Abstract
The environmental consumer-citizen has become a global master narrative that is the outcome of environmental discourse (Darier, 1999; Harper, 2001). In this article, we examine a particular strand of the environmental citizen identity in the context of environmental and consumption consciousness. Through interviews with Australian children about themselves, their consumption, and their links to local and larger global communities, we uncover an adapted strand of this narrative. A local transformation of the master narrative on environmental citizenship is seen in the national identity narrative of the ‘ethno-consumer’. This identity narrative is one of the ‘good’ green Australian consumer-citizen constructed in relation to regional political and economic discourses. We uncover how this strand of environmental consciousness is used as identity capital in children’s narratives of self and nation (Hage, 1998). We suggest that there exist several levels of identity narratives. In this particular context, the national identity narrative appears to adapt and accommodate, but also dominate, the global master narrative for these children.
Introduction
In his discussion of national identity, Skey (2013) describes a hierarchy of belonging narratives. In the context of national identity and belonging, he suggests that everyday narrative acts of belonging operate in a bottom-up manner to build a collective sense of national identity and belonging (Skey, 2013: 82). In this article, we use Australian children’s stories of imagined community of national identity to uncover how the national identity narrative works in relation to the global environmental narrative. We uncover the use of global green narratives as a cultural resource that bolsters national identity. We also see how the national borrows from the global narrative in creating a new(er) imagined national identity.
Harper (2001: 101) suggests that the environment (and environmentalism) has become a global master narrative, understood by people across the world at an archetypical level, but is translated and reconfigured to fit the particular/unique social, political and economic local settings in which it has identity building purposes. She goes on to argue that whilst this transcultural metanarrative is situated within the borderless imagined community (Anderson, 1991) of global environmentalist citizenry, its translation and articulation are taking place in particular field sites shaped by local discursive strands of identity, politics and place.
This article examines one functional use of the global environmental narrative within the national identity narrative. It develops two central concepts. First, the idea of consumption/environmental consciousness is examined in the Australian context, through the lens of young consumers. Second, the relationship between the global environmental master narrative and a specific national Australian identity narrative is examined. We examine the nuances of the master narrative of environment and consumption and uncover how such a narrative is implicated in an emerging Australian cultural identity narrative, which results in a unique narrative identity position we describe and call the ‘ethno-consumer’.
Implication of consumption in the global master narrative of environmental citizenship
Trentmann (2007) and other scholars suggest that consumption and counter-consumption are significant spaces where consumers carry out their citizenly rights and vote for or against economic/commercial ideas whilst also forging and asserting their individual and collective identity (Shaw et al., 2006; Varman and Belk, 2009). Similarly, Gabriel and Lang (2006: 182) identify the eco-sphere as one consumption context in which such an identity position is increasingly displayed. They cite the magazine ‘The Ecologist’ exhorting their readers ‘to act responsibly, to consume wisely and to think of the “eco-sphere” as one consumes, seek to reintroduce a citizen’s ethic of social responsibility, which goes beyond the consumer’s narrow self-interest countering the ethos of a throw-away society’ (2006: 182).
Moisander and Pesonen (2002) show how this ethical green consumer-citizen has been constructed and often is articulated as a subject of resistance to consumption. Benn (2004) shows that the identity positions of 12- to 19-year-old Danish youth are shaped by their consumership. He identifies the strength of the relationship between what it means to be a consumer and what it means to be a citizen. Benn (2004) illustrates how consumption beliefs and behaviour shape young people’s sense of self. Shaw et al. describe this idea as ‘We assert, therefore, that citizenship and consumption are not divorced concepts, but rather that the importance attributed to consumption in today’s society and the impact of consumption on individuals and the environment means it has become a vehicle within which to exercise citizenship’ (2006: 1054).
Speaking of the interrelatedness of citizenship and consumption, Darier explains how this deployment of environmentality operates and implicates the discursive device of environmental citizenship (Darier, 1996: 594–595) as a particular subject position in that discourse. Thus, increasingly, consumer-citizen identities are being linked to consciousness and awareness of what and how the individual consumes in relation to the environment and as a means of constructing self-identity (Agarwal, 2005).
