There’s a regional gap on climate change which mirrors a “green gap” that goes back nearly two centuries
By Colin Woodard
Every American is dependent on the planet for life support – for food, air, water, thermal regulation, and radiological protection – and yet support for environmentalism generally and climate protection in particular have always varied widely by region. Since the beginnings of the conservation and naturalism movements in the early 19th century, appreciation for the natural world and its role in keeping us healthy, happy, and alive has been overwhelmingly concentrated in Yankeedom, New Netherland and, later, the Left Coast, Far West, and El Norte and opposed by the political leaders of the Deep South, Greater Appalachia and (paradoxically) the Far West. This post explains why.
Today, addressing climate change is rightly the most essential environmental issue, the one upon which everything else depends, from protecting biodiversity to promoting environmental justice. For decades now, bold action to address the problem has been hampered by the United States’s internal divisions in the issue, wherein politicians from some regions of the country first denied global warming was taking place – Senator Dan Inhofe of Oklahoma said it was “the greatest hoax every perpetuated against the American People” – then accepted it was happening but that humans weren’t the cause and now, increasingly, admitting it is happening but that it’s not worth fixing. This opposition, buttressed by the fossil fuel industry, has doomed our future generations to live in a world of superstorms, megadroughts, unprecedented wildfires, and mass extinctions.
At Nationhood Lab, we were interested if the regional gaps might be starting to close, given that climate change effects are hitting southern and western regions particularly hard. To gauge this, we asked the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication if we could access their 2023 county-level climate opinion estimates, which took survey results from 28,000 Americans and leveraged them with detailed demographic information in a computer model. (At a county-level, the model has +/- 8 percent accuracy, and 3 percent nationally, so the American Nations model level would be in between; we dropped First Nation from our analysis because we strongly suspect there’s far too little sampling to power their model.)
The Yale data – depicted in the graphic at the top of this post — showed supermajorities in every regional culture agree climate change is happening, from a low of just under 67% in Greater Appalachia and Louisiana’s New France enclave to highs of about 80% in Left Coast. But when asked if humans are causing it – and there is no doubt that we are – the numbers get quite a bit softer. Only 50.6% of respondents in Louisiana’s New France enclave – which is sinking into the sea – accept human causation compared to 65.9% in the U.S. portion of Greater Polynesia (Hawaii). Among large “nations” this range went from 52.6% in Greater Appalachia to 65.8% in Left Coast. The results for wanting Congress to take strong action to the address the issue were nearly identical – plus or minus about one percent in most regions — though it was about 4% weaker in Greater Appalachia, the Midlands and Yankeedom and 3% in Far West.
The same general pattern emerged from the response to a question asking if most scientists believe global warming is happening (and they emphatically do.) The misinformed have their greatest strength in New France, Greater Appalachia, and Deep South and are thinnest on the ground in New Netherland, Greater Polynesia and Left Coast.
Hardcore American Nations geeks may appreciate that the regional pattern appears to hold when you cross over into Canada, as seen in this visualization over at Yale Climate’s site. Residents of Yankeedom and Left Coast electoral districts (or “ridings”) strongly accept global warming is happening, Far Western ones are skeptical, and those in he Midlands and First Nation are in between. New France also strongly accepts the science, because the culture here did not assimilate with the Deep South (as Louisiana’s Cajun country has over the past two generations.)
The Yale data also showed big support in every region for regulating carbon dioxide and funding renewable energy initiatives and overwhelming opposition everywhere to drilling in National Wildlife Refuges. (Even in New France, the latter measure only received 35.3% support.)
To triangulate, we also crunched numbers on several climate-related questions posed by the massive Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, which surveyed more than half a million Americans about a broad range of issues between 2019 and 2021. Encouragingly, we found overwhelming support in every “nation” for capping carbon emissions – like by 25 and 30 point margins even in the least climate conscious regions – and clear net approval for implementing a “green new deal” everywhere (save New France, where it was an exact tie.) Americans may disagree on whether human-caused global warming is real or if we should do anything about it in the abstract, but they’re almost universally for creating green jobs and making power plants more efficient.
The most contentious climate-and-energy issue in the Nationscape poll was whether authorities should lift existing barriers to oil and gas development, a measure with serious habitat protection and global warming implications. In each region at least a quarter of respondents were not sure where they stood and there were no majorities on either side of the issue. But pluralities want to drill more in New France (42.6% to 25.2%), Greater Appalachia (35.0-30.2), and Deep South (35.7-30.8.) All the other regions oppose by varying degrees, from a point or two in New Netherland and Tidewater to nearly 20 in Left Coast (25.6-44.2.) In Far West the net disapproval of lifting barriers was more than 4 points (31.9-36.2) and in Yankeedom more than 6 (30.0-36.3.)
