Paper short abstract:

Climate activists often employ Romantic tropes, negatively contrasting the light of modernity and industrial society with the darkness of the past and nature. This paper explores new forms of climate activism that seek to build a new culture as the only solution to a profoundly unwell world.

Paper long abstract:

Climate activists often contrast ideas of pristine nature with the corrupting culture of modernity. This paper charts some of the forms of new climate activism that have emerged over the past decade including the school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and Dark Mountain, through a combination of participant observation and interview data. Such movements are largely located in the populous centres of Europe and North America, and focus their critique on the industrial capitalist system generating the prosperity from which they have benefitted. Their activism holds an ambiguous position between complicity and rejection of that system. They negatively contrasted the “light” of modernity and the Enlightenment with the “darkness” of the past. Climate activists, like Romantic thinkers, perceive Enlightenment optimism as created through exclusions that deny all that does not fit within the narrative of progress. New climate activism has emerged over the last decade in the context of unprecedented climatic changes, calling for system change as the only solution to a profoundly unwell world. They perceive their own “Western culture” as corrupted by the capitalist system, and traditional climate activism as too late to accomplish its stated goals. Instead they reframe activism as a revolutionary act, one aimed toward building a new culture. This paper seeks to examine Romantic tropes in new climate activism through engagement with the anthropology of activism, particularly the work of David Graeber. In doing so, the aim is to bring together anthropological visions of living otherwise with activists’ increasingly urgent and disruptive calls for system change.