Abstract
This article analyzes how young people in the climate justice movement cultivate a prefigurative culture centered on justice as a response to the threat of climate change. Employing grounded theory and drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 29 youth activists and participant observation in Santa Barbara County, California, the birthplace of both the environmental movement and offshore oil drilling, I argue that four key values—relationships, accessibility, intersectionality, and community—enable movement building, a stated goal of the climate justice movement. These values emerge from interviewees’ words and practices. Drawing on John Foran’s (2014) notion of political cultures of creation, I conceptualize these values and the practices that embody them as constituting a “climate justice culture of creation” that shapes and is shaped by ideas, experiences, social relations, and the reality of a changing atmosphere. These values, and movement building, are about creating alternative futures—cultures that are not dependent on inequality and fossil fuels.
Highlights
This article analyzes how young people in the climate justice movement cultivate a prefigurative culture centered on justice as a response to the threat of climate change
I suggest that youth activists of the climate justice movement in Santa Barbara are responding to climate change by cultivating values, embodied in practices, to build their movement
The climate justice movement is most explicit in this regard (see explicit recognition of climate change in the BLM platform (The Movement for Black Lives 2016)) and its movement building strategies may prove useful to other movements
Summary
“I am optimistic about our generation ...we’ve been criticized a lot...but I think those of us that do care, take that, and want to do something with it. In 2016, The Black Lives Matter Network website read, “We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement”; in February 2019, it reads “We must ensure we are building a movement that brings all of us to the front” (https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/) These movements are often sparked and led by youth organizers, people who will live with climate crisis our entire lives.. 2018 United Nations Climate Summit, which I attended, 350.org organized a variety of justice-oriented events focused on antifracking movements, divestment, youth, and the plight of small island nations. They are well known for coordinating global days of action in which people from literally all over the world participate.
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