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Relationships between Recreation and Pollution When Striving for Wellbeing in Blue Spaces

Evers, Clifton; Phoenix, Cassandra

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Authors

Clifton Evers



Abstract

Our aim for this research was to identify and examine how recreation enthusiasts cope with and mitigate the violence of pollution as they strive for wellbeing in polluted “blue spaces” (e.g., seas, oceans). Our methodology to undertake the research was ethnography (online and offline), including autoethnography and informal interviews (40). The study proceeded from a constructivist epistemology which emphasizes that knowledge is situated and perspectival. The study site was a post-industrial area of northeast England where a long-standing but also rapidly growing surfing culture has to live with pollution (legacy and ongoing). We found evidence of what have become quotidian tactics that attach to themes of familiarity, embodiment, resignation, denial, and affect/emotion used by enthusiasts to cope with and mitigate the violence of pollution. We argue that by necessity some surfers are persisting in striving for wellbeing not simply in spite of pollution but rather with pollution. We assert surfers enact a “resigned activism” that influences their persistence. We extend critical scholarship concerning relationships between recreation, blue spaces, and wellbeing by moving beyond a restrictive binary of focusing on either threats and risks or opportunities and benefits of blue space to health and wellbeing, instead showing how striving for wellbeing through recreation in the presence of pollution provides evidence of how such efforts are more negotiated, fluid, situated, uncertain, dissonant, and even political than any such binary structure allows for.

Citation

Evers, C., & Phoenix, C. (2022). Relationships between Recreation and Pollution When Striving for Wellbeing in Blue Spaces. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(7), Article 4170. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19074170

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 26, 2022
Online Publication Date Apr 3, 2022
Publication Date Apr 1, 2022
Deposit Date Apr 3, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Print ISSN 1661-7827
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 19
Issue 7
Article Number 4170
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19074170
Publisher URL https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/7/4170

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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