Fighting the enemy within. How environmental activists are getting intimate with capitalism

While the aim of young environmental activists is to free nature from the clutches of the capitalist economy, their day-to-day activities seem invariably caught up in the workings of the system they denounce. Based on a qualitative and quantitative survey carried out among young people involved in climate action, we will see how these activists’ sworn enemy has wormed its way into their relationship with time and their bodies. Building on the existing corpus of ethnographic surveys, we will then examine the toll taken on young environmental activists, forced to become capitalism’s bedfellows, revealing contradictions that are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.