Democrats should heed RFK Jr’s call for a more spiritual approach to the environment

There’s not a lot that Robert F Kennedy, Jr., is getting right at the moment. Not only is the former presidential candidate asking the Supreme Court to keep his name on the ballot, the federal government is investigating him for allegedly driving a dead whale’s head across state lines. Not a great look for Kennedy — or for Donald J. Trump, whom Kennedy endorsed for president — though it’s hardly surprising given his recent and equally newsworthy experiences with bears and bikes, brain worms and more. Kennedy has a knack for the outlandish.  

Kennedy did get one thing right recently, however. It was his comment in an interview with Tucker Carlson on how the Democratic Party’s environmental approach has commodified everything, distilling nature down to a numeric value, and that their carbon quantification focus was the wrong one. In contrast, the reason to protect the environment, according to Kennedy, is because there’s a spiritual connection to it, because it connects us to generations past, and because we love our children. 

In sum, use less quantitative reasoning, and more qualitative. Kennedy suggests that “God talks to humans through many vectors,” but nowhere with the kind of “detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation, and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.” Carlson enthusiastically supports this assessment, as well as the overall idea that God talks to us through the birds, fish, leaves and wildlife and that is why we preserve nature.  

Kennedy isn’t wrong on this front. The environmental movement has, of late, largely doubled down on the carbon quantification framing and has lost some of the love and spiritual connection that once guided it. And since the Republicans’ environmental track record has often centered around concepts like clean air and clean water, the need to conserve and protect, and the religious duty to care for and steward what the creator provided, one can assume that is why Kennedy chose to back Trump. It most aligned with Kennedy’s comments above.  

Yet, despite a historical Republican approach that was more conservationist and religionist in nature, that’s now being ditched for something far different going forward. Project 2025 and the Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling illustrate clearly how nature will get an areligious pummeling by Republican Party politicos and appointed judges — a far cry from the Roosevelt Republicanism that helped drive the conservation movement under President Theodore Roosevelt. 

Democrats would do well, then, to heed Kennedy’s comments and balance all of that carbon accounting with some spiritual connection, creation care and love for the divine. Especially if they want to pick up independent voters, undecided voters or voters who didn’t follow Kennedy when he endorsed Trump.  

That doesn’t mean Democrats need to drop the carbon focus. It just means that Democrats and their environmental backers can lead with more emotion to balance the carbon math, more spiritual connection to balance the carbon accounting and more divination to balance the decarbonization.  

Instead of leading with carbon neutral this and net zero that, Democrats can lead with a vision of something more relational and inspirational. Instead of leading with embodied carbon this and sequestered that, Democrats can tell stories that convey and capture wonder, not data. Instead of leading with numerical carbon targets and timelines, Democrats can talk about nature in ways that actually connect with Americans.  

All of this is possible, and Kennedy is not off the mark to mention it; voters want it. And while no party should lay claim to environmentalism — as the clean-up job is too big for one party to be the primary planet protector — Democrats and their environmental backers could take a lesson or two from Kennedy’s carbon critique and lean into the divine. Because it may just be that which will move the masses. 

Michael Shank, PhD, is adjunct faculty at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and a visiting scholar at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.