Destabilizing Environmentalism: Epiphanal Change and the Emergence of Pro-Nuclear Environmentalism

George 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.