Literature Review

Environmental activism plays a vital role in raising awareness of environmental degradation and halting environmentally destructive activities, which is expected to contribute to safeguarding the Earth’s system against climate and biodiversity loss crises. Although the passion and commitment of environmental activists should be acknowledged, several groups of environmental activists are embracing the radical environmentalist movement. They support using illegal actions to achieve their primary goal of environmental protection. The actions perpetrated by radical environmentalist groups are not impulsive but rather part of a deliberately planned and organized following a long-term strategy.

Historically, academic debates on the sustainable development discourse have tended to sideline the influence of religion faith traditions. However, in the last two decades, with the growing instability in the social, economic, and environmental realms of the global economy, there has been intensive search for new paradigms and frameworks to guide human understanding of the interrelationship between human well-being and environmental protection and foster new forms of environmental activism at the ground level. This work intends to contribute to this emerging area of research by presenting how faith traditions can help to provide alternative explanations to deal with contemporary environmental challenges by creating alternative models of production and consumption in society, as well as providing individual motivation for pro-environmental behaviors. The chapters presented in this edited volume weave together the economic, ethical, cultural, and societal dimensions of varied Eastern and Western faith traditions and discusses their applicability to contemporary environmental problems. The work presents three main pathways through which faith-based traditions can help in steering mainstream sustainable development discourses in a new direction – promotion of ethical values, fostering new forms of ecological activism, and inculcating pro-environmental behaviors. The introductory chapter presents an analytical basis for understanding the causes behind sustainability challenges from a faith-based perspective and how these would lead to alternative adaptation and mitigation policies, discussed in the subsequent chapters.

Environmental education in historically White schools of education has typically emphasized science, outdoor, or STEM education rather than environmental racism, environmental (in)justice, or the environmental justice movement. This focus often deemphasizes the role of structural injustice and state-sanctioned violence in environmental issues as well as BIPOC peoples’ environmental activism, thus contributing to the erasure of the long history of BIPOC environmentalisms (D. Taylor, 2009; 2016; Wald et al., 2019). Scholars, however, have begun to address this omission (Haluza-DeLay, 2013). This dissertation contributes to this discussion and extends it by theorizing and presenting a BIPOC storytelling approach for teaching the difficult and traumatic history of environmental racism in the U.S. (Bullard et al., 2008). By examining BIPOC storytelling, specifically campesino ecotheatre—El Teatro Campesino’s Vietnam Campesino (1970) and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994)—as literary case studies (Tiedt, 1992), this dissertation makes visible BIPOC environmentalisms, particularly the environmentalism of the poor. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, the environmentalism of the poor addresses structural injustice and state-sanctioned violence resulting in environmental degradation, adverse health effects, and social inequities in historically marginalized communities often conceptualized as sacrifice zones (Bullard, 2000; Guha & Martinez-Alier, 1997). These dangerously polluted spaces compromise the health and well-being of residents, especially BIPOC children, and interconnect in significant ways with more recent environmental struggles, including climate change. Thus, this work posits that engaging with BIPOC cultural productions representing environmental struggles can help increase awareness of lifeworlds and environmental themes and concepts not fully explored in the science or social science literature. [less]

For several decades, efforts to transform the grammar of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) have proved to be little fruitful, producing at best marginal transformations (Labaree, 2021; Mehta & Datnow, 2020). Today, however, we can observe in many countries that the omnipresent grammar of schooling is at the core of major debates regarding the future of education (Mehta & Datnow, 2020). Two tendencies can explain the rise of attempts to alter the conventional grammar of schooling. First, in the current context characterized by health, economic, ecological and social crises, concerns about our future and future generations have given rise to new educational imaginaries focused on the common good (Mehta, 2021; Taylor, 2017). They disrupt the taken-for-granted grammar of schooling through their particular philosophy, organization, governance structures, curriculum, pedagogy or type of students. Secondly, this tendency is also the result of new institutional pathways at the crossroads of the school institution and social movements, leading to a re-imagining of learning spaces and purposes (Taylor, 2017). As a result, the boundaries of organizations—i.e., what should or shouldn’t be incorporated—are increasingly permeable to issues that go beyond them. Normative references and routines are no longer self-evident, and new partnerships are being created between organizations in order to assume the diversification of their missions (Devos, 2020). One of the most pressing contemporary challenges facing humanity is the preservation of the natural environment and the mitigation of anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s ecosystems. Hence, individual actors and organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of incorporating environmental concerns into their operations and decision-making (Dunlap & Brulle, 2015). As such, a new level of responsibility is required of educators whose job it is to prepare children to meet these profound challenges (Taylor, 2017).

