Overcoming the ‘greenlash’

A central — perhaps the central — challenge confronting political leaders and economic change makers in all our democracies is the need for society-wide actions to minimise the effects of climate change, and to tackle its root cause: the reliance of societies and economies on fossil fuels. In the US, UK, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe,1 a broad majority of the public wants to see action to address and reverse the impacts of climate change — a public that also believes that going green and ameliorating climate change can be a source of new jobs that can reinvigorate rural areas suffering from loss of young people. Yet in all our countries, leaders seeking to lead the ‘green’ or ‘great’ transformation (as it is referred to in Europe) confront, and to be successful need to overcome, what many describe as a ‘greenlash’2 — a phenomenon whereby many climate change denying, or just ideologically contrarian, leaders encourage residents to believe that policies and practices to support the green economy transformation are being ‘done to them’ by urban elites, and such policies are injurious to the way of life of rural, industrial and/or extractive region residents. (Examples of this backlash abound across the world, from the UK Conservative Party’s retreat from climate change amelioration3 to German farmers rallying against Berlin’s green policy4 and, perhaps most starkly, in coal mining regions such as West Virginia in the US, where a once strongly Democrat-voting population has moved to the extreme right, blaming Democrats’ environmental policies and a perceived ‘war on coal’ for their economic distress.5) To effectively aid national and local policy makers and practitioners of green economic transformation, the transatlantic Heartland Transformation Network brought together new research on the attitudes towards climate change amelioration efforts of residents of economically still struggling former industrial and rural heartlands, which are often the targets of ‘greenlash’ agitants. As part of this process, the network convened a transatlantic discussion6 with successful practitioners of green transformation from within these regions. The goal of the discussion was to gather new insights to offer other economic change practitioners across our countries on how green economies can and are being developed, with support and buy-in from heartland residents, and in so doing, overcome the ‘greenlash’ and work successfully to revitalise and grow the economies of rural and industrial heartland regions on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a report on those insights.