Abstract
The initial year of the Trump presidency has produced wrenching disruption in federal environmental policy, practice, and management. This is largely a result of a culture war that has been raging in much of the USA for several decades. Although Trump’s election was not a referendum on environmental protection, it did reflect deep divisions in public attitudes toward federal regulation and elite, science-driven models of policy making. Trump’s reliance on strategic distraction, normalization of bad behavior, and “alternative facts” has kept his base energized, but it has also produced a growing crisis of legitimacy that calls into question the future of both democracy and sustainability.
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Notes
A politics driven by frontier notions of development that are increasingly recognized as unsustainable. It includes Trump’s support for offshore drilling, coal mining, and other forms of nonrenewable resource extraction.
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Hempel, M. AnthropoTrumpism: Trump and the politics of environmental disruption. J Environ Stud Sci 8, 183–188 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0491-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0491-8