The Changing U.S. Environmental Movement

Some claim that the U.S. environmental movement is shifting away from a strategy focusing on state regulations and policy changes and shifting toward a strategy focusing on individual change and, in particular, partnerships with businesses. We aim to test whether this is happening, and if it is, we will address the implications of this shift. Using a series of automated text analysis techniques we extracted all of the topics addressed by the environmental movement, and the tactics used, from national and local newspaper data between 1990 and 2014. We are analyzing how attention to different topics has changed over time, what tactics make the news more often and how this is changing over time, and we are testing the correlation between topics and tactics.