Access for whom? White environmentalism, recreational colonization, and civic recreation racialization

Abstract

This paper interrogates “civic recreation”—a type of collective action found among participants of alternative lifestyle sports, such as mountain biking, surfing, and rock climbing. Although scholarship celebrates civic recreation for fostering resource stewardship and local environmentalism, the literature largely fails to acknowledge that it also perpetuates access to romanticized notions of “wilderness” among the privileged, while marginalizing other social/cultural relationships to nature. We examine how the logic of white environmentalism serves as an orienting framework for much civic recreation, thus extending civic recreation theory to anticipate not only its constructive outcomes, but also the perpetuation of socio-cultural-political marginalization.

Keywords:

• Civic recreation
• colonialism
• rock climbing
• voluntary action
• whiteness

Scholars of natural resource governance, outdoor recreation, and voluntary action have noted a growing form of collective action in recent decades: practitioners of “alternative” and “lifestyle” sports—activities such as surfing, mountain biking, and rock climbing—organizing in voluntary associations around their chosen activities. Some see these collaboratives as another type of politically motivated interest group because they advocate for management policies that serve their recreational interests (Shelby & Shindler, 1992). Others highlight their associational nature, motivated by social connection and community engagement (Lu & Schuett, 2014). Increasingly, however, scholarship highlights the potential for such initiatives to generate both limited and broader public benefits, reflected in Rebecca Schild’s (2019) construct “civic recreation organizations.”

Civic recreation organizations are “civic” (i.e., voluntary, communal, and sometimes political efforts toward improved collective conditions; Adler & Goggin, 2005) in several ways. They are “civic” in the sense that through them every day recreational participants help to shape informal norms that govern “alternative” and “lifestyle” sports (Carter et al., 2020). They are “civic” in the sense that the natural resource stewardship in which they engage can generate positive externalities for other recreationists, conservationists, and the broader public (Carter, 2021; Schild, 2018). And they are “civic” in the sense that their political efforts may serve as catalysts to greater advocacy and activism—particularly in regard to sustainability and the environment (Schild, 2019).

A central concern of most civic recreation organizations is securing, protecting, and increasing access to a specific activity. Civic recreation practitioners tend to define access as (relatively) unencumbered use of the natural landscapes in which their desired activities are practiced, to which private property rights, development, and management policies pose the greatest threats (Carter, 2021; Schild, 2019). Not acknowledged in this definition are marginalizing and exclusionary barriers grounded in the activities and their subcultures, themselves. For example, outdoor recreation and environmental communities’ reverence for physical fitness and rejection of select technologies exclude many people with disabilities (Aitchison, 2009; Jaquette Ray, 2009).¹ Similarly, prevailing social constructions of outdoor recreation spaces (both physical and social) reinforce restrictive gender and sexuality norms rooted in masculinity, heteronormativity, and cisgenderism (Kling et al., 2020), thereby excluding women, trans* gender, nonbinary gender, and queer folks.

In this paper, we examine this seemingly “less civic” function of civic recreation organizations with the argument that through narrowly constructed conceptualizations of access born from the experiences of privileged corners of society, civic recreation organizations reinscribe and reinforce exclusion and marginalization along intersecting dimensions, including ability, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, education, geography, and language (among others). Our analysis focuses specifically on how civic recreation organizations are predisposed to substantiate existing racial dynamics in prevailing cultures, reinforcing the white settler colonial groundings of the overlapping outdoor recreation and environmentalism subcultures to which they belong (Boggs, 2017; Ho & Chang, 2021; Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022; Wigglesworth, 2021). Theoretically, we highlight civic recreation organizations as elements of the larger institutional landscape that maintains the whiteness of outdoor recreation settings (Finney, 2014; Martin, 2004; Rose & Paisley, 2012). Practically, our examination suggests why civic recreation practitioners may find realizing anti-racist and/or anti-colonial outcomes more fraught than generally anticipated.

Positionalities

We first situate our argument by unpacking our relevant positionalities. By positionalities, we refer to relevant world views and positions as they relate to the social and political context of which we write (Holmes, 2020). The intent is twofold. First, we hope to be both reflexive and transparent in how our identities, characteristics, values, and experiences shape our motivations to pursue this inquiry. Second, we intend to be clear in our participation and complicity in the structures and practices that we critique.

