Abstract
To save nature, environmental activists in Taiwan and Japan are willing to change their behavior and society itself, challenging “harmony” in their communities. This paper explores the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions. A wide-encompassing understanding of environmental activism is proposed, based on a tentative typology of different positions regarding environmental sustainability. This paper follows some environmental activists’ journey to moral protest, through semi-structured interviews and participatory observation conducted between 2015 and 2019. It then discusses the results in light of some traditions of thought in Taiwan and Japan. Interviewees often tell about an event in their life that triggered a moral shock and exacerbated their feeling of urgency. Activists’ sense of purpose motivates them to navigate psychological and social obstacles such as social disapproval and exclusion. They also tend to build a “community of activism” through social media to support each other and develop strategies.
Highlights
This paper explores the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions1
Environmental activists primarily change their own behaviors and ways of life, and could be said to reach greater harmony with the world and nature through activism. This bivalence reflects the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions
Despite the partially overlapping narrative of global sustainability, what counts as moral protest and environmental activism take different shapes depending on the localized cultural traditions
Summary
This paper explores the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions. This paper explores the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions1 It presents the results of an exploratory study on environmental activists’ voices and perspectives within their specific sociocultural context in Taiwan and Japan, between 2015 and 2019. This paper scrutinizes the idea that in some sociocultural contexts in Taiwan and Japan, speaking up is discouraged, as it threatens the harmony of the community (Li 2013; Tao et al 2009). In Taiwan and Japan, still today, activists can face high social risks. To support and learn from each other strategies to move from confrontation to commonness, environmental activists often build a “community of activism,” partly through online social networking
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