the bottom,” meaning the worst actors — the companies least focused on, say, reducing air pollution — set the standard for other companies.
Regulatory experts I spoke to were clear that if RFK Jr. wants to crack down on food dyes and pesticides, he would need to pursue new regulations and not tear existing ones down. His ability to do that will be limited, even if he’s confirmed to lead HHS.
“I don’t think he’s going to beat Big Food,” said Ken Cook, president and cofounder of Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization focused on ridding environmental toxins from food and water. “He can’t walk down the hall to FDA and say, ‘Hey, all these food additives are banned in Europe so we’re going to ban them here.’ … Industry is going to push back and they’re probably going to win.”
This points to an obvious rift in the new administration and the modern Republican Party: Trump has curried the favor of billionaires and deregulatory crusaders and yet members of his coalition say they want to reign in corporate influence and pollution. But although those attitudes are at odds, it might not matter. Most people support Trump not because of his stance on environmental issues but because of his rhetoric around immigration and the economy. It’s also not clear how large or powerful this new band of right-wing environmentalists really is, and whether they can really influence the administration. Some Trump administration appointments already seem to be in direct tension with the MAHA coalition.
Just as support for Trump and deregulation is at odds with a desire for a healthy environment, so is an allergy to climate action.
Many MAHA and MAGA people with environmental concerns tend to criticize clean energy and downplay the impacts of the oil and gas industry. Part of that belief stems from a rejection of globalization and hyper growth — a more traditional conservative ideology. A self-sufficient, pastoral lifestyle doesn’t mesh with a highly modern, massive solar farm that centralizes energy production (let alone the huge, power-hungry data centers that Trump’s new friends in the tech industry demand to support the growth of artificial intelligence).
These beliefs are reinforced by misinformation. This includes claims that lifetime carbon emissions of EVs are comparable or higher to combustion cars. (They’re not.) Or that clean energy sources pollute the environment more than fossil fuels. (They don’t.) Or that offshore wind turbines are killing whales. (There’s no scientific evidence to suggest that.)
“They’re all made in China and when they explode — which one did off of Nantucket a month ago — they put shards into the water so you can’t swim without getting cut,” Kennedy said of offshore wind turbines on a podcast in September. (Last summer, blades of the turbine, which was manufactured by an American company, folded over and broke off into the ocean.) “They’re killing the whales. The environmental movement doesn’t care. They built these and they are destroying the whale populations and everybody knows it.”
This isn’t correct.
The reality is that oil, gas, and coal have been federally subsidized for hundreds of years. Their staying power is in part the result of big government. Even if you ignore the impacts of climate change, these fuels have been definitively tied to air pollution including nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and ozone, compounds widely known to harm human health.
A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Environmental Research in 2021 attributed more than 10 million premature deaths each year, globally, to air pollution from burning fossil fuels. It’s not surprising that people who live near petrochemical plants have higher rates of cancer. (That doesn’t mean “clean energy” sources are pollution-free — they’re definitely not. But comparatively, they are a heck of a lot safer.)
Then of course there are the impacts of rising temperatures, which are increasingly hard to ignore. The planet is about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today than it was in the late 1800s. Yes, there have been hotter periods in Earth’s past, but not during modern civilization — and the warming has never happened this fast.
Human populations and ecosystems are struggling to keep up with the rate of change. In the Florida Keys, for example, extreme ocean temperatures have helped wipe out coral reefs, a critical structure for dampening waves that flood coastal communities during hurricanes. Healthy coral cover in the Keys has declined by at least 90 percent in the last half century. Monroe County, which encompasses the Florida Keys, overwhelmingly supported Trump in the past election.
Against this backdrop, Trump has put “drill, baby, drill” at the center of his agenda. On his first day in office, he signed several executive orders intended to accelerate fossil fuel production. These include trying to open up vast stretches of Alaskan wilderness to drilling and logging, and eliminating efforts to protect poor communities from pollution.
Trump’s pick to run the Department of Energy is also telling, though unsurprising. Chris Wright is the founder, CEO, and chair of the board of Liberty Energy, one of the nation’s largest fracking services companies. In a video on LinkedIn in 2023, he said, “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.”
What’s next for the environmental movement?
Trump is back in the White House, and many environmental problems — wildfires, hurricanes, habitat loss — are worse today than ever before. Where does the environmental movement go from here?
Fortunately, there is common ground between far-right and mainstream environmentalists: a desire for clean air, water, and soil, and accountability for big corporations that negatively impact the environment. Among these disparate factions, polluting companies are a common enemy, even though the Republican Party has traditionally, and under Trump, favored polluters.
“We have far more in common than we don’t,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organizations. “When you hear Americans of any political stripe express concern about pesticides, express a desire for clean air, clean water, and healthy food, express a preference for anything related to reviving small farms … what that affirms for me is that our issues, our [environmental] agenda, is more popular than either party.”
The Sierra Club and other big green groups acknowledge that they need to do a better job at talking about these common concerns. “We can’t talk about gigatons of carbon equivalents,” said Tejada of the NRDC. “Like nobody knows or cares. We can talk about the fact, though, that a storm hit West North Carolina a couple months ago that left $60 billion worth of damage that nobody knows how to pay for.”
As Jealous put it, the problem with the environmental movement “is not what we say, it’s literally how we say it.”
Green groups could adjust their messaging, and perhaps get more of the right behind their cause. This may work in local fights — to protect a city park, for example, or clean up a stream. It is not, however, in the public’s interest to abandon efforts to tackle climate change; lowering carbon and expanding clean energy are integral to those efforts. Plus, ditching carbon from the green vocabulary won’t suddenly dissolve political divides. There are much bigger hurdles to building a more unified environmental movement.
Common among the far right is what Whitney Phillips, a media studies researcher and co-author of a forthcoming book on anti-liberalism, calls anti-liberal demonology: the idea that liberals, a group that is not clearly defined, are an evil force that is polluting the “real America.”
Most mainstream green organizations, Democratic policymakers, and scientists — again, pillars of the modern environmental movement — are seen as liberal and thus deeply mistrusted. To the far right, they are inextricably linked to the very pollutants, the impurities, that they’re trying to get rid of (even though these groups are arguably doing more than any other to clean up pollution).
Without resolving these deeply entrenched trust issues, it’s unlikely that far right and mainstream environmental leaders will be fighting these problems together.
“If you’re trying to work with people who are on the left, but you hate people on the left,” Phillips said, “how the fuck is that supposed to work?”
Umair Irfan contributed reporting.
