The Environmentalism Gettysburg Doesn't Talk About

I thought I knew what environmentalism was supposed to look like. Then, driving north through Adams County, I began passing solar arrays. One appeared beyond an orchard; another interrupted a stretch of farms and pickups; then came another.

When I stopped, curiosity got the better of me and I opened the satellite view on my phone. What I had read as isolated installations resolved into a wider patchwork of dark rectangles across the landscape. This did not fit the political map I had carried into Gettysburg.

I arrived with a simple mental map: college towns are liberal, tourism towns are cosmopolitan, and rural Pennsylvania is conservative. Gettysburg is all three landscapes compressed together. Within minutes, a drive can move from battlefield to tourist downtown, from college lawns to orchards, farmland, solar fields, and small towns. The scenery changes faster than the labels we use for the people living inside it.

Then I began noticing the recycling. Not once, but repeatedly: at subsidized housing, ordinary wall-to-wall homes, and a mansion with a heated driveway. In one house, the owner recycled and composted while rejecting much of the politics usually bundled with environmentalism. I caught myself saying "everyone recycles here" and "everyone has solar." Those are perceptions, not statistics. But that is how a field note begins: an outsider notices a pattern that familiarity may have made invisible, then asks whether it holds.

I critique Gettysburg, but I also love it. I was not trying to catch the town in hypocrisy or award it a surprise environmental medal. I genuinely did not understand it. My attention kept drifting away from what residents might call themselves and toward the small systems organizing their days: the pickup schedule, the location of the bins, the zoning line, the ordinary rules that make one behavior easy and another exhausting.

So I opened borough documents to see whether recycling was mandatory. Gettysburg lists solid-waste and recycling compliance beside snow removal, weeds, and property maintenance: the mundane machinery of living together. A 2018 borough newsletter described a hauling contract that preserved broad curbside recycling even while neighboring municipalities narrowed what they accepted. Gettysburg College similarly describes solar panels, dining-waste reduction, and rainwater collection as campus operations. The environmental result is real, but daily participation is procedural: there is a bin, a schedule, a roof, a system.

That search changed my question. I had begun with "Why do conservatives recycle?" But the wording treated ideology as the cause and the behavior as an exception. The more useful question became: When does environmental behavior stop needing an environmental identity?

Research suggests that the label itself can alter a choice. In a 2013 study, Dena Gromet, Howard Kunreuther, and Richard Larrick found that an environmental message could make some politically conservative consumers less likely to select an efficient light bulb. The product had become a badge. Troy Campbell and Aaron Kay call a related pattern "solution aversion": people can become more skeptical of a problem when its familiar solution threatens their values.

Solar without the environmentalist identity

The lesson is not to conceal climate science or manipulate people with euphemisms. It is to stop demanding identity conversion as the price of participation. Lower bills, reliable power, cleaner air, comfort, less waste, and stewardship are genuine parts of the same action. A solar roof can be climate mitigation and "free electricity." A compost pile can reduce emissions and improve soil. More than one honest motivation can lead to the same useful behavior.

Visibility matters too. Rooftop solar advertises its own adoption. Bryan Bollinger and Kenneth Gillingham found that, at the average number of owner-occupied homes in a ZIP Code, one additional installation increased the probability of another adoption by 0.78 percentage points. A neighbor's panels are not just equipment; they are evidence that the technology works here, under familiar conditions. They turn an abstract transition into local precedent.

Norms can move even before a majority has changed. Gregg Sparkman and Gregory Walton found that telling people a behavior was "becoming more common" increased interest in eating less meat and, in one field experiment, doubled meatless orders at a cafe. "Everyone already does this" may be untrue. "More people here are starting to do this" can be both truthful and directional.

But messages cannot carry the whole burden. A blue bin without collection, a bike lane that vanishes at an intersection, or a rebate that requires hours of paperwork asks people to reenact their values every time they act. Infrastructure preserves the behavior on days when conviction is weak, attention is elsewhere, and nobody feels like being a climate hero.

Seat belts show how the layers fit together. Observed U.S. seat-belt use was 59 percent in 1991; NHTSA reports 91.3 percent use in 2025. Cars came with better restraints and reminder chimes. States adopted and enforced laws. Parents modeled buckling up. Recognition of "Click It or Ticket" rose from 35 percent in 2003 to 79 percent in 2007. Communication reinforced a material and legal system until buckling up became the opening ritual of driving.

The questions climate communication should ask

Climate communicators should therefore ask five questions. Is the action easy to repeat? Is it visible enough to become evidence for others? Are its immediate benefits legible without a partisan vocabulary? Do rules, defaults, prices, and feedback reinforce it? And does the language make participation sound like something people around here do, not a performance for a distant political tribe?

Depoliticizing a practice does not mean erasing its cause, ignoring unequal costs, or pretending policy is unnecessary. It means designing climate participation so people do not have to announce a complete worldview before they can enter. The strongest message may be a neighbor's roof, a cart already beside the trash can, or a building standard nobody thinks to debate each morning.

Gettysburg is famous for arguments that could not be avoided. Its quieter lesson is about the arguments we may not need to keep having. I began by driving past solar fields that seemed to contradict the place around them. Now I wonder whether the contradiction was mine. Climate action becomes durable not when every panel reads as a political declaration, but when it is as ordinary as a seat belt or a ZIP Code: useful, expected, built into the system, and almost boring. That is not climate action disappearing. It is what winning looks like.