Greater environmental risk exposure correlates with less worry among Louisiana Tea Party voters

Evidence

A key finding of the study is that the community’s engagements with the risks so far described appear to be surprisingly somber, reflecting an acceptance (rather than a questioning) of the growing volatility of their lives as inevitable in the face of broader uncertainties. One of Hochschild’s most poignant insights is that, puzzlingly, the higher the exposure to environmental risks among her informants, “the less worried the individual was about it” (2016, 279). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 281

Categorization

• QUESTION: Hochschild reads this inversion as acceptance of inevitable volatility; whether normalization or another mechanism drives it is worth probing.