Bright Blue and Dark Green: Youth Environmentalism and Paradox in Iceland

• Main Author: Cody Alexander Skahan 2000-
• Other Authors: Háskóli Íslands
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Mannfræði; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/46644

This thesis is the first of its kind to conduct in-depth participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Ungir Umhverfissinnar (UU), the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association (established circa. 2013). As a board member of the organization, I engage very explicitly in engaged/activist anthropology, exploring the difficulties and paradoxes experienced by youth environmentalists in Iceland while reflecting on the difficulties and opportunities I encountered as a youth activist researcher. Drawing on the work of Kristín Loftsdóttir and others in the Nordics on exceptionalism, and Savannah Shange’s (2017) work on progressive dystopias, I develop the notion of Iceland as an environmental progressive dystopia. The reality of Iceland’s environmental action pales in comparison to the harmonious, nature loving “exceptionalist” image the country’s nation branding campaign has constructed to influence both the outsiders looking in at Iceland, but also for the public sphere of Iceland. This image is created by the ideological manipulation of the country’s abundant renewable energy, pioneering work in carbon capture and storage technology, and the idea of Iceland possessing “Europe’s largest untouched wilderness” to construct ignorance over the fact that the country’s emissions are the highest per capita in Europe. To confront these ideological images and to navigate the difficulties of being an activist in a country of less than 400,000 people, UU has adopted a diplomatic and professional approach that scarcely resembles the dominant media and academic representations of the radical youth environmental activist. Seeking to provide valuable contributions to the reflexive activists at the heart of this thesis, I muse openly on how youth in Iceland and around the world who find themselves in these circumstances might think about their activism in regard to how their “socio-technical imaginaries” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) and hopes for the future differ from the sociopolitical system they work within to incite ...