Young Environmentalists: Post-Modern Identities or Middle-Class Culture?

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Abstract
The dominance of certain fractions of the ‘new middle class’ within the environmental movement seems beyond dispute. As regards youth, on the other hand, involvement in ‘new social movements’ is often interpreted as part of identity-formation processes typical of the ‘postmodern’ era, where class background allegedly do not have the same impact as before. However, the latter position seems somewhat lacking in empirical foundation. A study of 5,624 Norwegian 13–19 year olds demonstrated that youth with a background in the humanistic-social intermediate strata were particularly over-represented in environmental organizations (EOs) and gave the highest political priority to environmental issues (EIs). Youth whose parents were manual or clerical workers were under-represented in EOs, and they attached less importance to EIs. A similar pattern was discerned in youth choosing academic and vocational subjects respectively, and there was a strong relationship between background class and choice of subjects. Number of books in childhood home (an indicator of cultural assets, itself strongly related to class) was also correlated with environmental orientation. It is suggested that the findings should be interpreted along four dimensions: a cultural polarization between abstraction and production, proximity to production and market, proximity to nature, and cultural dominance vs. subordination.

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