Victoria Aquilone on Nancy J. Manring’s *A World of Wounds: Rebuilding a Bipartisan Environmental Movement and Cultivating Authentic Hope*

In January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14162 which effectively withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, an internationally recognized treaty that purposes to address and mitigate the effects of climate change. Interestingly, the US is the only nation to have withdrawn and rejoined the Paris Agreement: the US first joined in 2016 during President Barack Obama’s term, then withdrew in Trump’s first presidency in 2020, then rejoined in 2021 under President Joe Biden, and, as it stands at the writing of this review, President Trump withdrew again early in 2025.[1][2] The back-and-forth nature of the US’s relationship with the Paris Agreement illustrates the clear partisan lines along which environmental policy tends to fall.

But if the plainly-stated goals of the environmental movement seem sensible to anyone walking down the street—clean air, clean water, sustainable food sources, safe and accessible outdoor spaces, and an overall healthy planetary home to pass on to the next generation—why does it seem to be so difficult to enact policy across party lines to achieve these goals?

In her book World of Wounds: Rebuilding a Bipartisan Environmental Movement and Cultivating Authentic Hope, Nancy J. Manring, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Environmental Science and Sustainability Program at Ohio University, attempts to answer this very question.

In the Introduction, Manring highlights that the early years of the environmental movement and legislative activities of the early 1970s exhibited a bipartisan commitment to the basics: clean water, clean air, and endangered species conservation.[3] Manring reports that “By 1989, three-fourths of Americans identified themselves as environmentalists.”[4] However, at the time of writing (2025), Manring reports that only 41% of Americans identify as environmentalists.[5] What changed?

Ultimately, Manring’s line of argumentation across the book is something like this: The dominant social paradigm is a worldview that holds two major assumptions that are ecologically-relevant: (1) that the earth was created to benefit humanity and (2) that the planet’s resources are essentially limitless, especially with the help of technology. The DSP is ultimately responsible for the myriad ecological ills we observe today, but the DSP became threatened when the environmental movement gained real traction in the political sphere. Defenders of the reigning worldview, the DSP, attempt to sustain the DSP by delegitimizing any claims consistent with the new ecological paradigm (NEP)—a paradigm that emerged with the environmental movement and better accounts for ongoing and emerging ecological realities—claims such as the foundational claim of Anthropocene researchers: humans cannot ultimately control nature. In fact, nature is far more complex and agentic than we assume, and as such, is hurtling into destabilization as we speak. Despite observable realities of Anthropogenic effects on nature, in an effort to maintain the DSP, conservatives have engaged targeted political tactics to discredit any information consistent with the NEP, tactics particularly related to delegitimizing climate science. In order to forge ahead in ushering in the NEP, and subsequently, planetary stabilization and sustainability, communicating about ecological issues requires dispute resolution tactics such as identifying shared interests that subvert obstacles erected by conservative actions thus far. That being said, it’s not just communication tactics we need; hope is of incredible import in the efforts to rebuild a bipartisan environmental ethic. In sum, Manring traces the historical unfolding of the environmental movement—from its inception as a bipartisan rallying cry against postwar ecological ills to its unfortunate fracturing along party lines, and she ultimately offers a response that may clear a path forward.

I was particularly struck by the strength of Manring’s Anthropocene chapter; it was well-researched, well-crafted, and deftly navigated the dual necessity of addressing both the breadth and depth of the Anthropocene as a topic in order to keep building her argument. Readers may even use it as a desk reference as it helpfully “glosses” the concept of the Anthropocene as a whole.

Additionally, Manring’s final chapters are worth a close read. By the time I reached the final chapter, I certainly needed a dose of hope, and Manring provided it. And the penultimate chapter on bridging the partisan divide offered tangible, actionable approaches for politicians, lawmakers, and concerned citizens alike to communicate across party lines for more productive outcomes.

