Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

During the Soviet era, Soviet scientists were well respected and often included in the policy-making process. Under the new set of post-Soviet circumstances, scientists remain influential but their favored position has decreased insofar as they now operate in an expanded pluralist context in which they must join or compete with emergent local, national and international NGOs and other actors for influence. In this article, we explain this change in terms of a shift from a centralized political economy to a liberal one. A liberal political economy has allowed various groups and institutions, and the public in general, to participate in environmental policy-making. This has diminished the influence of Russian scientists. Highlighting this diminishment, we demonstrate that policy-making under a liberal framework does not always result in greater environmental protection. The article explores the implications of this for Russia and, by extension, other parts of the newly liberalizing world.