Environmental Subjectivities, Young Indonesian Student Engineers: A Story of Hard Choices

This paper responds to the provocation: What stories can we tell with, for and about children, young people and the Anthropocene? The combined narrative of this paper comes from interviews with young Indonesian environmental engineering students who had become committed environmental activists. The story unfolds around their troubles and tensions regarding discourses of technological progress and economic growth that contradict their deep-felt concern for the destruction and exploitation of the natural world. Threaded through this scholarly narrative is Arun Agrawal’s warning that environmental research must pay attention to interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities. Worldwide, environmental engineering degrees remain anchored in the basic premise of engineering itself; applying the principles of science and mathematics to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of humankind – and by corollary, to the generation of profit for the capitalist class. In the case of the ecologically-aware students interviewed in Indonesia, their environmental engineering degree provided a narrowly mechanistic perspective on the natural world. It contradicted their more holistic understandings of nature, and their concern for the long-term cost of environmental destruction and pollution in the globalised risk economy. As they approached graduation, the extractive industries came knocking - offering tempting salaries and careers. The young people were forced to a range of ethical and less-ethical choices. The paper outlines that trajectory of dilemmas.