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Newswise — Caleb Scoville grew up in isolated Humboldt County in northern California, known as the “home of the Redwoods” for its old-growth forests. From an early age, he witnessed the tension between extracting goods from nature and trying to preserve wilderness. That early environmental awareness continues in his work as an assistant professor of sociology, teaching classes like Environmental Sociology.

Now he will be delving deeply into the connection between environmentalism and partisan politics in the U.S., thanks to a prestigious , which he just received. The fellowship is part of a Carnegie program supporting research around political polarization in the U.S.

One of only 26 recipients nationwide out of an applicant pool of more than 300, Scoville will receive $200,000 for a two-year research project called “Divided by Nature: How Environmental Politics Became Partisan and What to Do About It in a Warming World.” He plans to write a book that appeals to academic and general audiences based on the research.

He points out that Republicans have a long history of supporting environmentalism, from Theodore Roosevelt leading the movement to create the national parks system to Richard Nixon establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. But since the 1980s, environmentalism has been a contentious political issue. “I want to understand how environmental politics became woven into the broader partisan landscape,” says Scoville.

“We are extremely proud of this very prestigious honor earned by Caleb,” says Bárbara Brizuela, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. “It sheds light using a sociological lens on one of the most important issues of our time—climate change and our environment.”

Tufts Now spoke with Scoville, who began teaching at Tufts in the fall of 2020, to learn more about how bipartisan concern for the environment fell victim to partisan politics. 

How did you get interested in the connection between environmentalism and political partisanship?

My dissertation for my Ph.D. was on a very specific case of environmental political conflict—over water resources and endangered species conservation in California. It centered on the Delta smelt, a fish species that lives only in the center of California’s water distribution system. Protecting that species starting in the early 1990s has sometimes resulted in curtailments of water available to farms and to cities. 

As I studied that case, I came to understand that while there was a conflict over natural resources, the controversy spilled over into the public sphere, into national media and electoral politics. It took on a life of its own and stopped being so much about water and became more about the articulation of partisan identity—the sense of “us” and “them.”

It’s still alive today, too, as it was  to water shortages in fighting the California wildfires. 

I remember that it became a symbol, how one tiny, endangered fish could stop “progress,” as it were. 

I was interested in how people who had no stake in the case—who didn’t live in California, weren’t farmers—came to see themselves as aligned with a side. The Delta smelt became a symbol for the opponents of everything that was wrong with environmentalism, liberalism, California, and America. 

Of course, there are cases like this on the other side, too, where environmentalists or liberals have an affinity with people vis-a-vis their relationship to natural resource struggles that are far away, like the Keystone XL pipeline.

What’s the connection between the Delta smelt and this new research project of yours?

This project is an attempt to explore some of the intuitions I developed in that case, to understand how the Delta smelt is just one episode in a longer process in which environmental issues became integrated into these increasingly cohesive and antagonistic senses of “us” and “them” that are associated with partisanship.

Environmental issues didn’t used to be that partisan, particularly at the national level. We had Republican presidents who were very supportive of environmental legislation and conservation, but the gap between the parties has increased tremendously. 

Do you have a hypothesis about the connection between environmentalism and partisan politics?

I expect to see a growing connection between partisan animosity and environmental issues, articulated increasingly in relation to fossil fuels and climate change. I also expect to see an increasing interconnection between environmental issues and other polarized issues that may seem remote from environmental politics—for example, abortion, gun control, and school choice.

How will you analyze that? 

My collaborator on the project is , a sociologist at Virginia Tech. We will start with computational text analysis, which allows us to systematically analyze large bodies of text, finding lexical patterns without having to read every single word. Once we have mapped the terrain in this way, we will use qualitative methods to analyze trends in fine-grained detail.

We will look at how partisan animosity environmental positions are articulated in the , in general-interest partisan publications like National Review on the right, The Nation on the left, and in statements disseminated by various advocacy organizations across the political spectrum. This will help us understand when, how, and why powerful political actors connected environmental issues and other policy areas to evolving partisan narratives and identities. 

What are the primary lessons you want to learn?

We want to understand how this process unfolded historically. A key question is, what were the key turning points and who was involved? We know a lot about certain parts of this story. We are informed by research on the climate change countermovement, which is made up of fossil fuel interests that have promoted skepticism over climate change. 

However, I think that is only one factor among many that contributed to the changes we are trying to understand. This will be a broad, open-ended study of how positions on environmental issues became aligned with other facets of partisan identity over time. And while I come in with some hypotheses, I also expect to be surprised.