Conservative Environmentalist Benji Backer Talks Polarization and the Pressures to Conform

Benji Backer, Starts With Us Movement Partner, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, and author of the new book The Conservative Environmentalist, argues that “conservative principles are the key to climate solutions that actually work.” 

Benji doesn’t fit the usual political stereotypes. We recently talked to him about the pressures we face to align with “our team,” and how he sees liberals and conservatives amplifying division on the climate issue. 

As Benji said when we talked to him: “We all have individual experiences that make us complex beings, and we should never expect to agree completely with someone else on everything.”

Truthfully, many of us are like Benji in having beliefs that are out of step with our preferred political party. (Did you know roughly 30% of Democrats and Republicans don’t agree with their party’s stance on abortion?) In his book, Benji writes that many younger conservatives have views similar to his on the environment. “82 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds polled indicated that climate change is important to them, including 77 percent of right-leaning and 90 percent of independent respondents.” 

The more polarized we become, the more pressure we feel to align with our political tribe. Polarization pressures us to become stereotypes — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say there’s a pressure to act like stereotypes due to our discomfort at talking about how we differ from “our team.” 

That’s why Benji often takes flak from people on the right AND the left:

In our increasingly tribal culture, news outlets and politicians on the right and left want my message to fit their political narrative. Conservatives want me to hammer more on extreme climate policies, over-focus on the importance of fossil fuels, and honestly try to make liberals look crazy. 

Liberals often want the same. They want me to highlight conservative-side climate change denial, over-focus on solutions like solar and wind — while vilifying fossil fuels — and try to make conservatives look crazy. 

People often rely on simplistic, divisive narratives that flatten nuance and ramp up tensions. For example, on the liberal side, some people speak as if “liberals care about the environment and conservatives don’t.” But many conservatives, Benji points out, do care about the environment — and speaking as if they don’t is unhelpful and divisive.

A conservative living in rural America cares deeply about protecting their environment — but to them it’s an issue local to their community. When these people hear the word “climate,” because the word has become so associated with the left, they immediately assume “climate” equals “big government” — as well as top-down solutions that will harm their livelihoods. 

Just because someone is scared of climate policy hurting their communities doesn’t mean that person hates the environment. 

And just because a person is worried about the effects of climate change, doesn’t mean that person wants to rip your livelihood away from you.

Toxic polarization grows when we have distorted views of people on the “other side” and see “them” as a scary, all-the-same monolith. One way we can break the cycle is by remembering that we are all complex beings and not stereotypes. Keeping this in mind helps us see our political opponents as individuals instead of caricatures or representatives of an entire political group. 

This explains why Benji can have a depolarizing effect on the people he meets: 

Liberals are often shocked that a conservative can be pro-environment and pro-climate; it always lowers people’s guard. 

Whether it’s pro-LGBT conservatives or pro-capitalist liberals, the more voices that normalize politics not being so black and white, the better off we’ll be as a society. 

The more we can shatter simplistic political stereotypes and focus on people as individuals, the more we’ll reduce team-based, us vs. them animosity. 

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