Given that Manring generally ends her book noting that average conservative citizens hold little to no blame compared to republican thought leaders and political pundits;[6] and given that Manring casts her book as countering the mainstream “story” of the environmental movement as told by the political right;[7] and, finally, given that I have experience in conservative circles, I’d like to continue this crucial conversation Manring starts by offering a gloss of a potential third “story” of the environmental movement and how it fits into “rebuilding a bipartisan environmental movement.”

To the average conservative, it seems that early actions of the environmental movement such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, etc. had an impact: Manring writes about how executives would bring an extra shirt downtown due to the smog that would be collected on them after a midday outing.[8] This is no longer a common practice, at least in my major metropole. In other words, in many average US cities, pollution is now invisible—and as the story goes, the Clean Air Act worked. In fact, many of the environmental ills we are facing are impossible for the average person to perceive. For example, biodiversity loss and mass extinction may be empirically measurable, but only by rigorously trained scientists with precise instruments and complex mathematical modelling. While the average person may sense that one summer is hotter than another or that there is more snow this winter than in the past, people’s subjective experiences of these phenomena are anecdotal and easily written off as variations of normal rather than the potentially catastrophic deviations that scientists could detect. As Manring notes, “at some point, physical, sensory reality trumps everything.”[9] Then, when politicians come along proposing policies perceived as restrictive or undesired on the basis of complex scientific studies that reveal a catastrophic ecological reality that the average voter cannot detect with their own senses, such policy seems arbitrary. Conservative politicians, the heroes of this plotline, stand in to protect the average person from arbitrary policy; and, as Manring has deftly shown, politicians will do or say just about anything to secure their election. And even if such politicians act deviously to get elected, the oblivious voter is just glad the proposed legislation is off the table.

I do not offer this third story necessarily to endorse it, but to support Manring’s overarching imperative to converse about shared interests rather than entrenched positions. But identifying shared interests requires a tethering to tangible experience. It is my opinion that climate scientists may have the most leverage here to counter the political obstacles erected: if they can figure out how to convey “unseen” reality in such a way that the average person understands that reality to be true—as true as the warmth of the sun on your skin or the chill of the winter in your bones—then the politicians must act according to the truth forfeit their heroic status in this story. At times, scientific experts ask citizens to trust them on the basis of their expertise, and while that may be warranted, it often does little to close the gap between skeptics and the reality of which they need to be convinced. Once the truth is understood, policy that is logically consistent with the truth is more palatable and attractive to voters. This is the front door to Manring’s “back door” of shared interests.[10] I wholeheartedly embrace Manring’s call to pursue the truth as the strongest foundation of hope and a necessary ingredient for renewing trust across party lines—there is no better way to start “Rebuilding a Bipartisan Environmental Movement and Cultivating Authentic Hope.” I look forward to a world where the purveyors of truth—not the distorters—are our universal heroes.

Bibliography

Haskett, Jonathan D. U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement: Process and Potential Effects. Congressional Research Service, April 14, 2025. Accessed June 19, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48504/R48504.1.pdf.

Manring, Nancy J. A World of Wounds: Rebuilding a Bipartisan Environmental Movement and Cultivating Authentic Hope. Stanford University Press, 2025.

Somanader, Tanya. “President Obama: The United States Formally Enters the Paris Agreement.” The White House: President Barack Obama. Last modified September 3, 2016. Accessed June 19, 2026. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/03/president-Obama-United-states-formally-enters-Paris-agreement/.

[1] Jonathan D. Haskett, U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement: Process and Potential Effects (Congressional Research Service, April 14, 2025), 2, accessed June 19, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48504/R48504.1.pdf.

[2] Tanya Somanader, “President Obama: The United States Formally Enters the Paris Agreement,” The White House: President Barack Obama, last modified September 3, 2016, accessed June 19, 2026, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/03/president-Obama-United-states-formally-enters-Paris-agreement/.

[3] Nancy J. Manring, A World of Wounds: Rebuilding a Bipartisan Environmental Movement and Cultivating Authentic Hope (Stanford University Press, 2025), 2.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 3.

[6] Ibid., 160.

[7] Ibid., 7.

[8] Ibid., 160.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 168.