Potential Impact of Environmental Activism: A Survey and a Scoping Review

Abstract

Environmental issues increasingly impact the well-being, the ability to have a good life, of people, especially members of marginalized groups. Dealing with environmental issues is a long-standing and increasing focus of activism. Youth are increasingly involved in environmental activism. One focus of environmental education is how to instill the role of being a change agent into students. Marginalized groups experience many problems in relation to environmental issues, and environmental activism impacts the lived experience of marginalized groups in diverse ways. A pre-study scoping review suggested a gap in academic inquiry around “the impact of environmental activism”. The aim of our study was to decrease this gap and to better understand the perceived impact of environmental activism. We used two approaches to achieve this aim. In the first step, we used a survey to ask undergraduate students about their views on the impact of environmental activism. Given the results of the survey and that students need access to information to be able to fulfill their roles as critical thinkers and change agents, we then performed a scoping review of abstracts from Scopus, Web of Science, and the 70 databases accessible through EBSCO-HOST to ascertain what topics and which marginalized groups are engaged with in the academic inquiry of environmental activism. We found that participants felt that environmental activism has an impact on all the social groups and entities we gave them as choices, although there were differences in how positively they viewed the different groups and entities being affected. The participants also indicated that many of the well-being indicators were impacted by environmental activism, although around 30% felt that they did not have information they needed to form an opinion. Finally, our participants felt that different social groups have different ability expectations. Our scoping review found that many of the groups and indicators that our participants felt were impacted by environmental activism were not covered in the abstracts we analyzed. Our findings suggest many gaps and the need for actions and opportunities in relation to the topic of the “impact of environmental activism”.