We are both active recreationists, active in outdoor pursuits such as climbing, backcountry skiing, backpacking, trail running, fly fishing, and other resource-based endeavors. We both identify as white, cis-gendered, able-bodied males who benefit from centuries of colonization and displacement of others—people who often still live, work, forage, play, and connect with the spaces that we use for outdoor recreation. As white men, we understand that we often take our access to, and comfort in, these spaces as a given. Additionally, as U.S. residents, much of the infrastructure and built environment by which we access recreational spaces was constructed through the labor of exploited peoples, including enslaved, incarcerated, and internee folks, among others. From nearly any perspective, it is clear that we are not outside of the problematic social, political, and economic power structures which we examine in this paper; we are very much a part of them, and we reproduce and extend them.

Furthermore, David Carter has served as a volunteer member of the Policy and Conservation committee and the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) committee of a civic recreation organization (a local climbing organization), served on the organization’s board of directors for several years, and has conducted survey research in collaboration with local and national civic recreation organizations. Both authors also support (financially, politically, or otherwise) a variety of civic recreation organizations, both contributing to these organizations and benefiting from our engagement with them. From a research design perspective, we are “insiders” (Berkovic et al., 2020)—members of the communities under study. Our examination is not limited to scholarly interest; we conduct this critical analysis in part to clarify our own understandings of how many civic recreation organizations are built on foundations inextricably intertwined with notions and assumptions of whiteness and colonialism, among other implicit and explicit frameworks. We also understand that people in privileged positions are needed to help untangle some of the very systems that have created and sustained those privileges.

Civic recreation organizations

Voluntary associations and volunteer-run organizations are important in many recreational and sport contexts. For example, although professional sports are the focus of great public interest, the bulk of sports participation occurs through nonprofessional participants supported by community sports organizations in which volunteers fulfill virtually every function, from coaching to fund-raising (Cuskelly & O'Brien, 2013). Volunteers are similarly important to more formal, yet still nonprofessional, organized sports contexts of university recreational sports leagues and those of similar institutional settings (Warner et al., 2012).

Scholars distinguish civic recreation organizations from the aforementioned sports organizations for overlapping reasons (Carter, 2021; Lu & Schuett, 2014; Schild, 2018, 2019). First, civic recreation organizations originate in and revolve around particular outdoor recreation activities. Broadly speaking, outdoor recreation is “voluntary participation in free-time activity that occurs in the outdoors and embraces the interaction of people with the natural environment” (Plummer, 2009). Of course, outdoor recreation is varied, ranging from activities such as birdwatching to off-road vehicle driving. Across these many practices, outdoor recreation is usually associated with five objectives: appreciation of nature; personal satisfaction and enjoyment; physiological fitness; positive behavior patterns; and environmental stewardship (Plummer, 2009).

Second, within the umbrella of outdoor recreation, activities that form the core concern of civic recreation organizations tend to be what scholars of recreation and leisure refer to as “alternative” (Thorpe, 2009) and “lifestyle” (Wheaton, 2004) sports. As with outdoor recreation, generally, lifestyle sports are varied. They are often defined in contrast to their more “traditional” counterparts: where traditional sports are rule-bound, competitive, regulated, and reflective of “achievement sport cultures,” lifestyle sports are typically characterized by individualism (lack of competition), self-governance (absence of an official governing body), and distinctive subcultures (Gilchrist & Wheaton, 2011; Wheaton, 2004). Common examples include mountain biking, climbing, and surfing (Rinehard & Sydor, 2003).

The activities that civic recreation organizations revolve around are simultaneously shaped by and directed toward the outdoor settings from which they emerge, leading to arguably their most important defining features: engagement in resource advocacy to ensure access to outdoor recreational spaces and preserving and/or restoring these spaces. For example, Schild (2019) describes how the Boulder Mountain Biking Association works to build and maintain recreational trail infrastructure, while the Friends of Muir Valley organization operates and maintains the Muir Valley Nature Preserve. Climbing-focused civic recreation organizations (the focus of our analysis) perform a variety of advocacy and stewardship related activities, including infrastructure construction and maintenance (from trails to toilets), sport-specific infrastructure work (e.g., climbing “staging” areas, fixed hardware), education regarding resource use and behavior, coordination and collaboration with land managers, and advocacy with political officials and land managers to support climbing “friendly” management policies (Carter et al., 2020; Carter, 2021).