Situated within this globalised master narrative of environmentalism, the consumer-citizen confronts increasingly complex and conflicting messages. For instance, consumption movements involving fair trade or ecological concerns emphasise the ethical dimensions of consumer obligations (Shiva, 2005) whilst the open markets of the global economy evoke rational consumers to make the most efficient and optimal choices. In turn, the buy local call to consumers runs counter to market efficient, economic rational choices. Researchers widely acknowledge this gap between consumers’ ethical intentions and actual consumption behaviour (Eckhardt et al., 2010). Ultimately, the inherent tensions and anxieties of the consumer-citizen identity have become evident in the ontological angst that environmental consumer-citizenry evokes (Miller and Rose 1997; Rose, 2000). The contradictions of thinking globally and consuming locally are constantly being negotiated by consumers. Consumer identity work is one way in which this inherently conflicted position is reconciled and managed by consumers. As Chatzidakis et al. suggest, ethical and ecological identities are ‘a prevailing politics and collective identity that comes with its own set of requirements and challenges, defining and restricting what constitutes ethical/green consumption and non-consumption choices with much wider nexus’ (2012: 496). These authors as well as Cherrier (2009) point out that whilst the ethical/green consumerism narrative is an important one, it is often only one narrative thread of a far more complexly woven identity narrative.
Building on this, we examine how the ethical ecological consumer narrative is manifested within the identity narratives of young consumers in the Australian context. We explicate how this global narrative of ecological consumption is transformed because of Australia’s particular geographic and historic particularities and is incorporated into a complex narrative of local identity.
Consumer consciousness and Australian youth: ‘I love a sunburnt country …’
In the context of a growing global eco-consciousness, Australia has experienced a surge in the number of people who express concern about the environment. In a Roy Morgan International survey in 2008, 35% of the people surveyed declared the environment to be the most important issue facing the world (ahead of terrorism and economic issues). The alignment of a national identity that is close to the land with newer notions of green values and climate change issues has come easily in Australia. Australian schools have long instilled a sense of the land and landscape in its educational curriculum. Aboriginal spirituality is inextricably linked to the animal spirits of the land and the traditional song lines of land custodianship have been incorporated into the modern-day Australian’s sense of identity. Thus, land and landscape are integral to building the Australian identity in multiple ways. In the poetry of Dorothea Mackellar (‘I love a sunburnt country…’), the prose of Tim Winton and in the films of Peter Weir (Collins and Davis, 2004), the landscape dominates. In defining the lifestyles of the ‘surfie’ culture of the coastal cities, or the outdoorsy image projected abroad, the physical geography of the country is strongly foregrounded.
Payne (2005) illustrates how green-voting Australian parents establish the urban household as a site of eco-pedagogy and a kind of eco-praxis in the classroom by harnessing the household (family) as a supplementary site of practice. Lockwood and Davidson (2010) show how the eco-conscious Australian consumer-citizen is a subject position that is well entrenched in the country. They describe how this is deployed by voicing nature to condition consumers to an eco-centric perspective based on ethical and moral duties of a citizen.
There is market research that suggests that such identification of environmental and ethical concern is expressed by a significant percentage of Australians – national surveys confirm that eco-conscious views are expressed by a good part of the Australian population (Lockwood and Davidson, 2010). This underlying cultural element that landscape and ecology occupies in the national psyche is harnessed by schools, families and Australian popular media to socialise children to being aware of public discourses and ‘global’ narratives of environmentalism. Eco-centric techniques are harnessed to educate a population who are more conscious of how their consumption affects the environment than ever before (Lockwood and Davidson, 2010).
Australia is, however, the second highest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) per capita in the world (Van Loon and Morales, 2009). This paradox of expressed values contradicting behaviour in the identity narrative needs to be explored. We therefore examine these nuances in the identity narratives amongst young consumers to understand how it shapes and influences their cultural identity positions. Further, we uncover the narrative strands around the self, consumption and community amongst Australian children as a means of accessing a particular version of the consumption consciousness narrative and how it helps in the collective identity project of these children.
Children’s narratives
We chose a sample of children, rather than adults, to examine their developing local identity narratives as consumer-citizens. We see this as appropriate because children’s narratives could reveal the way such master narratives are understood in relation to their own identity narratives. Additionally, it is clear that particular consumption consciousness themes are much stronger in this decade and are more systematically incorporated into school curricula than a decade ago (Hicks and Holden, 2007). Thus, we build on the argument that the consumer-citizen is an identity position that is constituted over time. We expect that children would manifest most sharply the ‘symptoms’ of these identification narratives more clearly than adults who grew up during a period where the green and other consumption discourses were not as strongly present in the public discourse.
