A multilevel conception of identity is proposed in this chapter, with individual, social, human, and ecological levels. Emphasis is placed on the nature of the relationships among the different identity positions, with a focus on dialogical flexibility and the distinction between consonant and dissonant dialogues. The risk of over-positioning is analyzed, indicating the one-sided exaggeration of one of the identities, and attention is devoted to the “level confusion” resulting from a lack of distinction between the different levels. An elaborate discussion of the concept of conscience is presented. From a neurological perspective, evidence shows that the natural inclination of bonding and caring puts limitations on our circle of moral regard. Finally, the worldviews of two historical icons, Jane Addams and Andrew Carnegie, are compared in order to demonstrate the value of promoter positions.

Environmental groups are important stakeholders because they strengthen the collective voice of their constituents and because they can enhance company value, such as with environmental partnerships, and harm company value, such as with activist campaigns and boycotts. An effective environmental strategy needs to be tailored for environmental group stakeholders and reflect their own strategic needs. Environmental groups compete to provide collective goods and need their own advantage in acquiring supportive stakeholders. An important challenge in responding to activist campaigns is assessing the campaign’s strengths and negotiating terms for a solution that preserves company values. The case of Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz’s response to a Greenpeace campaign against his company illustrates the information and negotiation challenges in many activist campaigns. Environmental partnerships, in contrast, are an opportunity for a company and its environmental group partner to produce triple bottom line outcomes. Important keys to success are finding synergies in the resources that partners contribute and assuring that each side will follow through on its commitments.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

The most dramatic environmental debate in Norway in the late 1970s was whether to build a hydroelectric dam at the Alta-Kautokeino River. It was a debate the Deep Ecologists lost with a Supreme Court verdict in 1982. The defeat meant an end to Deep Ecology as a movement and an intellectual endeavor in Norway as they became increasingly fundamentalist and thus politically irrelevant. However, at the same time they enjoyed their first international breakthrough in North America, thanks to the environmental organization Earth First! The end of the Cold War in 1989 also meant a turn towards global climatological perspectives. Propelled by the sentiment that capitalism had won over communism, Gro Harlem Brundtland would, as Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, frame the solution to climate change in cost–benefit terms, rather than in socialist terms. Climate change problems were to be solved by treading carbon dioxide equivalent quotas and by buying clean development mechanism certificates. Norway would be an active buyer in these markets, making sure Norway would look like a virtuous “pioneer country” to its own citizens and the world.