Despite their focus on the relatively narrow needs and purposes of particular outdoor recreation activities, civic recreation organizations can be linked to broader impacts and outcomes. First, their activities may benefit other resource users, such as when improved trails are used by non-climbers or where improved infrastructure creates more robust ecosystems for all visitors. Second, civic recreation organizations may serve as gateways to other types of collective action and/or environmentalism. For example, Schild (2019) posits that civic recreation may lead some participants to engage in more general “civic ecology,” described by Kransy and Tidball (2010, p. 1) as “participatory environmental restoration and management initiatives in cities and elsewhere.” Whether or not they lead to more mainstream environmental advocacy or activism, we suggest that they reflect many of the implicit and value-laden assumptions of more generalized civic environmentalism, as outlined in the following section.

Organizational institutionalization of colonial and racial oppression in civic recreation

The preceding constructive functions notwithstanding, civic recreation organizations are often (but not exclusively) predisposed to perpetuate systemic inequities of the societies in which they are embedded, and the historically rooted white settler colonial projects that they are extensions of, in particular. The context of our examination is the United States.² A number of theoretical articulations clarify and explain how racialization, exclusion, and marginalization are enacted in the U.S. through civic recreation. We review the more relevant of these, starting with conceptual definitions, and progressing through theoretical logics that link racialized cultural contexts, institutional structures, and recreational choices.

Civic recreation organizations’ role in perpetuating racism and oppression stems from the hegemonic cultural contexts in which they exist, and the particular cultural domains in which they are grounded. For our purposes, two relevant constructs help describe the overarching cultural context: whiteness and settler colonialism. By whiteness, we mean more than the white supremacy that characterizes much of U.S. society.³ We follow Harris’s (1993) conceptualization of whiteness as institutionally coupled with property and property rights. Originating out of “parallel systems of domination” over Black and Native people, whiteness carries with it racialized privileges that extend to access to resources, capital, and sovereignty that have subsequently been legitimized and codified in laws, policies, procedures, and other institutions.⁴

Whiteness extends into both conservation and outdoor recreation movements, where landscapes are infused with centuries of exclusion, displacement, and violence (e.g., Finney, 2014; Outka, 2008; Rose et al., 2022), For example, Theriault and Mowatt (2020) trace how, although African American experiences are complex, diverse, and multifaceted, oppression has arguably been the mainstay of Black Americans’ collective relationship with nature for the past 400 years. During enslavement, enslaved Africans escaping brutal plantations for the freedom of the wilderness risked violence and execution if found. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans similarly faced legal exclusion, sanctioned violence, and even the threat of lynching when seeking to engage with nature in what were de facto, if not de jure, white spaces. These violent histories continue to manifest in contemporary issues of racial discrimination, geographic accessibility, and disproportionate visitation rates, among others (Scott & Lee, 2018; Weber & Sultana, 2013).

We conceptualize settler colonialism as encompassing both of what Tuck and Yang (2021, p. 4) refer to as “external” and “internal” colonialism—the “conquering” of Indigenous peoples, recasting of Native lands and territorial artifacts as “natural resources,” and ongoing political control of people and lands for imperial consumption. U.S. settler colonialism began with forced dislocation, abduction, and mass killing, but continues as an ongoing process that is political, economic, cultural, and spatial in nature (Rifkin, 2013; Rowe & Tuck, 2017; Tuck & Yang, 2021). As explained by Wolfe (2006), such settler colonialism is a structure of authorized definitions and relationships; it redefines land as property and human relationship with land as one of ownership.