This data shows a clear pattern when it comes to public opinion on this ultimate environmental issue. Left Coast, New Netherland and Greater Polynesia are the most green minded regions, with El Norte, Tidewater, and Spanish Caribbean not far behind. The Far West, and Yankeedom occupy the middle. The Midlands is pretty skeptical on climate, and Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, and Louisiana’s New France enclave (where offshore oil and gas is a major employer) are the least engaged.
Longstanding patterns
This matches patterns seen throughout our history. Virtually the entire history of the environmental movement – from the writings of the Transcendentalists in the early 19th century to Earth Day in 1970 – was driven by people and institutions in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast, with an occasional assist from an exiled Midlander. The Sierra Club, the continent’s first grassroots environmental group, was founded in San Francisco in 1892 with substantial support from the faculty of Stanford and Berkeley, both of which were part of the mostly unsuccessful Yankee project to establish a “New England on the Pacific.” George Bird Grinnell, a Yale-educated New Netherlander, fought the mass slaughter of birds by recreational hunters through the foundation of the New York-based Audubon Society in 1905. Another New Netherlander, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal involvements in environmental protection with the creation of the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. His Yankee cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936. Midland-born, Yale-educated Aldo Leopold, founded the science of wildlife management and the Wilderness Society while a professor at the University of Wisconsin; his observations of the land around his rural Wisconsin home, published posthumously as A Sand County Almanac, is a landmark text in the green movement. From the coast of Maine, Midland-born Rachel Carson wrote The Sea Around Us (1951) and Silent Spring (1962), which raised the ecological consciousness of millions. Two of the most prominent environmental groups that emerged in the 1960s – The Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund – were based in New Netherland. The Left Coast gave the world Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver, B.C.), the Sea Shepherd Society (based in Friday Harbor, Washington), and Friends of the Earth, founded in San Francisco under the auspices of Berkeley native David Brower, who also founded the Earth Island Institute and League of Conservation Voters. The father of the Appalachian Trail, Benton MacKaye, wasn’t from Appalachia at all but rather was a Harvard-educated Connecticuter whose grandparents had been prominent Yankee abolitionists.
Public interest in these causes followed the same pattern, but with the addition of Far Western and Tidewater. By 1993, per capita membership in the thirteen largest national environmental organizations was overwhelmingly concentrated in Left Coast, Yankeedom, New Netherland, Tidewater, Far West, El Norte and Spanish Caribbean counties; the Midlands occupied a middle ground and almost entirely absent in Greater Appalachia, Deep South, and New France. Six of the top 25 counties were in the Colorado Rockies, but not one was from those three southern regions. A state-level study examining average environmental opinions from 1973-1982 as expressed by respondents to the National Science Foundation-funded General Social Survey, showed the greenest values in the West Coast and northeastern states and weakest in the Deep South and High Plains ones. A 2024 study examined millions of Twitter posts to map how climate change denialists were distributed across the nation’s 3143 counties; the same general pattern appeared, with denialism concentrated in Greater Appalachia, the Deep South and the High Plains portion of the Far West.
State environmental policies often follow this regional pattern. An examination of 256 indicators of a state’s environmental record in 1991-1992 conducted by the Institute for Southern Studies resulted in a list with the West Coast, Yankee, and New Netherlander states occupying the top eleven positions and Deep Southern and Greater Appalachian states monopolizing the bottom eight. A 2020 ranking of the “greenest states” by review and advice publisher Red Ventures incorporated renewable energy prevalence, open spaces, recycling, and environmental justice factors and resulted in a broadly similar list, with Pacific and New England states dominating the top of the list, Deep Southern, Greater Appalachian and most Far Western states the bottom. (Though Florida, where 38% of the population lives in green-friendly Spanish Caribbean, ranked sixth.)
Public opinion doesn’t always drive public policy, however. This is especially true in the Far West, where the public is environmentally conscious but their elected representatives are often hostile to green policies, including climate change. Martin Nie, director of the University of Montana’s Bolle Center for People and Forests, wrote his dissertation on this phenomenon, which he called “the Great Divide.” He found much of the political leadership’s hostility to environmental regulation was wrapped up in its resentment of the federal government which, because it controls a majority of the land in many Far Western states, has an enormous say in land and resource use. “Conservative representatives in the region are often as antagonistic to the federal origins of environmental policies as they are to the policies themselves,” Nie wrote back in 1998. “The question now worth asking…is whether or not these same political representatives will continue to favor local control when such control means environmental protections that are as stringent or even more stringent than those imposed by the federal government.” The answer, thus far, appears to be “yes,” in that Far Western states with the most “green” electorate – Colorado and Nevada – are generally ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of environmental policies while those with fewer environmentalists, like Utah, Idaho, and North Dakota, are at the bottom.
Vital Historical Backstories
Why do these geographical patterns persist over decades and centuries, despite the enormous changes that have taken place? As we’ve seen with the Far West, culture and history play a big role.
