Volunteer beach cleanups: civic environmental stewardship combating global plastic pollution Bethany Jorgensen, Marianne Krasny, Juan Baztan To cite this version: Bethany Jorgensen, Marianne Krasny, Juan Baztan. Volunteer beach cleanups: civic environmental stewardship combating global plastic pollution. Sustainability Science, Springer Verlag (Germany), 2020, 1, 10.1007/s11625-020-00841-7. hal-02919775 HAL Id: hal-02919775 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02919775 Submitted on 21 Sep 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Author's personal copy Sustainability Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00841-7 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Volunteer beach cleanups: civic environmental stewardship combating global plastic pollution Bethany Jorgensen1,3 · Marianne Krasny1 · Juan Baztan2,3 Received: 1 December 2019 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Marine litter, the majority of which is plastic, is one of the most pressing global environmental challenges impacting the planet. One way coastal communities respond to this challenge is through the environmental stewardship practice of vol- unteer beach cleanups. Beyond providing temporarily cleaner local beaches, how might these beach cleanups have broader impacts in the global struggle against plastic pollution? Using the lenses of environmental stewardship and civic ecology, we conducted a content analysis of primary source materials created by 50 groups involved in volunteer beach cleanups. We collected data on the scale at which groups coordinate volunteer beach cleanups, the roles they play in conducting these cleanups, how they interact with other volunteer beach cleanup groups, and the other forms of stewardship they conduct, if any. Within our sample, we identifed groups coordinating volunteer beach cleanups at fve geographic scales: local, sub-national, national, multi-national, and global. Within the groups operating at each scale, we found groups conducting environmental stewardship in the forms of education, advocacy, research, and monitoring in addition to their conservation work through beach cleanups. Our fndings demonstrate that groups branch out their impacts by combining diferent forms of environmental stewardship targeting plastic pollution, and they collaborate to scale up their actions in ways that contrib- ute to plastic pollution governance. Connecting these fndings with the literature on the broader impacts of civic ecology practices allows us to theorize how volunteer beach cleanup groups branch out and scale up their eforts to weave a global net of ocean stewardship. Keywords Marine litter · Civic ecology · Beach cleans · Ocean stewardship Introduction Bethany Jorgensen and Juan Baztan: Members of Marine Sciences for Society. Marine litter is one of the most pressing global environ- mental challenges impacting the planet (Galgani et al. 2015; Handled by Graham Epstein, University of Waterloo Faculty of Topçu et al. 2013; Thiel et al. 2013; Barnes et al. 2009). The Environment, Canada. majority of marine litter is plastic (Derraik 2002), whose persistence in the environment, dispersability, misman- Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1162 5-020-00841 -7) contains agement, and increasing production have led to extensive supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. plastic pollution throughout the biosphere (see Baztan et al. 2017; Bergmann et al. 2019; Wagner et al. 2018; Van Sebille * Bethany Jorgensen et al. 2015; Cózar et al. 2014). This includes oceans and [email protected] coastlines (Jambeck et al. 2015; Thompson et al. 2009; Law 1 Civic Ecology Lab, Department of Natural Resources, and Thompson 2014). The scientifc community’s concern Cornell University, 144 East Ave., Ithaca, NY 14853, USA about plastic pollution is refected in the growing number 2 Research Centre of peer-reviewed publications and increasing participation Cultures-Environnements-Arctique-Représentations-Climat in academic conferences (e.g., international MICRO 2018 (CEARC), Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yveli conference on microplastics; Baztan et al. 2016; Baztan et al. nes, UVSQ, 11 Boulevard d’Alembert, 78280 Guyancourt, France 2018). The plastic pollution crisis is also receiving more attention in media (Henderson and Green 2020), government 3 Marine Sciences For Society, Barcelona, Spain Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 Author's personal copy Sustainability Science policies (Xanthos and Walker 2017), and private sector learning (Chaves and Wals 2018), social–ecological learn- actions (Staford and Jones 2019). Further, members of ing and community resilience (Smith et al. 2016; Chan et al. civil society are taking actions ranging from local volunteer 2015), culture building (Krasny 2018; Andrews and Edwards beach cleanups to large-scale global cleanup campaigns. For 2005), sense of place (Enqvist et al. 2019; Haywood et al. example, over 1 million volunteers from 122 countries par- 2016), network building for environmental governance ticipated in the 2018 International Coastal Cleanup (Ocean (Murphy et al. 2019; Romolini et al. 2016; Svendsen and Conservancy 2019), and according to the Let’s Do It! Foun- Campbell 2008; Andrews and Edwards 2005), and social dation (2018), their 2018 “World Cleanup Day” engaged movement building (Abhyankar and Krasny 2018; Andrews 13 million participants in 144 countries. Smaller-scale vol- and Edwards 2005). Our study is one step in understand- unteer beach cleanup eforts regularly take place in coastal ing possible connections between volunteer beach cleanups communities around the world; however, their impacts and these potential spillover efects (Nilsson et al. 2017; remain understudied. Thøgersen and Crompton 2009). Given the enormity of global plastic pollution, how might In the face of global environmental challenges such as small-scale volunteer beach cleanups, even when coordi- plastic pollution, environmental stewardship actions and nated globally, be meaningful? Our study addresses this initiatives enable citizens to act on environmental concerns question using the lens of civic ecology, which focuses on locally using their own knowledge and expertise (Ben- small-scale, grassroots environmental stewardship practices nett et al. 2018). Environmental stewardship occurs when that can branch out and scale up to have broader impacts individuals working independently, in local groups, or in (Krasny and Tidball 2015; Krasny 2018). We use primary regional networks, leverage their capacity and motivation source materials produced by volunteer beach cleanup to use various “approaches, activities, behaviors, and tech- groups in this initial exploration of the scope, approaches, nologies” (Bennett et al. 2018, p. 606) to conserve, restore, and collaborations entailed in volunteer beach cleanups that manage, monitor, advocate for, and/or educate about the may indicate scaling up impacts beyond local beaches. We environment (Fisher et al. 2012; Bennett et al. 2018). Such also identify additional forms of environmental steward- stewardship can vary from a single action to long-term ship conducted by these groups to theorize how branching initiatives and encompass improving or protecting water, out through other stewardship practices may broaden the land, and air quality (Svendsen et al. 2016). Through their impact of beach cleanup groups’ eforts to eliminate plastic eforts, stewardship groups endeavor to construct the social pollution. infrastructure required for sustaining environmental prac- Our fndings contribute to the literature on civic ecology tices, such as city- or watershed-wide governance networks and environmental stewardship by revealing a global net of (Connolly et al. 2014; Romolini et al. 2016). Wolf et al. volunteer beach cleanup eforts conducted in tandem with (2013) found that participants in environmental stewardship other stewardship endeavors. We conclude by placing these are motivated to participate for the social benefts derived findings in the context of their implications for understand- through these practices such as community building, citi- ing the theoretical pathways through which civic ecology zen engagement, and concern for community, which are practices have impacts beyond their local communities. as important as the perceived ecological benefts. Because environmental stewardship links local quality-of-life and Environmental stewardship and civic ecology environmental concerns, it has the potential to beneft par- ticipants, their communities, and the environment. Volunteer beach cleanups remove marine litter after it has Environmental stewardship eforts tend to be opportun- entered the environment rather than preempting plastic pol- istic and focused on specifc projects or sites. This poses lution by targeting the source and reducing plastic produc- a challenge for comprehensively assessing their cumula- tion. Because of this, they have been accused of being pal- tive efects; long-term monitoring