Whiteness and settler colonialism are historically infused in many notions of conservation, wilderness, and nature. For instance, Madison Grant—prominent in the establishment of many U.S. national parks—was a noted eugenicist, and along with conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt, “believed that the preservation of wilderness, which included the creation of national parks, was a means for preventing racial degeneration and maintaining white superiority” (Lee et al., 2023, p. 8). These were colonialist endeavors, discursively marginalizing and spatially displacing Indigenous peoples (Bacon, 2019; Spence, 1999). Celebrated preservationist John Muir’s writings (Robbins & Moore, 2019; Wolfe, 2006), along with a literary lineage including Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and others, present the racialized Other as unworthy of humanity and basic decency (Spence, 1999). A multiple-century history of white bodies, white epistemologies, and the dominant logic of white supremacy is woven into the fabric of mainstream environmentalism and outdoor recreation (Finney, 2014; Lee et al., 2023; Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022).

Whiteness and settler colonialism in outdoor recreation and environmentalism

These process-structures—whiteness as property and whiteness as settler colonialism—describe the broader relevant institutional and cultural context in which U.S. civic recreation organizations exist. The hegemonic whiteness of this context takes on more specific contours when it comes to the outdoor recreation activities that are civic recreation organizations’ foci and rationales. Outdoor recreation—sports such as camping, hiking, climbing, and mountain biking—reflects historically exclusionary spaces and a “hierarchy of participation” wherein young, white, educated, able-bodied, and wealthy men have the greatest probability of engagement (Lee et al., 2017). The same demographics are regularly reflected in outdoor recreation depictions in marketing and media (Frazer & Anderson, 2018; Martin, 2004; Stanley, 2020).

As explained by Ho and Chang (2021), the exclusionary nature of outdoor recreation spaces is both structural and constructed. Outdoor recreation rests on an “idyllic vision of the outdoors…a sanguine vision of human relationship with the wilderness, one imbued with fun and adventure” (p. 5). The idyllic vision presupposes a number of privileges among participants, including those bestowed by claim and access to land via historical and contemporary colonization, secure political and economic positions in society, and affluence that enables the material accompaniments of contemporary outdoor lifestyles. In other words, most outdoor recreation activities exhibit “white” characteristics and practically fall under the domain of whiteness (Arai & Kivel, 2009).

Romanticized conceptions of nature, in concert with aligned assumptions regarding nature’s supposed fragility and vulnerability to anthropogenic ruin, further undergird what Ho and Chang (2021; see also DeLuca & Demo, 2001; Sturgeon, 2016) refer to as “white environmentalism.” As a particular way of relating to nature and natural spaces, white environmentalism assigns ecological advocates the celebrated and even heroic role of environmental protection and saviorism (Kashwan et al., 2021), a point to which we return in the discussion. In this framing, the nonhuman unbuilt world is othered, romanticized, and in need of saving, and one of the responses is the necessary removal of Indigenous, poor, and extractivist-dependent communities (Outka, 2008).

Outdoor recreation and environmental organizations are not only founded upon problematic conceptions of nature and the domination of racially, ethnically, and colonially marginalized others, but continue to exhibit many of these tendencies and practices, where the organization itself is the mechanism for perpetuating such trends (Kashwan et al., 2021). Acknowledgement of competing authority or stewardship of these spaces is most typically missing from the dominant narrative; rather, the narrative is ahistorical in that it presumes outdoor recreation spaces were and are unpeopled and unproduced. Outdoor recreation thus systemically privileges mostly white participants with entitled access to natural spaces, which can manifest as implied authority in relation to the places in which they recreate, affinity for them, and a sense of responsibility over them (Atkinson, 1990). Through participation in outdoor recreation activities, contemporary (usually white) settler colonizers learn to see themselves as “keepers and stewards” of spaces that were forcefully stolen from Indigenous communities (Ho & Chang, 2021, p. 8).

