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Uncertain futures: young environmental activists narrating crisis and imagining transformation

Emanuele Di Francesco

In 2020, the depths of multi-dimensional crisis facing life on Earth have never been clearer for all to see. The coronavirus pandemic is just one of the latest facets of this multi-dimensional crisis, triggered by a capitalist growth-driven economic system which tears through ever-increasing swathes of Earth’s ecosystems and habitats in service of profit and wealth for the ultra-rich.

This same system is at the root of existentially threatening ecological breakdown, recent symptoms of which have included wildfires in Brazil, Australia and the US and the acceleration of Arctic ice melt at a rate faster than even climate scientists had expected. At the same time, Indigenous peoples and their lands continue to be violated to make way for the extractive infrastructures of fossil capital, civilians in Yemen and elsewhere are bombed from above, refugees flee across the Mediterranean on crowded dinghies, and Black people are murdered in broad daylight by the police.

From crisis to transformation

In this tumultuous era of crisis, it can become very difficult to envisage the possibility of more just futures. At the same time, it is often stated by scholars and activists that crises represent opportunities for fundamental change, as they are moments when the existing social order is at its most vulnerable and unstable. A term which is becoming increasingly popular amongst researchers to refer to such types of fundamental change capable of addressing interconnected ecological and social crises, is transformation. Transformation would involve comprehensive changes to economic systems, political institutions, everyday lifestyles, cultures and a whole range of other components which make up society. More and more people are seeing this scale and depth of change as necessary to pave a way out of multi-dimensional crisis.


“In this tumultuous era of crisis, it can become very difficult to envisage the possibility of more just futures”


In relation to ecological crisis, for example, we have witnessed how more reformist discourses such as sustainable development have merely served to perpetuate and ‘greenwash’ the status quo of growth-driven capitalism and neoliberal development paradigms. While many states in the global North may point to a relative decoupling of their GDP from carbon emissions over recent years as evidence of successes, this is an accounting trick which relies on practices such as exporting high-polluting production processes to countries of the global South where Northern-based corporations can exploit cheap labour. Ideas of transformation, by contrast, seek to address the roots of interconnected ecological and social crises, rather than simply alleviating certain symptoms or giving the appearance of doing so by shifting them around geographically and institutionally.

The role of the imagination

As we become increasingly aware of the depths of multi-dimensional crisis then, the need for transformation likewise becomes more starkly visible. However, for many of us it is difficult to envisage what a just and sustainable society could look like and how we might navigate there from our current condition of capitalist catastrophism. The role of the imagination in changing society has long been a subject of interest amongst scholars. In 1975, the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argued that a ‘radical imaginary’ is at the root of all social realities, which are created through the implementation of ‘imaginary significations’. By significations, Castoriadis essentially refers to the sets of subjective ideals which are held by different individuals and societies.

More recently, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish – sociologists based in Canada – have delineated the radical imagination as a means of generating dynamic visions which can guide and inspire action towards alternative futures. They see the tasks of the radical imagination as identifying what is (the current society and multi-dimensional crisis), describing this as a result of what was (roots of the current society and crises) and exploring what might be (desired alternative futures). Similarly to Castoriadis, Haiven and Khasnabish therefore see the radical imagination as vital to movements for progressive and radical change.


“Radical imagination as vital to movements for progressive and radical change”


Over the last few years I have been conducting research into imaginaries of crisis and transformation amongst young environmental activists. Within this time period, there has been a noticeable spike in environmental movement mobilisations, which have in many places been led by younger people. Scholars have suggested that the increasing salience of environmental issues amongst younger people may result from their growing up with easy access to in-depth knowledge of environmental problems, as well as a sense that their generations will be faced with the threat of ecological collapse.

While it is clear that a substantial segment of younger generations have identified our current societal trajectory as one headed towards catastrophe, I have been interested in the question of just how exactly young environmental activists understand contemporary crisis and what kind of alternative futures they desire. Accordingly, my research follows an understanding of the radical imagination similar to that outlined by Haiven and Khasnabish, investigating how environmental activists narrate what is (as a result of what was), and what might be.

To explore these questions, I conducted research with young environmental activists (aged 16-28) in the North East of England, from my position as someone pre-embedded in this social constituency. I spoke to individuals representative of a range of environmental actions present in the region, in terms of both issue focuses (e.g. climate justice, plastics/waste, food, conservation) and collective organisational forms (e.g. student groups, community campaigns, protest movements, direct action).

Climate collapse or climate justice

Beginning with narratives of crisis (or what is), my research reaffirmed the claim that young people are being mobilised to engage in environmental activism based on a sense that global ecological collapse is a real possibility within their lifetimes. Warnings of collapse have always played a role in environmentalist narratives, but seem to have reached another peak, as epitomised by recent popular environmental texts such as David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.