There is evidence that the narratives around the environment and children’s understandings of this have shifted over time (Hicks and Holden, 2007). Brownlie recommends that the normalisation of the global citizen in the environmental context is to be explicitly stated in curriculum handbooks and systematically taught in schools. Preston (2012) refers to this as normalisation of the sustainability discourse in Australian schools. His study of Australian schoolchildren over a period of 3 years shows that many of them had ‘shifted’ their attitudes in the direction of the more dominant and now-normalised sustainability discourse. Thus, if evidence of such normalisation is manifested in the attitudes of children (consumer-citizens in the making), we should see this in their narratives. Thus, we choose to use a child sample over an adult one.
We analysed data collected from group interviews of children about consumption consciousness, we highlight the threads of identity and citizenry that were manifested in their narratives and reveal how these threads interweave with the global environmentalism narrative and create an integrated young consumer identity. We argue that within the strands of the global metanarrative of environmentalism and counter-consumption exist the possibilities of constructing and adopting particular narrative identity positions, coloured by local economic, political, social values and anxieties.
Methodology
We used the conceptual starting point of consumption/environmental consciousness (defined broadly as recognising and responding to the effects/consequences of consumption especially on the environment) and explored how Australian children understood this idea and related it to the individual, the immediate community and the larger world/society levels. Using 10 group interviews of children in friendship groups (they were invited to come to the interviews in self-selected groups of three) of three each, we examined the narrative threads that emerged from an analysis of the interview data. The interviews were open-ended with early questions merely used to help the children familiarise themselves with the group and setting.
First, the children were asked to draw a picture of the first ‘counter-consumption/environmentally conscious’ activity they engaged in. An open discussion was then initiated by the interviewer around why the children consume what they do, the way it makes them feel, things they will not buy/consume and their feelings about all of these. The interviewer facilitated the group in a discussion of these ideas, allowing the children to move the conversation along. This methodology was chosen so as to examine how these issues may be used to ‘connect’ with other children in a social context underlining the narrative construction of the collective identity (Ricoeur, 1991: 73). We used Ricoeur’s understanding of the narrative identity and in keeping with the methods used by Scourfield et al. (2006) in their study of children and their sense of place. Following this method, the children were moderated in their friendship groups, to speak of the effects of their consumption on three different levels: on the individual, on the community and on the larger world. This was done to facilitate their understanding of the different levels of influence and the interconnectedness between consumption and environmental consequence.
Speaking to the children in small friendship groups helped emphasise the collective construction of meaning that collective narratology assumes. The recognition of this ‘collective’ construction allows us to analyse the narratives as coloured by both the individual and collective understandings, desires and longings of the narrators (Brown, 2006: 741). It preserves the ‘plurivocality’ of the collective narrative and ultimately demonstrates how ‘collective identities are always in a state of becoming, because identity narratives figure in on-going conversations between participants’ (Brown, 2006: 744).
Recruitment
Children were recruited through an accredited and reputed social research firm, from a research panel they maintain. All adults in the panel were contacted by email with an invitation to volunteer their 7- to 16-year-old children for the study. The children were all from the greater Sydney area from different suburbs and different socio-economic backgrounds. Once the consent of the parents and the children was obtained, the children were invited in groups of 3 (10 groups of 3 children each = 30 total sample) to participate in interviews involving a discussion on ‘Myself, Society and How I Consume’. The interviews were audiotaped. Children of this age and cognitive development group were chosen to ensure that the rather ‘abstract’ ideas of self and society would be understood (Inhelder and Piaget [1958]1999; McAdams and McLean, 2013).
Analysis
In the analysis of the interviews, we used McAdams and McLean’s (2013) ideas about an integrative narrative. They suggest that the collective narrative develops as people tell stories to and with others. The individual tells stories in relation to the others in a collective sense, and in voicing the individual narrative, the narrator develops a broader and more integrative sense of self in relation to the collective. The individual narrative is edited, reinterpreted, integrated and interwoven into the collective narrative to make meaning of this imagined community and its collective identity. We also use the idea of ‘small stories’ or ‘petit recits’ to explain the children’s narratives of environmentalism (Lyotard, 1984). These individual, everyday narratives of ordinary people, were used as a counterpoint to the master narrative.
