Access for whom? White environmentalism, recreational colonization, and civic recreation racialization

Abstract

This paper interrogates “civic recreation”—a type of collective action found among participants of alternative lifestyle sports, such as mountain biking, surfing, and rock climbing. Although scholarship celebrates civic recreation for fostering resource stewardship and local environmentalism, the literature largely fails to acknowledge that it also perpetuates access to romanticized notions of “wilderness” among the privileged, while marginalizing other social/cultural relationships to nature. We examine how the logic of white environmentalism serves as an orienting framework for much civic recreation, thus extending civic recreation theory to anticipate not only its constructive outcomes, but also the perpetuation of socio-cultural-political marginalization.