Identity, Politics, and the Beach: Environmental Activism in Surfers Against Sewage

Abstract

Academic accounts of leisure activities like surfing tend to emphasise their individualistic, hedonistic and commercialised qualities, seeing this as characteristic of leisure consumption in late capitalism; that culture is increasingly dominated by the market and attention is diverted from collective and political issues. Yet empirical research in such lifestyle sport cultures reveals a more complex and contradictory picture of leisure consumption. This paper examines the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), founded by surfers in Cornwall, England. It draws on subcultural media discourses about SAS and interviews with SAS members and personnel. Whilst acknowledging the limitations in the political significance and impact of SAS’s activism, the paper argues that through their sport consumption, participants from a range of minority water sports cultures have formed a politicised trans‐local collectivity based around a concern with their own localised environment, one which has become articulated into broader trans‐national political issues. It is argued further that SAS is part of a broader wave of new social movements and direct action protest groups that gathered momentum in Britain in the mid to late 1990s. In such groups the politics of identity take centre stage. The paper therefore challenges us to rethink the meaning of political activism, and the capacity of leisure and sport to contribute to the politics of identity.

Keywords:

• consumption
• lifestyle sport
• surfing
• identity politics
• environmentalism
• new social movements
• political protest

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Surfers Against Sewage for permission to reproduce the figures used in this paper. The author also thanks the editors and the three anonymous reviewers – from very different disciplinary perspectives – for providing such diverse and useful insights on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. John Fiske (1989) is widely – but somewhat unjustly – cited as the main protagonist of this romanticisation of consumer creativity, specifically for being overly preoccupied with ‘empowering’ the audience of the text, and overstating their resistive capacities (see, for example, Curran, 1990; McGuigan, 1992).

2. Though beyond the scope of this article research also demonstrates the enduring nature of traditional structures of social and cultural power, particularly how patterns of gendered, class and racial inequality are reproduced within them (see, for example, part 2 of Wheaton, 2004b).

3. Description of SAS on membership survey (interview with Moore).

4. Field (1999) states that Surfers Against Sewage were claiming a UK membership of 23,000 in the summer of 1996; however, there is no source given.

5. As Naomi Klein (2000) has suggested, contemporary practices like culture jamming and adbusting are rooted in, and borrow from a range of philosophies and avant‐garde art movements, and particularly Guy Debord and the Situationalists.

6. See however debate in Seel and Plough (2000), who examine how in environmental protests around Earth First! NIMBY attitudes and events lead to wider engagement with the movement.

7. The SAS survey did not ask about the members’ gender or ethnicity; however, an analysis of a small random sample of ‘names’ (n =147) revealed that 65% of those who responded were men and 29% women (in the remaining 6% the gender was unclear from the name given).

8. The exception being the London area. It was suggested that this was due to the large number of visitors to the West Country from around London.

9. Stedman, in her analysis of surfing in Australia, goes so far as to argue that ‘surfing as it is simulated in magazines is the surfing subculture’ (Stedman, 1997: p. 78, my emphasis). She contends that postmodern processes have resulted in the demise of the subculture as an ‘observable entity’ which now exists only through representation in the surf media (1997: p. 76).

10. Certainly the survey data discussed earlier pointed to a surprisingly small percentage of members of SAS defining themselves as active ‘surfers’. However, this is likely to also reflect the type of member that responded to the survey.

11. Debates about environmentalism and trans‐national citizenship – such as expressed in the notion of ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental citizenship’ – are widespread in the literature on environmentalism. See, for example, Valencia Saiz (2005) and Bell (2005) in the journal Environmental Politics.

12. SAS have also conducted a survey of people’s buying habits in relation to eco‐friendly products. The research was sponsored by the Co‐op Bank (Pipeline, issue 57, p. 9).