Keeping this in mind, the two authors used a thematic coding of the interviews. Working independently, we used a process of open coding before consolidating the themes, after discussing themes together on which there was no consensus. Each ‘negative case’ was further analysed in an attempt to understand why they were different. Our analyses worked towards finding and describing the following: a contextualised understanding of the children’s conceptions of environmentalism and of their consumption identities thus dialectically and collectively constructed, themes of citizenship intertwined with particular themes of awareness of consumption and environmentalism, and evidence of the metanarrative of environmentalism itself in the children’s own small stories.
Narrative themes
The children who participated in our study articulated a strong and consistent narrative of environmental consciousness. This echoes Preston’s (2012) findings that environmentalism has been normalised, which is apparent in children’s responses. An understanding of the link between excessive consumption and environmental degradation was also clearly made. Thus, many of their discussions centred on their everyday practices that they saw as being environmentally conscious. Consumption was linked very strongly to environmental destruction in a general and abstract way (i.e. ‘more factories = more pollution = global warming’ types of associations). However, whilst most felt that Australians ‘buy and use too much’, most were unable to connect their individual consumption to this concept (e.g. factories = pollution = global warming). More importantly, several identity related threads emerged, which are discussed further in the following sections.
‘Textbook’ greenness: talking the talk
Almost all the children could describe behaviours that were green: switching off lights, not letting the water tap run when brushing teeth, sorting the rubbish and helping to plant trees at school or in the local community. However, their ability to link environmental consequences to individual consumption was not as strongly seen. Taking ‘green bags’ to the shop so as to avoid using plastic bags or carrying reusable lunch containers to school were examples commonly described. They readily agreed that they perhaps bought a lot of ‘stuff’ that they did not need. It was quite clear that they were conversant in appropriate ‘everyday’ green behaviour. They pointed to ‘society and environment’ courses in school and green initiatives in schools as well as parental and local community initiatives such as ‘clean up Australia day’ as being key sources of learning about such awareness.
Most explained that they learned to engage in such practices from their parents, siblings and peers. The Internet and in particular YouTube were mentioned consistently as sources of environmental and ethical consumption information, as were popular media sources such as television (TV) shows and documentaries. This data show how the master narrative of environmentalism has permeated school and media sources that influence the children’s understanding of consumption consciousness and their identity of being a ‘good green’ citizen, which manifests as an almost textbook description and understanding in the children’s narratives.
In this sense, our analysis shows similar themes as Preston (2012) who concluded that children ‘talk the green talk’ rather more than they ‘walk the green walk’. Thus, it is clear that this training for environmental citizenship (Darier, 1996; Preston, 2012) has been working, with children displaying textbook-like accounts of what they should do for the environment. However, an in-depth understanding of the ‘connectedness’ or chain of consumption was not as clearly evidenced. We interpret this theme as representing a green socialisation narrative skein within the larger identity narrative the children articulated. Shankar et al. identify this kind of socialisation in their Bourdieuan analysis of the role of music in the life narratives of men in the United Kingdom as follows: ‘We are all socialised into the world partly through the narratives of our family, class and culture. These stories provide us with archetypical ways of being and doing…they are models. But these remain theoretical constructs until they are reproduced in practice by people actually being and doing…this happens across time and space …’ (2009: 80). Thus, this part of the children’s narratives can be understood as a socialisation to greenness, which is not translated into everyday practice.
The children’s understanding of their consumption choices on their immediate microlocal context is clear in their narratives (e.g. ‘we need to be careful and not throw rubbish in the backyard, school or park because the plastic could harm the birds’). Their consumption behaviour and its effects at a national or country level is also clearly understood (e.g. ‘Forests in Tasmania are being cut down for paper in Sydney that is making the Tasmanian devil die out’). They understood quite clearly that too many factories meant global consequences in terms of pollution, but how this may be linked to individual consumption was not clearly made. There clearly was a socialisation to the green consumer-citizen cultural narrative as suggested by Shankar et al. (2009), but it is unclear if these models were being reproduced yet amongst these children.