Notably, narratives of ecological crisis (and collapse) amongst environmentalists I spoke to were dominated by concerns in the domain of climate and rising global temperatures, while dimensions of crisis such as biodiversity loss and species extinction, degradation of marine ecosystems and soil, and deforestation received very little - if any - attention. This focus on climate seems to be coupled with the prominence of a human-centred environmental ethics, which sees climate breakdown as the foremost threat to human welfare and existence. Importantly, however, activists recognised vastly diverging degrees of threat facing different sections of the global population. It was stressed frequently that people in poorer countries of the global South will face the worst effects of climate breakdown, while effects on global North populations will escalate less rapidly.

In sum, these narratives of ecological crisis reflect the wide permeation of climate justice as one of the foremost frames for contemporary environmental action. The climate justice frame performs the important work of making explicit the intertwined nature of environmental issues with social inequalities, unveiling the fight against climate breakdown for what it truly must be: a decolonial and global class struggle.


“Unveiling the fight against climate breakdown for what it truly must be: a decolonial and global class struggle”


Having said this, we must also be mindful to what climate justice may leave out of the picture. Namely, it is vital to keep in mind the range of other dimensions of ecological crisis apart from – though intimately connected with – those of climate, which also intersect with existing social inequalities across local and global scales. There is a risk that too universalistic a focus on climate to the exclusion of other dimensions of ecological crisis may unwittingly lead to a perception that we can simply unplug the current global economy from its power source of fossil fuels and plug it into renewables instead, thus eliminating carbon emissions.

There are many problems with this narrative. Most crucially, it ignores the fact that an infinitely growing economy requires increasing inputs to fuel this growth, in the form of materials, energy and land. While this metabolism of the economy continues to grow, devouring more and more of Earth’s ecosystems and habitats, we cannot meaningfully address either climate or wider ecological crisis.

Uncertain futures and pragmatic hope

Whilst imaginaries of just and sustainable futures were seen by most young environmental activists I spoke to as important in inspiring and guiding action in the present, many admitted difficulties in imagining such alternative futures themselves. It was noted that envisaging a comprehensively different type of society is hard when you have been surrounded your whole life by a culture that says there is no alternative to globalised ‘free-market’ capitalism. Mark Fisher explored this foreclosure of the imagination around alternatives to capitalism through his concept of capitalist realism. Serge Latouche similarly spoke of how the imagination becomes ‘colonised’ by the ideology of capitalist society.

“Envisaging a different type of society is hard when you have been surrounded your whole life by a culture that says there is no alternative to globalised ‘free-market’ capitalism”

 As a result, to the extent that imaginaries of alternative futures were present amongst the activists, they were often vague and constricted. Encapsulating this reality, one participant told me: “I think that’s what makes it a problem: even within myself I’m not fully sure what I think the alternative is…I don’t have a concrete idea as to how we get through this…So it’s quite scary”. Instead, narratives of transformation were dominated by opposition to the current ‘system’. This system was often identified as capitalism, which was most commonly cited as the primary driver of ecological crisis. Some activists went as far as to argue that opposition to the existing system should be the focus of all political energies, and downplayed the importance of developing alternative imaginaries.

There wasn’t an abundance of optimism however around the likelihood of overturning the societal structures which drive ecological crisis, which were viewed as entrenched, and protected by the powerful actors who profit from the status quo. Further, activists envisaged difficulties in building a critical mass of public support for transformation, given that many citizens in countries like the UK themselves buy into consumer capitalist society and are wary of any proposals seen as representing a ‘radical’ diversion. Many activists were left then with what I am calling a pragmatic hope: a resolution that we must continue to mobilise against ecological crisis even though it may seem impossible to envisage a way out, and we have no option but to hold on to the possibility of a just and sustainable future even if we don’t know what it will look like.


“We have no option but to hold on to the possibility of a just and sustainable future even if we don’t know what it will look like”


Imagination beyond opposition

It was clear amongst the young environmental activists I spoke with that ecological crisis was seen as tightly interwoven with social conflicts and inequalities, representing therefore a key terrain on which struggles for both ecological and social justice will play out in the coming years. But while analyses of this multi-dimensional crisis and its roots were well developed, the next step of the radical imagination was a point of tension: activists saw imaginaries of just and sustainable futures as playing an important role in furthering transformations of society, yet often struggled to construct such imaginaries themselves. We must seek then to carve out more time and spaces to stoke the radical imagination of futures beyond ecological crisis. As ecological breakdown accelerates – which seems the only direction in the near future – we will require desperately imaginaries of better futures to generate the hope which can sustain and broaden action in the face of seemingly overwhelming forces.


October 2020

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