Importantly, the roles of environmental activist and ecological steward serve as self-reinforcing racializing constructs. As articulated by Hickcox (2018, p. 498), environmentalism, implicitly attached to whiteness, becomes a distinguishing feature between cultural “insiders” and “outsiders.” Environmentalists use a number of rationales to justify the coupling of racial and/or ethnic identities and assumed adherence to “environmentally friendly” lifestyles. For example, the natural spaces often frequented by residents of color may not fit self-described environmentalists’ conceptions of wilderness (Cronon, 1996) and the cultural manifestation of environmental ethics within communities of color does not always align with the narrow, idealized esthetic of mainstream environmentalism (Taylor, 1997). There is also a common assumption that environmentalism is a luxury not accessible to less-affluent folks, who, preoccupied by the more “pressing” concerns related to scarcity and coping, do not have the practical capacity to engage in sustainable consumption practices or environmental advocacy. Regardless of the specific justification, environmentalism becomes an indicator of social group (alongside, for example, cultural practices and geographic origins) that affirms the separateness and superiority of whiteness.

Finally, outdoor recreation activities such as hiking, mountain biking, and rock climbing take place in environments that often rank among the most treasured and sacred to the Native peoples that were forcibly displaced from these spaces. Beyond being enabled by historical colonization, outdoor recreation constitutes a very direct and active form of “recreational colonization…wherein the dynamics of settler colonialism are advanced and (re)produced within the seemingly apolitical spaces of recreation” (Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022, p. 108). Because outdoor recreation is directly tied to land and landscapes, there is a tendency among some participants to imagine parallel or even intersecting interests and experiences with Native inhabitants. But there are examples of conflict between Native communities and white recreationists over access to natural areas—and civic recreation organizations have been mechanisms by which recreationists attempt to secure such access (as we illustrate below). The displacement and erasure associated with environmentalist-inspired outdoor recreation represents a form of “colonial ecological violence” (Bacon, 2019, p. 59) and ongoing, contemporary settler colonial projects (Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022).

Civic recreation organizations as racial(izing) structures

Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations helps to clarify civic recreation organizations’ role in perpetuating the oppressive dynamics of the outdoor recreation and environmental advocacy domains from which they are constructed. According to Ray, organizations create structures that shape societal characteristics and outcomes by connecting cultural schemas—“generalizable, often unconscious, cognitive ‘default assumptions’” (Ray, 2019, p. 31; citing DiMaggio, 1997, p. 269)—to organizational rules and/or resources. Rules may take the form of organizational hierarchies, positions and roles, and informal conventions related to behavior and interaction (among other examples), while resources may be “material,” such as capital and objects, or “social,” such as knowledge and relationships (Sewell, 1992). Once institutionalized, racial structures manifest racism in the form of narrative justifications of racial inequality, which then reinforce the racial schemas on which they are built (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The structural relationships between schemas, rules, resources, and racial ideologies (adapted from Ray, 2019, p. 33).

When considered in a civic recreation context, Ray’s theory suggests how civic recreation organizations act as meso-level mechanisms through which white environmentalism and recreational colonization are sustained more broadly. For example, drawing on our discussion above, civic recreation organizations institutionalize and perpetuate an understanding of outdoor recreation as composed of white activities (Martin, 2004) by prioritizing natural resources and outdoor, largely unbuilt landscapes that are central to activities pursued by predominantly white participants (Carter, 2008; Harrison, 2013; Lackey et al., 2022), while ignoring ways of experiencing outdoor and natural spaces more common among Indigenous people and communities of color, as well as the direct role of outdoor recreation in contemporary colonization (Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022). Because the legitimacy of white outdoor recreation activities is built on largely uncontested schemas, civic recreation organizations simultaneously claim formal commitments to equity and inclusion, while following “race-neutral” practices that reinforce prevailing outdoor recreation schemas as “white places” and recreational stewardship as a cultural extension of whiteness (Finney, 2014; Hickcox, 2018).

In the remainder of this paper, we apply elements of Ray’s theory of racialized organizations to a particular type of civic recreation organization—climbing advocacy organizations. The analysis demonstrates how largely uncontested racialized schemas related to climbing access manifest in organizational structures that reinforce racial exclusion in climbing and undergird overt acts of recreational colonization. We also highlight how more recent challenges to previously accepted racial schemas may be altering (to some extent) the racializing structures of some climbing advocacy organizations. Our discussion then takes a step back to consider the implications of civic recreation racialization for outdoor recreation and environmentalism, more broadly. We also discuss limitations that our analysis shares with Ray’s framework—namely, the omission of an intersectional lens that more fully incorporates how civic recreation organizations perpetuate, for example, the interrelated exclusionary impacts of masculinity, other discriminatory gender and sexuality norms, and ableism, among other marginalizing social forces.

