‘I reckon my life will be easy, but my kids will be buggered’: ambivalence in young people's positive perceptions of individual futures and their visions of environmental collapse

Abstract

This article discusses young people's attitudes towards the future in terms of two distinct risks: on the one hand, their perceptions of achieving their ambitions, on the other, their perceptions of the future of the world, particularly in terms of environmental issues. The data are discussed as a disjuncture between these issues where the positive perceptions of the likelihood of achieving ambitions are rarely linked to their pessimistic visions of societal collapse. This is discussed through the lens of social theories about risk, reflexivity, ambivalence and governmentality. It is argued that the ‘experts’ in young people's lives – namely parents, teachers, politicians and media – discursively create a hierarchy of risk that legitimises individual choices about managing one's own life trajectory while delegitimising action towards large scale social issues. Despite considerable awareness of coming environmental problems and frustration over inaction, young people tend to prioritise the management of individual issues that works towards the maintenance of a governmentalised subjectivity. When faced with the ambivalences inherent in a risk society, the reflexive quest for order is governmentalised.

Keywords:

• youth
• risk
• the future
• environmental attitudes
• governmentality
• ambivalence

Notes

1. Actions included under this label range from joining a mass movement to reach IPCC targets by 2050; drastically reducing one's own carbon footprint; or joining grass roots movements like Transition Towns. Further, I would include an array of sociological theories such as ecological modernisation, green capitalism and so forth under this label as well. In this sense, an emancipatory politics in regard to coming environmental issues takes the science on climate change as settled and is taken as a given that climate change is ‘real’, that the problems are induced by human activity, and that there is coming nexus of problems involving climate change, peak oil and food production that requires rapid and substantial action in the very near future to avoid (if it is not too late already). For a detailed overview of this see Urry (2011).

2. Subheading refers to a song by REM, from the album Document (1987).

3. I would like to emphasise here that this is a simplified working example of day-to-day risk calculus where there are many ‘tracks’ in a complex and concurrent interplay between the ‘present centred’ and the ‘future orientated’ (Woodman 2011).