https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7400-0164
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ABSTRACT
Some scholars have drawn associations between Australian environmentalism and racism. Others have argued that natural resource management policies go beyond the science in justifying policies that have their real foundation in Australian nationalism. Yet applying semiotic analyses to focus upon such associations can risk obscuring efforts to actively loosen the nature–culture binary. Australia has a unique history of three decades of national environmental youth training programs such as Green Corps and Green Army. This environmental workfare engages a diverse range of actors: from university-qualified scientists to unemployed urban and rural youth. If any workplace culture is likely to generate a naïve environmentalist eco-nationalism, then the pseudo-military setting of national environmental workfare programs would be worthy of close examination. Based upon data collected from participants in Australian environmental workfare programs, this article explores how young workers display critical reflexivity, engaging creatively and ironically, embracing the more obscure Others. While attempting to generate cultural capital, particularly in the field of environmental science, they actively spurn naïve environmentalism. From the midst of the Australian bush, young people are answering Haraway’s call to “make kin in the Chthulucene”.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Dr Terry Leahy for review and theoretical contributions to this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Routledge, 2000); Adrian Franklin, Nature and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2001).
2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
3 Nick McKenzie and Joel Tozer, “Neo-Nazis Go Bush: Grampians Gathering Highlights Rise of Australia’s Far Right,” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 January 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/neo-nazis-go-bush-grampians-gathering-highlights-rise-of-australia-s-far-right-20210127-p56xbf.html.
4 Phil Macnaghten and John Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage, 1998).
5 See Klaus Eder, The Social Construction of Nature (London: Sage, 1996); John Hannigan, Environmental Sociology, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006).
6 Marcia Langton, “What Do We Mean by Wilderness? Wilderness and Terra Nullius in Australian Art,” The Sydney Papers 8, no. 1 (1996): 11–31.
7 Hage, White Nation.
8 Adrian Franklin, “An Improper Nature? Introduced Animals and ‘Species Cleansing’ in Australia,” in Human and Other Animals: Critical Perspectives, ed. B. Carter and N. Charles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 195–216.
9 Franklin, Nature and Social Theory, 110.
10 Peter Ferguson, “Anti-environmentalism and the Australian Culture War,” Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 3 (2009): 289–304.
11 “Workfare” often refers to alternative means of providing welfare payments to unemployed people in exchange for work services. In this context, I have chosen the term “environmental workfare” to describe a series of environmental programs with certain similarities in that some participants may be participating under threat of withdrawal of welfare. However, other participants in these programs may not necessarily be unemployed or underemployed and may have selected these programs as a vocational choice. Adding to the ambiguity throughout these programs, participants have been labelled by government variously as “trainees”, “workers”, “volunteers” and “participants”. Generally, participants in these programs have been provided better conditions than welfare payments without some benefits of full employment. For these reasons, “environmental workfare” provides the most suitable collective term for these programs.
12 The Coalition’s Policy for a Green Army, authorised and printed by Brian Loughnane (Barton, ACT: Liberal National Coalition, July 2013), 4, www.realsolutions.org.au (accessed 15 December 2015).
13 Joan Beaumont, “Commemoration in Australia: A Memory Orgy?,” Australian Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2015): 536–44.
14 See Nathan Church, “The Centenary of Anzac: Budget Review 2015–16 Index,” Parliament of Australia, May 2015, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/BudgetReview201516/Anzac#_ftn6 (accessed 4 August 2022); and Ian McPhedran, “Government Spending More than $8800 for Every Digger Killed during WW1,” news.com.au, 3 September 2015, https://www.news.com.au/national/government-spending-more-than-8800-for-every-digger-killed-during-ww1/news-story/34808367386af87773c8e4326d2a46e8.
15 Senator Fraser Anning, first speech, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Senate, 14 August 2018, 473.
16 Paul Gilding, War: What Is It Good For? WWII Economic Mobilisation: An Analogy for Climate Action (Melbourne: Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, September 2016), http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_1bfd229f6638410f8fcf230e12b1e285.pdf; Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” The New Republic, 15 August 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii; Margaret Klein Salamon, “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement,” The Climate Mobilization, https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/resources/whitepapers/leading-public-emergency-mode/ (accessed 9 February 2020).
17 David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2008).
18 Philip Sutton, “Philip Sutton: What a Climate Emergency Act Could Look Like,” Climate Emergency Declaration, 20 July 2016, https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/what-a-climate-emergency-act-could-look-like/.
19 Jacqui Lambie cited in David Crowe, “Jacqui Lambie Calls for Emergency Services Conscripts to Combat Climate Change,” Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/jacqui-lambie-calls-for-emergency-services-conscripts-to-combat-climate-change-20190914-p52rbe.html.
20 “Concern about Climate Escalates as Bushfire Crisis Continues: Climate of the Nation Polling,” The Australia Institute, 14 January 2020, https://www.tai.org.au/content/concern-about-climate-escalates-bushfire-crisis-continues-climate-nation-polling.
21 Nick Bonyhady, “‘A very hot war’: MP Calls for Teens to Do Civil Service in Disaster Response,” Sydney Morning Herald, 6 January 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-very-hot-war-mp-calls-for-teens-to-do-civil-service-in-disaster-response-20200106-p53p7u.html.