The imagined community of ‘the bush’ helping the construction of the ‘good’ green Australian consumer-citizen
‘Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities’ (Anderson, 1991: 133). In this data, we see an illustration of Anderson’s ideas about imagined community. This imagined community is not so much the transcultural borderless community of environmental citizens as Harper’s (2001) master narrative thesis suggests, but a more (local) national imagining. The national (local) narrative of the green Australian consumer-citizen is seen as being adopted in opposition to a more globalising narrative that Harper describes.
In our current data, we see a resistance from the bottom-up (Skey, 2013) to the global master narratives of world environmental citizenship, articulated through a nationalistic and local green Australian identity constructed in relation to political and economic discourses of threat from nations in the region. China and the Asian ‘threat’ to a western identity have always historically been problematic for the Anglo-Celtic Australian identity (Hage, 1998). The complexity of this identity position is seen clearly in the contradiction of the truth and fabrication (Beckett, 2012) that is articulated in the children’s conversations about Australia’s role as the good green citizen of the world and contrasted with that of the ‘big bad’ Chinese polluter.
The paradoxes of this identity are negotiated and narrated by the older children in a more sophisticated manner than younger children, selectively using information in popular media (note: we mention this ‘YouTube effect’ as it was clearly and consistently cited by the children as a source of a lot of information/misinformation on environmental issues). The main theme consistently occurring in the narratives is that Australia is an environmentally responsible citizen of the world. Little is seen about its status as the second highest per capita emitter of CO2 in the world after the United States (Van Loon and Morales, 2009).
Our analyses uncovered a very strongly articulated thread of local and nationalistic identity expressed in environmental and counter-consumption terms. In relating their consumption to that of Australian society, the children were (with one exception) convinced that Australia as a nation was greener than other nations. All but one child believed that Australia was ‘better’ than countries such as China, Africa or Asia. Every single group of children mentioned China’s poor record on the environment. However, amongst the younger children (7–12 years) most could find reasons why this may be the case. One said, ‘In places like Africa, there are poor people who throw rubbish on the ground’. In another group, Africa was mentioned in a thread that first suggested that Africans were environmentally conscious because they use trees to make their homes. This was countered by another child (8-year-old boy) who corrected this perception: ‘(Australians) are much better than Africans because they don’t have proper homes, they have homes made out of trees and stuff, which is bad for the environment’. Then M (another 8-year-old boy) interjected with ‘that’s how the environment cares for them, so that they will care back to the environment’. B (8-year-old boy) added, ‘but we are better than the Americans, because they litter a lot and eat too much’. Yet another child in a group of 9- to 10-year-old girls categorically stated that ‘Australia is definitely more environmentally friendly than China and USA’.
Amongst the older children (12- to 16-year-olds), a very similar picture emerges. This group also held strong beliefs that Australia is ‘greener’ than most other countries. Only one boy challenged this almost unanimous belief. For example, amongst a group of 14- to 16-year-old girls, one suggested that: We’re getting there, Australia’s going green, we have Earth hour. Better than Beijing which is so polluted it’s obscene! But worse than in some places in Europe, because we’re built up, and places like Sweden are better because they get their electricity from nuclear sources, but we use coal.
In another group of 13-year-old girls a similar theme emerged: Australia is one of the better countries, we make an effort; Americans just slob around. We are more educated about the subject and doing a great deal to help other countries. In China they have massive air pollution – for the Beijing Olympics, they had to stop the traffic to try and clean up the air. We don’t have stuff like that in Australia.
In a third group of 13- to 15-year-olds, the theme was repeated: (Australians) are more environmentally friendly. Just went to Europe and they were all smoking! But it depends – Canada and Switzerland would be better. They just sound eco-friendly. Asia is worse because there’s so many people crammed into a little space.
In the final group of 14- to 16-year-old boys, the discussion about Australia’s greenness began in quite the same way, but was challenged by one of the group, to set the record right on Australia’s place as one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world. This was the only time the misinformation was challenged explicitly. This ‘us’ and ‘them’ nature of this description is also quite apparent in the ‘don’t think many Aussies would do that’ and ‘they…have no moral responsibility’ statements. The China ‘othering’ is quite explicit. At Philip Island, Asians chucked rubbish where little penguins were; don’t think many Australians would do that. Yeah they were trying to hit them [penguins] and all the Aussies told them off and said go back to China. Some Chinese are environmentally friendly, but [the] majority aren’t. They aren’t educated on the topic and have no moral responsibility.
