Beyond Climate Strikes: Intersectionality and Environmental Care

Abstract

This chapter aims to contribute to more inclusive and theoretically diverse understandings of young people’s environmental care through two main arguments. First, despite growing research on both young people’s climate activism and their climate concern, a need remains for more comprehensive understandings of young people’s environmental care that draw the two areas together. Second, intersectional analyses of young people’s environmental care stand to make important theoretical contributions to the academic literature on young people’s experiences of and responses to climate change, underpinned by the imperative to challenge environmental racism and other forms of discrimination. To flesh out these arguments, we present research conducted with 40 young people in Manchester, the UK, and Melbourne, Australia, who had primary or secondary experience through older family members of international migration. Most young people were part of racial minorities in the ethnically diverse but majority white cities of Manchester and Melbourne. All young people expressed concerns about the impacts of climate change on people and planet that were scientifically informed and emotionally engaged, and many spoke of undertaking practical activities to care for their environments, raise awareness, or mitigate their future environmental impact. However, very few young people had joined in climate strikes. The chapter presents and discusses the ways that young people related ideas about activism to their aspirations and sense of identity, and considers their reasons for joining or distancing themselves from climate strikes and the School Strike for Climate (SS4C) movement. These considerations support a case for greater intersectional attention to be given to the conditions that frame young people’s decisions about activism, as well as their diverse articulations of environmental care.