[...]the same year Stone published Trees, the Supreme Court in Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), held that nature does not have standing under the Administrative Procedure Act, signaling a reluctance of federal courts to support this form of legal rights and personhood for nature, despite Trees' notable citation in the dissent. The Ho-Chunk Nations General Council has also approved an amendment to their tribal constitution that would establish that "[ejcosystems, natural communities, and species within the Ho-Chunk Nation territory possess inherent, fundamental, and inalienable rights to naturally exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve," Ho-Chunk Nation Res. 09-15-18C, Proposed Resolution to Amend the Constitution of the Ho-Chunk Nation (2018), but further legal action is required for formal adoption into the Nations Constitution. Since 2006, local municipalities have also enacted rights of nature laws that bestow legal personhood on a number of landscapes, rivers, and animals. Similar to City of Toledo, the court found that the municipal government did not have the power to enact its rights of nature law because Florida's Clean Waterways Act explicitly preempted local rights of nature laws. While laws acknowledging environmental personhood have faced numerous court challenges in the United States, often focusing on the interplay of the powers of federal, tribal, state, and local governments, rights of nature laws have continued to blossom globally in the past 15 years with the advocacy and influence of Indigenous communities.

This presentation will draw on the early results of RE-Green project, a research study funded by a STARS (Supporting Talents in Research Programme of the University of Padua) grant. The research focuses on an under-researched social movement – the international secular Humanists movement – and its pro-environmental activism. Overall, RE-Green considers the contemporary debate about secularization and the Humanist Movement in Western societies and seeks to contribute to it by providing a novel perspective on Humanists’ activism. The project analyses the work of Humanist activist in the public sphere and in the private sphere by combining different theoretical debates and methods within the framework of Institutional Ethnography. The research fieldwork is in three countries (Norway, the UK, and Italy). The project considers the humanist system of meaning, different from that of religions, and humanist ethics, as emergent perspectives useful to reframe citizens’ environmental responsibilities. The project investigates respectively three areas of Humanists’ activism - in the public sphere (the social relations with different institutions), by considering the Humanists’ standpoints concerning the disjunctures between environmental public policies and their everyday needs and their campaigns; - in the private sphere of their families (the social relations with the next generation/s), by analyzing Humanist parents’ everyday practices of socialization of their children to green responsibilities; - toward the future (social relations with the future of the Earth), by collecting the Humanist Parents’ possible definitions of environmental citizenship and responsibilities. RE-Green conducts content analysis of campaigns, qualitative interviews, and diaries with Humanists who are activists, parents and adult children, and participatory action research to collect policy recommendations from Humanist parents and experts. The project aims to advance knowledge useful to designing policy measures attentive to intersectional and intergenerational aspects in pluralistic societies. Research outputs are a database of international and comparative case studies, a series of thematic templates of models of negotiation, and yield training tools for environmental professionals, educators, and communicators. This paper focuses on the early results of RE-Green project by taking into consideration the first sub-project, which focuses on Humanist activism in the public sphere. This sub-project intersects the academic debate concerning the need to strengthen the ties between social movements’ studies and the sociology of social problems, to re-situate social movements in a wider range of collective civic claims-making, and to develop new theoretical perspectives and methods of studying activism. Institutional Ethnography (IE) has still not received the attention it space in this debate even if it responds, theoretically and methodologically, to this need. Institutional Ethnography facilitates the analysis of Humanists environmental activism in the public sphere by deepening discourses and social practices. The IE approach furnishes an understanding of Humanists’ discourses and practices in advocating for environmental citizenship and how institutions (outside and within the Humanist movement itself) shape them. The study is focused on how the interface between the Humanist as individuals, the Humanist Movement as an organization, the family as an institution in contact with other institutions (e.g., the education system) gets organized in terms of the everyday social relations, negotiations and resistances between Humanists, other non-Humanist parents and other people involved in the process of children education. We are interested in advancing understandings of this interface in terms of ‘work’, that is how the ‘work’ of these parents is framed and impacted by institutional discourses and how they actively negotiate and/or resist these discourses. The concept of ‘work’ in Institutional Ethnography does concern everything that do that takes time, effort, and intent. IE adopts this conception of work in exploring the actualities of institutions. It orients the researcher to what people are doing as they participate, in whatever way, in institutional processes. Therefore, this presentation discusses the first draft of the maps that we elaborated on from the fieldwork, which relates to the first sub-project, and it aims to stress the IE notion of work to study environmental activism in this specific social situation. Results are based on a content analysis of texts available online regarding environmental policies related to Humanists’ mobilization (through social media, websites, blogs) and a short fieldwork in each country to participate in one of the environmentalist campaigns promoted by the Humanists movement. The texts of these environmental policies were retrieved online with the support of the Humanist local organizations in each country. Then, we contacted each local organization to join their public campaigns and observe their public activism during a short field trip. We observed how policies as texts rule Humanists public campaigns and how the Humanist movement as organization rules such activism.

