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Neoconservative intellectuals – men and women who, in the 1950s and 1960s identified as liberals and leftists – began to move steadily rightward in the 1970s. Transformations within the American environmental movement played a formative role in this process. In the 1960s, future neoconservatives supported environmental protection, but their perception of environmentalism as a radical movement driven by class interests and hostile to capitalism led them to enlist within the ranks of American conservatism. They fashioned an anti-environmental ideology that helped ensure lasting opposition between environmentalists and conservatives in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]