Abstract
ABSTRACTGeorge Monbiot, the prominent British radical journalist and environmentalist, shocked his readers and contemporaries by responding to the nuclear power station accident at Fukushima in March 2011 by becoming actively supportive of nuclear energy. In this paper we present a discourse analysis of Monbiot's published articles which document this epiphanal transformation in his identity from orthodox to pro-nuclear environmentalist. Using a narrative theoretical approach which draws on Charles Taylor's conceptualization of identity as arising from the telling of (moral) stories, we show how an individual can actively draw on the complexity of existing discourses in a given field to create new discourses and so recreate their own, and potentially others’, identities. Monbiot's story matters because of his role, as an environmental ‘movement intellectual’, in shaping environmental discourse to a greater degree than most individuals, as well as being an example of how any individual can make new sense of even deeply held convictions. We suggest that a new environmentalism is developing, painfully born from and through conflicts within the orthodoxy, embodied in and shaped by the personal struggles of the movement's own intellectuals.
Highlights
On 11 March 2011 the combined effects of a massive tsunami, poor safety design and regulatory capture resulted in a serious accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan (Aoki & Rothwell, 2013)
In the UK—where the government was intent on a new generation of nuclear power stations—one leading commentator made a distinctive shift in the opposite direction
As a movement intellectual this is probably too ambivalent a position to be publicly embraced by Monbiot
Summary
On 11 March 2011 the combined effects of a massive tsunami, poor safety design and regulatory capture resulted in a serious accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan (Aoki & Rothwell, 2013). In the UK—where the government was intent on a new generation of nuclear power stations—one leading commentator made a distinctive shift in the opposite direction. The campaigning environmental journalist George Monbiot announced that the incident in Japan had tipped him over the edge to become pro-nuclear on environmental grounds. ‘Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small,’ while ‘on every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power’ (Going Critical).
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