Publications

Manuscripts in PRep.

Lies, T. S., Omar, S. M., & Adams, G. (In press). Decolonial Considerations of Environmentalism. In B. Barnes, M. Fernandes-Jesus, C. Trott, & G. Barnwell (Eds.). Community Psychologies for Climate Justice. Springer.

Lies, T. S., Omar, S. M., & Adams, G. (2024). Does Environmental Psychology Afford an "Effective Context" for the Study of Structural Racism? Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Lies, T. S., Omar, S. M., Roennengart, A., Adams, G., & Santangelo, B. (2024). Attributing Extreme Weather to Climate Change: State Park Employees as Institutional Actors. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 1–23.

Lies, T. S., Adams, G., & Santangelo, B. (2022). Decolonial Considerations of Environmentalism: Observations from a (US) State Park. Psychology in Society. 64, 21-43

Nagel, J. & Lies, T. S. (2022). Re-Gendering Climate Change: Men and Masculinity in Climate Research, Policy and Practice. Frontiers in Climate. 77.

Nagel, J., Cooper, D. H., Lee, T., & Lies, T. S. (2021). Unmasking the Racial and Gender Politics of the US Pandemic. Peace Review. 33(1), 24-32.

Lies, T. S., Omar, S. M., Schmitt, H. J., & Adams, G. (Invited revision). Conserving Nature, Resisting Change: Political Conservatism and the Evasion of Anti-Systemic Environmentalisms.

Schmitt, H. J & Lies, T. S. (Under review). “What’s our color? Poor!”: Exploring Race & Justice Evasion in Environmental Exposure Frames.

Lies, T. S., Omar, S. M., Morin, H., Russin, E., Roennengart, A. & Adams, G. (In prep). (Hegemonic) Conceptions of Environmentalism: Wilderness Preservation, Ecomodernism, & Racism-evasion.

Lies, T. S. (In prep). Environmental Psychology’s Evasion of Capitalism Hinders its Engagement with the Ecological Crisis.

Miller, J., Lies, T. S., & Crandall, C. (Under review). Tuning Arguments to the Audience: Selecting Justifications to Suit Audience Prejudice.

Primary lines of research

Climate Change Skepticism

Activists and policymakers have long considered how to engage the public with the ecological crisis. One line of my work considers the topic of climate change engagement in the cultural context of U.S. state parks. In contrast to the celebratory view of parks as ideal spaces to inspire climate change engagement, a perspective of cultural psychology informed by decolonial theory posits that prevailing colonial conceptions of nature and environmental engagement might impede this process.

We conducted interviews with park visitors (Lies et al., 2022) and employees (Lies et al., 2024) to explore the implications of this idea for how people make sense of recent extreme weather and its relationship with climate change. In both investigations, most participants reported experience of extreme weather, but few reported experience of climate change or attributed the extreme weather to climate change. This tendency was also racialized: White park visitors (compared to people from historically marginalized groups) and employees in settings with a higher proportion of White residents were less likely to attribute recent extreme weather to climate change. Both investigations also reveal how a cultural emphasis on parks as an escape from the burden of everyday life leaves them ineffective—as currently conceived—to adequately engage the ecological crisis.

Psychology of DEvelopment

My dissertation research explores how modern/colonial ways of being perpetuate environmental injustice. The work focuses on the proposed development initiatives in the area of the Wakarusa Wetlands south of Lawrence, KS.

The Wakarusa Wetlands are of crucial historical and ecological importance. For nearby Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU), the wetlands are a site of resistance: during the operation of the Haskell Institute—a boarding school designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children to Euro-American culture—the wetlands served as a space for children to speak their native languages to family members. The wetlands continue to bear the dark legacy of the boarding school period: community members fear that many children are buried in unmarked sites of the wetlands floodplain.

It is also difficult to overstate the ecological importance of the wetlands which house "over 278 species of birds, 98 other vertebrate species, and 487 plant species." Despite this importance, the wetlands remain under threat of development from a variety of entities including the state of Kansas, Baker University, and other local projects that perpetuate centuries-old legacies of dispossession and environmental injustice.

How popular is support for the development among the general public? What are the cultural psychological forces that propel development? I am to address these questions with my dissertation research. As a first step, I explored support for development among students at the University of Kansas.

Conceptions of Environmentalism

"Environmentalists or conservationists are nice, slightly crazy guys whose main purpose in life is to prevent the disappearance of blue whales or pandas. The common people have more important things to think about, for instance how to get their daily bread…Isn’t the village of Bambamarca truly environmentalist, which has time and again fought valiantly against the pollution of its water from mining?"

– Hugo Blanco (1991), Peruvian activist & writer

Environmental historians and activists note that dominant efforts to address environmental problems tend to reflect and promote the interests of people who live in affluent settings of the Global North to the neglect of environmental justice (EJ).

One line of my work applies this insight to popular conceptions of environmentalism (i.e., what is it?; Lies et al., in prep). We asked Black and White U.S. residents to nominate their conceptions and to what degree various activities associated with various threads of environmentalism (e.g., wilderness preservation, eco-modernism, environmental justice) are and should be the focus of environmentalism. Participants associated environmentalism with global north or "rich" forms of environmentalist action significantly more than they associated environmentalism with environmental or social justice activities. We also observed racialization in the tendency to associate EJ activities with environmentalism: ethnic-racial identification was positively related to an EJ conception among Black participants and was negatively related among White participants.

Another line of work applies this framework to investigate relationships of political ideology with support for policies associated with different threads of environmentalism (Lies, et al., Invited revision). This work finds that the relationship of political ideology was significantly weaker with support for policies associated with Global North or "rich" environmentalism than with policies oriented toward EJ. We also find that this effect is especially apparent among White (compared to Black and Latine) participants.

Psychology for the Ecological Crisis

A primary theoretical contribution of my empirical work is to apply the cultural psychology framework of mutual constitution to understand how concepts of environmentalism, nature, land, and self operate between personal subjectivity and the everyday environment.

This idea coalesces in my work with colleagues to critically engage the core tenets of environmental psychology—that is, the integration of physical space into the study of psychological experience.

Today, environmental psychology represents an unmistakably large site for Western psychological research on the ecological crisis. My research in this area aims to ask whether environmental psychology is well-suited for this task, and how it might better engage it. Thus far, this task has involved considering the extent and character of research on racism in Western environmental psychology (Lies et al., 2024).