“What’s right for the environment is right in every other way”: Environmental Volunteering as a Gateway to Environmental Justice Frameworks
Academic Article
What motivates people to become involved in environmental volunteering and activism? How do environmental volunteers and activists understand the environmental issues to which they are responding? This study considers the case of volunteer water monitors working with a riverkeeper organization in Southeast North Carolina and Northeast South Carolina. This case study, which includes interviews with 10 volunteer water monitors, supports existing findings that volunteers resisted activist self-identities, even as they conducted work that guards against forms of environmental degradation disproportionately harming rural, low-income, minority communities at risk. In this study, it was common for volunteers to frame their work in conservationist or preservationist terms. Generally, volunteers became involved with their local waterkeeper organization not because of a strong attachment to environmental justice (EJ) values, but because it was a form of civic life available to them. However, this study also suggests that sustained participation in environmental volunteering may represent an opportunity to introduce a receptive audience to environmental justice causes, values, and frameworks.