Social psychological research on environmental collective action often overlooks the facilitating or hindering impact of a country's context. Governments' institutional attitudes toward environmental issues may have crucial roles in mobilizing environmental activism. To explore how individual and contextual factors interplay for engagement in environmental collective action, we conducted multilevel modelling using data from 12 countries (n = 18,746). While environmental collective action was predicted by higher environmental concern and higher environmental efficacy beliefs, the strength of these relationships was moderated by macro-level contextual variables related to political governance. In countries with more effective environmental policies, the impact of both environmental concern and environmental efficacy beliefs on collective action were much stronger than in the countries with inadequate environmental governance. Moreover, our findings show that environmental concern is less likely to translate into environmental collective action in repressive countries. Findings are discussed within perspectives on community resilience, identity, empowerment, and repression.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Every country has numerous environmental movements that advocate every day for the defense of nature and the preservation of ecosystems, with the understanding that human beings depend on it. The “Environmental justice: reducing the gap between environmental movements and research” symposium has as a GOAL: first, to know about experiences in Latin America, Africa, and Asia regions about environmental justice, then to start to strengthen the relationship between environmental movements and epidemiology. METHOD: The symposium will include five moments: RESULTS: i) “Why does environmental justice matter?” - an analysis of environmental justice and its status worldwide; ii) “Environmental activism in LAC: an inventory” – an inventory of the environmental organizations in LAC to learn about their situation and how they face the socio-environmental conflict in their territories; iii) “Academic research and anti-extractive struggles: Comunalisis – Ecuador” – description about their experience, work on petroleum and mining struggles and examples of participative work in the community. petroleum and mining; iv) “Climate justice and feminism: Women on Farms Project - South Africa” - how to face the consequences of climate change as experience shorter harvest seasons: and v) “Food, Agriculture and Green Energy Education: Homemakers United Foundation – Taiwan” - reducing carbon emissions in their daily lives, green consumption, green diet, green energy, and nuclear-free causes. CONCLUSIONS: Finally, we will open the discussion to the audience with questions and answer section. This symposium proposal is a collaborative work among LAC Executive Committee.

In this paper, we examine how structural and social-psychological factors combine to motivate urban environmental activism. Specifically, we argue that residents’ everyday perceptions about environmental, social, and political conditions in their neighborhoods and cities are connected to their likelihood of involvement in environmental collective action. We use logistic regression models and original survey data from the 2021 Cook County Community Survey (n = 1,069) to investigate whether urban residents’ perceptions of the conditions where they live are associated with their likelihood of participating in protests or public meetings around environmental issues. Our findings show that, in the context of the Chicago metropolitan area, residents who perceive worse environmental conditions in their communities, feel a greater sense of belonging to their neighborhoods, and feel they understand local politics and have political power are more likely to mobilize. In contrast, those who are pessimistic about the future of their neighborhoods are less likely to act. The study suggests that participation in urban environmental collective action is partly explained by how people interpret the daily surroundings they routinely navigate and experience where they live.

As the corporate use of social movement rhetoric in advertising increases, the role of corporate participation in activism gains significance. The present study aims to dissect how clothing companies commodify the ideals of the environmental movement within visual advertising messages. Using methodologies of visual rhetoric and semiotics, it is possible to perceive how themes of the environmental movement are utilized as a corporate advertising strategy to increase profits while shifting the blame for environmental decline onto the consumer. This study centers on five product advertisements posted on social media accounts between August and October of 2022 from major clothing companies: Patagonia, Carhartt, Nike, The North Face, and Levi’s. My analysis reveals the creation and distortion of corporate trust and suggested convergence of corporate and individual activist ideals as advertising strategies to sell products to activist consumers.

This paper explores the gendered politics of care in global environmental activism. Drawing on interviews with 96 Extinction Rebellion activists worldwide and a close analysis of 10 older women within this dataset, we contend that ‘care’ both replicated and contradicted the patriarchal order. Older women in Extinction Rebellion have often been relied upon to take on much of the caring labour involved in the maintenance of the movement at local and national levels. However, care also involved these women undertaking powerful—and empowering—forms of political action, often grounded in their knowledge and experience of organising social justice movements over decades. In contrast to prior research in the area, we found that women's participation in leadership roles within the movement against climate change appears to have increased over time. Using Sara Ahmed's (2004) concept of affective economies, we argue that the emotion of care came to be accumulated and attached to older women within Extinction Rebellion, producing inequalities in expectations for who would ‘care for the movement’ while also opening up opportunities for empowerment.

Some of America's most severe environmental inequalities occur in its cities. This was especially the case in the decades immediately following World War Two, when white flight, deindustrialization and disinvestment, urban renewal and highway construction led a massive increase in particular types of urban environmental issues, especially in the country's older industrial cities. In response, city residents organized a series of highly local, grassroots but robust movements to address immediate harms but also create more just and livable cities. This chapter tells the story of that activism, while also placing it within the context of the longer history of urban environmental activism in the United States, the environmental movement and the emergence of environmental justice activism in the 1980s.