Piecing Together Multicultural Community: Cultural Differences in Community Building among Grass-Roots Environmentalists

Abstract

This paper draws on a participant-observation study of two grass-roots environmental movements to illuminate difficulties in multicultural alliance building between activists. It focuses on different, taken-forgranted cultural patterns in the ways grass-roots movements create group bonds, and it conceptualizes these patterns as different forms of “movement community.” A “personalized” form of movement community in local U.S. Green movement groups contributed to difficulties in multicultural alliance building. These difficulties arose despite the U.S. Greens' explicit multiculturalist ideology and their validation of the “environmental justice” ideology upheld by some activists of color. The paper suggests that U.S. Greens share with other contemporary activists a way of building movement community that places cultural barriers in the path of multicultural alliances. It also suggests that the personalized form of community may be a reasonable, if problematic, response by activists like Greens to difficult cultural predicaments in multicultural alliance building.