Here, the third boy interjects with a particularly self-reflexive analysis that reveals a consciousness of the national myth of green identity, which the others appear to accept unquestioningly. But we [Australia] emit heaps of pollution, top or second in [the] world, so we’re not good. The general culture might be a bit better. Parts of Asia are crowded and [there’s] no self-query about chopping down the last bit of forest, but when you watch an Australian show or movie they have references to “the bush”. Not many Australians would go and have alone time in the bush, but it’s a culture thing. Feels like Australia should be known for taking care of the environment and animals – we’re proud of it but we don’t actually do anything to keep it going.… build big houses, don’t think of solar panels, they’d rather have big plasma TVs they can show off.… if they didn’t put in the pool they’d be able to afford the solar panels!
In this particular thread, the majority narrative of the nationalistic green environmentalist is clearly apparent. Here, unlike the examples offered by Moisander and Pesonen (2002) of the marginalised and counter-mainstream ethos, the green nationalistic narrative is seen to have become the mainstream truth in the collective narrative. The green identity is almost a false consciousness, where what used to be a marginalised discourse has been co-opted into the mainstream.
The only real counter-narrative is the final voice that speaks from the margins, pointing to the Australian relationship to the bush as an abstract and a culture thing. In this particular voice, there is a very clear recognition of the national imagined community of the Australian green consumer (Anderson, 1991; Harper, 2001) and the understanding that this imagined community does not really have a basis in practiced reality, as is clearly seen in the following excerpt: … but when you watch an Australian show or movie they have references to “the bush”. Not many Australians would go and have alone time in the bush, but it’s a culture thing. Feels like Australia should be known for taking care of the environment and animals – we’re proud of it but we don’t actually do anything to keep it going.
This recognition of the imagined community of the ‘Australian bush’ is an acknowledgement of its constructed existence and its influence on the Australian sense of identity. However, this was the single case of such reflexive understanding of the role of this imagined community in their own identities. However, this imagined community is one of a green national identity, not the global community that Harper’s (2001) describes. She depicts the master narrative of environmentalism as being borderless and transcultural. This is not apparent in these narratives. What is much clearer is that the master narrative has been domesticated to the purpose of constructing a national(istic) narrative of the ‘green Australian’.
Constructing the ‘other’ in an nationalistic identity narrative
Amongst the younger children, a sense of other was clearly seen. China as the world’s producer was clearly understood by all of the children. The influence of popular media in building the discourse around China became quite clear when one 9-year-old explained Saw on news how there was a really bad flu in China, then on an episode of Simpsons, Homer bought a juice maker from China and he caught the flu and everyone in Springfield did as well. So you should be aware of what’s happening in other countries before you buy something.
The confusion about the sources of information of the real/TV world is clear. However, the othering of China is manifest even in these younger children’s narratives of national identity. Amongst the older children, this sense of the ‘Chinese other’ was even stronger. One 15-year-old suggested that he Would prefer to buy something from US rather than China, hoping that human rights have been taken into account. I won’t buy fake stuff from sweatshops in China or Vietnam, tend not to buy things from China because their human rights are pathetic and it demeans our economy because it puts the responsibility on someone else.
Another mentioned seeing a ‘video about people in China skinning animals, so won’t use products with fur’. Apart from the single voice who pointed out that the idea of the clean, green Australian bush identity was a constructed ‘imagined’ community, the children seem to accept this construction and allow it to shape their understanding of ‘the other’ imagined communities of Africa, China, Sweden, Switzerland and America: Americans, because they litter a lot and eat too much… Some Chinese are environmentally friendly, but [the] majority aren’t. They aren’t educated on the topic and have no moral responsibility… Canada and Switzerland would be better. They just sound eco-friendly. Asia is worse… Africans because they don’t have proper homes, they have homes made out of trees and stuff, which is bad for the environment… Places like Sweden are better because they get their electricity from nuclear sources.
However, this particular construction of self-identity can only be normalised when the opposite pole is described and categorised. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983: 158) describe it as a normalising judgement that points out one as normal and conforming and another as nonconforming. In this strand, we see that the construction of the green, good citizen is being woven to the Australian national identity, and this is being constructed in comparison and relative to constructions of imagined communities of the other. The success of a particular fabrication (Beckett, 2012) can be seen quite clearly in the children’s statements about other countries and their environmental records.