22 Mark Beeson, “The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism,” Environmental Politics 19, no. 2 (2010): 276–94.
23 Hage, White Nation, 165–78.
24 Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
25 Franklin, Nature and Social Theory, 120.
26 See Marco Antonsich, “Natives and Aliens: Who and What Belongs in Nature and in the Nation?,” AREA 53, no. 2 (2020): 303–10; Haylee Kaplan, Vishnu Prahalad, and Dave Kendal, “Native for Whom: A Mixed-Methods Literature Review and Synthesis to Conceptualise Biotic Nativeness for Social Research in the Urban Context,” People and Nature 4, no. 1 (2022): 15–31; Charles R. Warren, “Beyond ‘Native V. Alien’: Critiques of the Native/Alien Paradigm in the Anthropocene, and their Implications,” Ethics, Policy & Environment (2021), https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1080/21550085.2021.1961200.
27 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Florence, UK: Routledge, 2002), 165.
28 Nicholas Smith, “Blood and Soil: Nature, Native and Nation in the Australian Imaginary,” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 1 (2011): 14.
29 Adrian Franklin, “Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Australia: An Overview of Results from the First National Survey and Follow-Up Case Studies 2000–2004,” Society and Animals 15 (2007): 7–27.
30 Franklin, “An Improper Nature?,” 195–216.
31 Franklin, Nature and Social Theory, 110.
32 See Neil Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study, Online Book Held by the United States Parks Service (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ccc/salmond/contents.htm.
33 Anastacia Kurylo, “The Problem of the Insider/Outsider Dichotomy for Researchers,” in Negotiating Group Identity in the Research Process: Are You In or Are You Out? (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 1–64.
34 Peter Kelly has extensively documented this narrative: Peter Kelly, “Youth as an Artefact of Expertise: Problematizing the Practice of Youth Studies in an Age of Uncertainty,” Journal of Youth Studies 3, no. 3 (2000): 301–15; Peter Kelly, “Growing Up as Risky Business? Risks, Surveillance and the Institutionalized Mistrust of Youth,” Journal of Youth Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 165; Peter Kelly, “The Entrepreneurial Self and ‘Youth-at-Risk’: Exploring the Horizons of Identity in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Youth Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 17–32; Peter Kelly, “Governing Individualized Risk Biographies: New Class Intellectuals and the Problem of Youth At-Risk,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 1 (2007): 39.
35 Some examples of the focus on environmental activists rather than workers can be found in Meredian Alam, Pam Nilan, and Terry Leahy, “Learning from Greenpeace: Activist Habitus in a Local Struggle,” Electronic Green Journal 1, no. 42 (2019): 1–18; Linda Connor, “Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia,” Oceania 82, no. 3 (2012): 228–49; Dave Horton, “Green Distinctions: The Performance of Identity among Environmental Activists,” Sociological Review Monograph 52 (2004): 63–77; Pam Nilan and Gregorious Ragil Wibawanto, “‘Becoming’ an Environmentalist in Indonesia,” Geoforum 62 (2015): 61–69; David N. Pellow and Hollie Nyseth Brehm, “From the New Ecological Paradigm to Total Liberation: The Emergence of a Social Movement Frame,” The Sociological Quarterly 56 (2015): 185–212.
36 Ariel Salleh “Green New Deal – or Globalisation Lite,” Arena Magazine 105 (2010): 15–19; International Labour Office, Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2015).
37 Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
38 Michelle Gabriel, “Writing Up Research,” in Social Research Methods, ed. M. Walter (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2006), 343–67.
39 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58.
40 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (New York: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933).
41 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990).
42 Sherene Idriss and Rosalie Atie, “Race in Australia’s Youthful Urban Leisure Scenes,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43, no. 10 (2020): 1854–71.
43 Australian Government, The Green Army Three Year Evaluation, vol. 2017 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), http://www.environment.gov.au/land/green-army/three-year-review (accessed 4 August 2022).
44 Elspeth Probyn, “Everyday Shame,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (2004): 328–49.
45 Michelle M. Jacob et al., “Indigenous Cultural Values Counter the Damages of White Settler Colonialism,” Environmental Sociology 7, no. 2 (2021): 1–13.
46 Macnaghten and Urry, Contested Natures.
47 Hage, White Nation, 177.
48 Franklin, Nature and Social Theory, 110.
49 Franklin, “An Improper Nature?,” 196.
50 Lindsey B. Carfagna et al., “An Emerging Eco-Habitus: The Reconfiguration of High Cultural Practices among Ethical Consumers,” Journal of Consumer Culture 14, no. 2 (2014): 158–78.
51 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Franklin, Nature and Social Theory, 82.
52 See Jacob et al., “Indigenous Cultural Values,” 1–13; Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019).
53 Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, 54–57.
54 Eduardo Kohn, “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–24.
55 Guy Standing, Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
56 Steven Threadgold, “Figures of Youth: On the Very Object of Youth Studies,” Journal of Youth Studies 23, no. 6 (2019): 1–16.