The Deep Southern oligarchy, past and present, has sought to build a colonial style extractive economy founded on compliant, low-wage work force, with few taxes or services and a weak regulatory environment that indulges polluters and disempowers public challenges to them. Greater Appalachia’s people have always been suspicious of government authority and regulations, including regulations those protecting the environment. Destruction of natural landscapes and resources is unpopular, but the regional preference for weak (and therefore unthreatening) institutions has made it easy prey for rapacious industrial interests, from mining and timber companies to the slaughterhouses and pig farms owned by external food conglomerates.
White evangelical Christians make up a substantial plurality of the population of both regions – 23.9% in the Deep South and 30.9% in Greater Appalachia – and these religious traditions have turned away from “creation care” since the 1980s. These denominations hold that the Bible is literally true and inerrant and should guide policy choices today. Many pastors look to Genesis 1:28, interpreting its directive that humans “fill the earth and subdue it” as a call to exploit and conquer nature. (Tidewater also shares this religious tradition but, as seen in almost every issue we’ve explored at Nationhood Lab, has undergone a dramatic cultural and ideological transformation over the since the 1970s.) On top of that, a substantial segment of the evangelical right subscribes to Reconstructionism, which can be apathetic about environmental destruction because they believe the End Times are coming, or even pleased about it because it can be seen as a sign it is imminent. “God made the world, and it does not hang in the balance,” declared D. James Kennedy, a leading Deep Southern evangelical pastor and founding member of Moral Majority, in his 2008 book How Would Jesus Vote?, adding it was “human hubris” to think we could alter the atmosphere.
By contrast, the Midlands, Yankeedom, and New Netherland, were for generations dominated by what religious scholars term “Public Protestants,” as opposed to the “Private Protestantism” of the major southern denominations. Public Protestants – northern Baptists, northern Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Unitarians, Dutch Reformed and Congregationalists among them – emphasize the salvation of society and the social gospel. The world, they argue, can and should be improved, and caring for creation often follows from this. Yankeedom’s Puritan founders were an extreme version of this approach, but Penn’s Quakers, Joseph Smith’s Mormons, and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science all shared it. Self-restraint for the common good, a deep Yankee trait, meshed with the goals of the early wildlife and land conservation movements, making Yankeedom and its emissaries in other regions the founders of the environmental movement.
The Catholic Church is also relatively environment-friendly, with a conservation ethic going back to medieval thinkers like St. Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi that has accelerated since the late 1980s. (“Disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa,” Pope Benedict XVI declared in 2007. “It becomes more and more evident that there is an inseparable link between peace with creation and peace among men.”) As we’ve already demonstrated in our examination of immigration patterns, the Great Immigration Wave of 1880-1924 made Catholics the largest denomination in Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, El Norte, and Left Coast – and they still are today — but virtually no Catholics migrated to the Deep South or Greater Appalachia in this era, which is why conservative evangelical Christianity has such sway over these places today.
On top of all this, the Left Coast’s identity has been tied up in the landscape since shortly after colonization. In the San Francisco Bay region, Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and the Olympic Peninsula and Puget Sound regions of Washington State, prominent leaders embraced nature protection in the late 19th century. John Muir’s Sierra Club was spearheaded by a group of Stanford and Berkeley professors, backed by San Francisco’s business community, and led to the creation of Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. Portland’s Mazamas Club, founded by members of Oregon’s elite in 1894, successfully lobbied for the creation of the Cascade Range Forest Reserve and what became Crater Lake National Park. In 1904 their Seattle subsidiary broke off to become The Mountaineers Club, whose members helped create the Mount Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic National Parks. Scholars have described how these groups exemplify a key aspect of the region’s culture: “a nature spirituality that envisions the region as both spiritually and economically productive,” in the words of Arizona State University environmental humanities professor Evan Berry. It’s this ethos Ernest Callenbach drew on in his 1975 science-fiction classic, Ecotopia, which imagined a secessionist nation consisting of Washington, Oregon and Northern California founded on principles of sustainability, self-sufficiency, and environmental justice which itself influenced the environmental movement and Left Coast regional identity. A few years later, visiting Washington Post editor Joel Garreau declared the region to have embraced Callenbach’s vision. “Ecotopia was able to catch the wave when environmental thinking became popular,” Garreau reported in 1981. “This is the first region in North America in which even the middle class has moved on the idea that a person may have to lower his monetarily described standard of living in order to raise his overall quality of life…. In order to be better off you may have to have less money? Less production? Fewer cars? Fewer factories? Smaller farms?” Twenty-first century tech bro culture may have eroded some of those values, but they were values that first became mainstream in Left Coast and it’s there, of all the big regions, they run deepest.
Given these backstories, the real surprise may not be so much that we find regional gaps on climate issues but rather that there is as much consensus as there is.
Thanks to graphics guru John Liberty, data analyst Tova Perlman and the rest of our partners at Motivf for their work on this post, and to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication for their county level estimates.
Colin Woodard, author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and a former global environmental reporter, is the director of Nationhood Lab.
