| Lancaster
Environmental Networks This research involved the environmental movement in Lancaster. As members of various formal groups, activists in loose collectives and participants in occasional actions, this is a movement to which, broadly, we belong. But beyond doing what we would ordinarily anyway be doing, for the last two years we've been carrying out qualitative research within the local movement. Through participant observations, focus groups and individual interviews we've generated vast amounts of data, that we're now in the process of analysing and interpreting. An important motivation behind this research is the belief that, whilst high profile protests have attracted a great deal of academic attention, the more cultural aspects of grassroots environmental politics have been relatively neglected. Yet these cultural aspects are crucial to the search for, and creation of, a socially and ecologically just society. If we are to achieve radical social change and ecological sanity it is clear that many, many more people need to shift their goals, priorities and practices. And, besides engaging in visible political action, environmental activists, in Lancaster as elsewhere, are experimenting with, and pioneering, new forms of living; they are forging, however clumsily and chaotically, some of those new goals, priorities and practices we so desperately need. Through this research, then, our aim is to contribute a little to an understanding of how environmental activists manage to lead different, more sustainable, and better ways of life. Gaining such an understanding might, we hope, be useful to all those who, in many wonderful and varied ways, are currently working to change how we relate to each other and the natural world, and so to build alternative visions. |