The construction of China in particular as the other in production/consumption terms makes it easy to focus the national identity construction efforts on one ‘othered’ entity. The consistency with which all of the children mentioned China’s role in pollution, producing too many things, having too many factories and its human rights abuses, whilst making Australia seem favourable exemplifies an almost latent ‘orientalist’ (Said, 1978) and othering. The overt theme is of nationalistic and ethical consumption of the moral consumer. However, the singular focus on China as a source of all bad production articulates the underlying narrative subtext about an Australian fear of the other (especially of the cold war era fear of communism and of last century’s white-only immigration policy) (Hage, 1998). It also speaks to the levels of belonging in terms of national and global identity. This othering is an integral part of building a national identity narrative for as Calhoun clarifies ‘nationalism helps locate an experience of belonging in a world of global flows and fears’ (Calhoun, 2003: 170).
This then, is not so much about environmentalism as a master narrative but an imagined nationalistic community narrative – where ethnicity and a moral consumption are all woven into a complex narrative of an irresponsible/bad producer/global power clearly imagined as the other contrasted against a small/green/economically vulnerable/democratic nation taking a moral stance. This narrative helps create a cohesive, integrative identity of nation and greenness, which is clearly in opposition to and in relation to other imagined national identities within a changing global context.
The ethno-consumer
Hall speaks of narratives of nation as ‘set[s] of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for or represent the shared experiences…which give meaning to the nation’ (1992: 293); and in this data, we see how powerful stories and landscapes are used in that construction of that imagined community. The notion of the ‘environment’ as a key element of the Australian cultural identity narrative has historically existed in Australia. However, we now see new shifts in this collective identity narrative, with a new thread of the ‘global master narrative’ of environmentalism entering and transforming it into a newer national(istic) identity narrative. This phase of the evolving narrative of identity incorporates elements of ethical/moral consumption, environmental superiority and othering, which our analysis has uncovered.
Thus, we do not argue that the Australian green consumer-citizen is a new narrative. Rather, within the more enduring historical cultural narrative of Australia as a nation – long defined by its distinctive landscape, and colonial past (Hage, 1998) – the master narrative of the global eco-citizen is being used as a thread in the nationalistic consumption-conscious narrative of identity. The relationship between the hierarchies of belonging and identity establishes that the national identity narrative is at once the more powerful, subsuming and incorporating the global narrative. Thus, a deep and already existing connection to the landscape is being harnessed to articulate a nationalistic citizen identity of this ethno-consumer in relation to other imagined (inter) national communities. The existing global environmental narrative is being used as a cultural resource (or form of identity capital) articulated in the context of good and bad global environmental citizens, within which the national Australian identity is constructed as a good global eco-consumer or ethno-consumer.
This nationalistic narrative serves a dual purpose. It aligns with the larger geopolitics of the region (big ‘Asian’ China, small ‘Western’ Australia) but also speaks to the particular neo-liberal environmentality that Fletcher (2010) describes as one that accommodates a form of conservation through consumption. Thus, rather than intervening or constraining consumption, this narrative constructs an Australian identity educated about their consumption and the environment, critical about those who produce too much; transferring responsibility about the environment to the producing other and are indeed working within the confines of the free market tenets of late capitalist ideology, that is, they do not ‘escape the market’ (Kozinets, 2002).
In examining the differences in the way this narrated identity is articulated amongst the younger and older children, we can see the change from a general understanding of Australians are good green consumers in younger children to a much more finely detailed articulation by older children. For example, the younger child is clear that Australia is better but offers little detail on the arguments offered, whereas the older child explains ‘we are getting there.… we have Earth hour’. Pasupathi and Wainryb (2010) suggest that older children are able to use storytelling to make meaning in more sophisticated ways, managing contradiction and paradox to make a more coherent and consistent narrative than younger children.
Thus, in this transforming identity narrative, quite in contrast to Jubas’ (2007: 232) suggestion that ‘as a key process in globalization, consumption can frame an exploration of citizenship that is increasingly being questioned as the global and the local challenge the national’, we see the national reasserting itself in relation to the narrative thread of the globalised consumer-citizen as the ethno-consumer. The national identity narrative prevails over the global ‘master narrative’.