Activists and policymakers have long considered how to engage the public with the ecological crisis. One line of my work considers the topic of climate change engagement in the cultural context of U.S. state parks. In contrast to the celebratory view of parks as ideal spaces to inspire climate change engagement, a perspective of cultural psychology informed by decolonial theory posits that prevailing colonial conceptions of nature and environmental engagement might impede this process. 

We conducted interviews with park visitors (Lies et al., 2022) and employees (Lies et al., 2024) to explore the implications of this idea for how people make sense of recent extreme weather and its relationship with climate change. In both investigations, most participants reported experience of extreme weather, but few reported experience of climate change or attributed the extreme weather to climate change. This tendency was also racialized: White park visitors (compared to people from historically marginalized groups) and employees in settings with a higher proportion of White residents were less likely to attribute recent extreme weather to climate change. Both investigations also reveal how a cultural emphasis on parks as an escape from the burden of everyday life leaves them ineffective—as currently conceived—to adequately engage the ecological crisis.

"Environmentalists or conservationists are nice, slightly crazy guys whose main purpose in life is to prevent the disappearance of blue whales or pandas. The common people have more important things to think about, for instance how to get their daily bread…Isn’t the village of Bambamarca truly environmentalist, which has time and again fought valiantly against the pollution of its water from mining?"

–  Hugo Blanco (1991), Peruvian activist & writer

Environmental historians and activists note that dominant efforts to address environmental problems tend to reflect and promote the interests of people who live in affluent settings of the Global North to the neglect of environmental justice (EJ).

One line of my work applies this insight to popular conceptions of environmentalism (i.e., what is it?; Lies et al., in prep). We asked Black and White U.S. residents to nominate their conceptions and to what degree various activities associated with various threads of environmentalism (e.g., wilderness preservation, eco-modernism, environmental justice) are and should be the focus of environmentalism. Participants associated environmentalism with global north or "rich" forms of environmentalist action significantly more than they associated environmentalism with environmental or social justice activities. We also observed racialization in the tendency to associate EJ activities with environmentalism: ethnic-racial identification was positively related to an EJ conception among Black participants and was negatively related among White participants. 

Another line of work applies this framework to investigate relationships of political ideology with support for policies associated with different threads of environmentalism (Lies, et al., Invited revision). This work finds that the relationship of political ideology was significantly weaker with support for policies associated with Global North or "rich" environmentalism than with policies oriented toward EJ. We also find that this effect is especially apparent among White (compared to Black and Latine) participants.