Smells like clean spirit
BLOG: Climate Confessions
Young teens wearing baggy jeans. Listening to Nirvana. On a Walkman. Have you fallen through a time portal? No. It’s just the latest trend. Could 90s revival culture help people embrace a fossil-free future?
— by Timothy Stacey
I was jealous to hear that, the other week, my Gen Z sister had attended an Oasis revival gig at Wembley Stadium in London. “Why does she get to go?” I found myself asking. “They weren’t a defining part of her youth. I still know all the words to most of their songs.”
But my pettiness aside, my sister's night out speaks to a common trend. From the bands headlining Europe’s biggest festivals, to the most popular TV shows, and the latest fashion trends, 90s culture is back in vogue.
Every generation has its comeback moment, and fashion is famously cyclical. The quintessentially ‘90s baggy jeans were themselves a play on '70s flares. But the era people hark back to speaks to ideals that they want to capture. Could the aspirations of this generation speak to the possibilities of a sustainable future?
There appears to be a yearning for a time before screens and before digitalisation.
The 90s were a time of optimism. It was the end of the Cold War (even of history for some); pre-Islamic terror (the new chapter in history); and pre-global economic crash. The COVID pandemic was a long way off. It was a time when “things can only get better”, as went the D-Ream song that played the UK’s Tony Blair onto stage during his 1997 election campaign. Looking back with historical oversight, the 90s seem closer to the hubristic height of a colonial capitalist empire than a vision of an alternative future.
But when we attend to the trend itself, the 90s appear to be luring people less because of how society in fact was than because of what it had not yet become: the outdoors and face-to-face subsumed by online; mass culture replaced by niche interests; creativity rendered futile by AI.
Just now, there appears to be a yearning for a time before screens and before digitalisation. This is not primitivism. People aren’t necessarily yearning to become migratory hunter-gatherers. It’s not even anti-capitalism or anti-colonialism. It’s just life as we know it, but with ever so slightly less: less screen time; less intrusion from infinite content; less notifications.
Ironically, this is a step further than what many advocates of degrowth are calling for but failing to convince people of. With the drive for economic growth widely acknowledged to be at the root of the climate crisis, degrowthers demand that we urgently find other means of determining societal success. According to Jason Hickel, perhaps its most famous advocate, the point is not to have radically less than we now do but to accept current levels of luxury, only distributed better.
Yet the narrative is not cutting through. While degrowth is receiving increasing attention among academics and left-leaning MPs, it is not convincing a critical mass. Like all of us urging for societal transformation, degrowthers are desperately looking for narratives and images that can convince people that a sustainable future is both desirable and within reach. It’s a hard graft. In the context of people’s aspirations for fossil-fuelled luxuries like big cars and cheap holidays, the sustainability agenda always ends up sounding like self-imposed austerity. It conjures a future of scarcity.
Inklings of alternative futures can already be found in the recent past.
Meanwhile, entirely of their own volition, some of today’s teens are finding for themselves that less is more. Of course, in some sense, this is a small step. Teens wearing Slip Knot Ts is not what is going to save us. Even returning wholesale to 1990s levels of consumption would not be sufficient to meet the ambitious sustainability targets set by the IPCC, IPBES, and UN IRC. But revalorising a recent past in which we recall ourselves as happy may prove crucial to stemming the ever-advancing tide of technology-driven emissions.
The 90s revival reminds us that inklings of alternative futures can already be found in the recent past – often in unexpected trends and among unlikely people. What is particularly hopeful about the 90s is that it is, in terms of both time and practice, just within reach; just within our muscle memory. And it is a hell of a long way from scarcity. Indeed, it was a time when things could only get better.
Climate Confessions is a blog series in which Timothy Stacey reveals the “religious repertoires” associated with sustainability in various sectors. From the myths of great floods that dominate in Dutch politics to the rituals of reconnecting with other humans and the other-than-human found among activists, Tim invites you into the repertoires that lurk beneath the surface, shaping sustainability in an otherwise secular world. For more formal reflections, see Tim’s peer-reviewed research: www.uu.nl/staff/TJStacey/Publications. To discuss how repertoires might transform your practice, get in touch t.j.stacey@uu.nl