Higher environmental risk exposure paradoxically produced less individual worry

Evidence

Hochschild provides powerful evidence of the severe risk exposures experienced by Louisianans—most devastatingly, environmental risks deriving from the unregulated activity of the oil and petrochemical industries operating in the state. These are real, materially felt risks, affecting hundreds of state inhabitants who experienced (among other forms of insecurity and precarity) ill health and dramatic increases in rates of cancer during the 2010s. 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

• XREF: The paradox of fatalistic risk acceptance parallels the Shakespearian ‘a lot of the risk’ stoic vernaculars and Milgrom’s cooperative equilibria under high discounting — shared dynamics of risk normalization. — connects to: Knowledge of environmental harm breeds despair, not action — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1202
• DEEPTHINKING: This single inversion — more risk exposure correlates with less worry — is the pivot for the whole financialized-populism thesis and deserves prolonged sit-with analysis.