“In my view, climate change is real and it is an existential threat.”

“My inclination is to take dams down.”

“The toxic chemicals that pollute our air, our water, our soils end up in our own bodies. They ruin our health in the same way that they ruin nature.”

Those might sound like comments from a pretty typical environmentalist: a liberal Democrat who probably reveres the outdoors and enjoys hiking, thinks about their carbon footprint, and tries to eat less meat.

Instead, they were spoken by a figure who’s now closely allied to President Donald Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In recent years, when he’s appeared on podcasts and campaign ads, Kennedy — Trump’s pick to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services — often brought up environmental concerns, like how pesticides are poisoning Americans, and sang the virtues of healthy soil. Kennedy is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee for his confirmation hearing on January 29.

“I’m an environmentalist,” he told right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro last April.

Kennedy has the credentials. He spent more than two decades working as an environmental attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a mainstream green group, and later helped found the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for clean water. He fought polluters including the coal industry, chemical companies, and the US Navy.

That’s what makes his current political alignment so surprising: Kennedy is now firmly enmeshed in the far right, and part of Team Trump — “the single worst environmental president our country has ever had,” according to some of Kennedy’s former colleagues. Trump, a climate-science skeptic, rolled back more than 100 environmental rules during his first term. And on his first day in office, he signed a raft of executive orders to boost oil and gas production and roll back environmental safeguards.

Kennedy was a longtime Democrat, and his migration to the far right has shocked many of those who have known him. But he’s not alone in this journey. It’s part of a much broader shift in the environmental movement.

For decades, most mainstream green advocacy groups and top environmental scientists have been largely aligned with Democratic policies and leaders. Now, however, many people who are advocating for conservation, including clean water, air, and soil, have fallen into the far right and voted Trump into power. It’s not uncommon to hear right-wing influencers talk about regenerative agriculture or Kennedy supporters raising concerns about environmental pollutants. While it’s not clear how much power they will ultimately wield in the Trump administration, they represent a new and increasingly visible right-wing environmentalism — or what sociologist Holly Jean Buck has called para-environmentalism.

“Kennedy’s rightward trajectory and new position within the MAGA movement are the latest indication that ideas that were once a core part of environmentalism are veering in a strange direction,” Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, wrote in Compact magazine in November. “Call it para-environmentalism. Like other para-phenomena, such as paramilitaries or the paranormal, para-environmentalism exists outside of the realm of official institutions and structures — at least for now.”

Across even the farthest stretches of the political spectrum are shared environmental goals: healthier land and healthier people. Everyone wants that. What stands in the way of a more unified environmental movement is that different political blocs have wildly different approaches to making the planet healthier. People on the far-right tend to distrust institutions including science agencies and big green groups, which form the backbone of the mainstream environmental movement. Members of this group also oppose action that centers on carbon and climate change; their concerns are more local, whether about water quality or immigration and grocery prices.

This leaves the modern green movement in a tough spot as it stares down four more years under Trump. How can its leaders work with a coalition of people who see them, the mainstream, as part of the problem — and should they?

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Meet the far-right environmentalist

Conserving nature wasn’t always considered at odds with the Republican Party. In fact, the movement to protect wildlife was born from the minds and actions of GOP leaders. More than a century ago, elite, Republican hunters — most famously, Teddy Roosevelt — witnessed the decline of charismatic species like bison and used their power to protect them. They supported, and in some cases helped create, environmental institutions like the national parks system.

That legacy of conservation lives on to an extent in the modern Republican Party. The waning number of hunters and anglers of today still lean more conservative, partly due to their stance on gun rights. And by and large, they back mainstream conservation policies, such as protecting public access to federal land, said Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a group that advocates for public lands. There’s also a crop of moderate conservatives, including many youth, who worry about climate change and support conservation and clean energy.

This new brand of far-right environmentalism that Kennedy embodies is something different. My reporting, including more than a dozen interviews with sociologists, conservative influencers, and mainstream environmentalists, identified two loose and partly overlapping strains. One consists of those who rail against environmental toxins as part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition. Another comprises back-to-the-land libertarians who see salvation in growing one’s own food, maintaining healthy soil, and embracing self-sufficiency.

MAHA environmentalism is rooted in a fear that we’re all being poisoned — that pesticides, food additives, seed oils, and chemicals in the air are the root of chronic illness in America. The perpetrators, they claim, are Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, and other big corporations. A core belief is that industries have infiltrated federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration that should be keeping Americans safe.

Many of the most outspoken MAHA figures promote and sell alternatives to conventional foods and health care, such as nutritional supplements. (MAHA figures including Kennedy also frequently assert that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism. Neither claims are supported by........

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