An illustration: Racialization via U.S. climbing advocacy

U.S. climbing advocacy organizations provide an illustrative example of racialization in and by civic recreation organizations. Climbing access is a core motivating concern and goal of these organizations. As described above, to climbing advocacy practitioners, access tends to mean ensuring that climbers have (relatively) unencumbered use of desired climbing resources (natural resources where rock climbing, ice climbing, or mountaineering is practiced) and the landscapes in which they are found. As described in this section, this understanding within the dominant climbing community/culture is typically disconnected from social, cultural, and political matters of colonialism, whiteness, race, and racism.

Background on climbing advocacy organizations in the U.S

Modeled after the sport’s European traditions, North American climbers have long organized via associations and clubs, such as the storied “stone masters” of Yosemite (Taylor, 2010), the Alpenbock Climbing Club of Utah (Wilson, 1967), and the American Alpine Club, founded in 1902 (AAC, n.d.). These early groups largely focused on the “production” of the climbing sport. The role and objectives of climbing organizations took a turn with the “sport climbing revolution” of the 1980s and early 90s, when climbing technology and practice advancements ushered in new management challenges and climbing area closures (Smoot, 2019).

In 1985, the American Alpine Club established an Access Committee to address mounting public lands and climbing closures, as well as the threat of more to come. Six years later, the Committee evolved into the independent 501(c)(3) organization, Access Fund. As implied by the name, Access Fund’s purpose was to secure access to climbing areas threatened by closure, often through outright property purchases. The organization’s functions have grown in subsequent years to include “working to reverse or prevent closures, reduce climbers’ environmental impacts, buy threatened climbing areas, help landowners manage risk and liability concerns, and educate the next generation of climbers on responsible climbing practices that protect access” (Access Fund, 2022a).

Today, the landscape of climbing-focused civic recreation organizations is made up of these national organizations (American Alpine Club and Access Fund) and over 130 “local climbing organizations” (Access Fund, 2022b). As we have outlined elsewhere (with coauthors; 2020), some local climbing organizations are organized around metropolitan areas, such as Montana’s Helena Climbers’ Coalition, others by a region, such as the Upstate New York Climbers Access Coalition or the Southeastern Climbers Coalition (that spans Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Arkansas), and still others around a particular climbing area, such as West Virginia’s New River Alliance of Climbers. Although their programs and activities are shaped by their particular communities and geographies, local climbing organizations tend to share similar missions and objectives, including to secure and maintain access to climbing resources, to maintain climbing area infrastructures and resource ecological health, and to advocate for climbing conducive land-management policies (Maples et al., 2019).

Climbing access as racialized schema

As suggested above, access is arguably the core motivating and orienting goal of U.S. climbing advocacy organizations. Beyond its name, for example, Access Fund’s mission is to “lead and inspire the climbing community toward sustainable access and conservation of the climbing environment” (Access Fund, 2022d), the Southeastern Climbers Coalition seeks to “preserve access to climbing areas in the region” (SCC, n.d.), and the New River Alliance of Climbers “exists to preserve and promote access to climbing areas, and to conserve climbing resources in the New River Gorge and surrounding areas” (NRAC, 2017). And although the term “access” has many meanings aligned with and pertaining to matters of inclusion, social equity, and justice more generally (Artiles et al, 2007), as outlined above, it is more narrowly framed and conceptualized as climbers’ ability to recreate in desired landscapes, whether located on private or public lands (Grijalva et al., 2002).

This notion of access arises from inherently racialized assumptions regarding the primary barriers to participation in the sport. In such cases, access often turns to issues of historical, contemporary, and future contestation between climbers and public and private land managers. For instance, land managers may take issue with climbers’ biophysical impacts on the landscape (e.g., trail degradation, vegetation loss, littering, parking concerns, placement of metal bolts or hardware in the rock), and subsequently, climbers’ access to such settings may be altered, limited, or denied. Because most climbing advocacy thus seeks to address access barriers faced by mostly white privileged climbers, and often ignores access barriers faced by climbers of color (as well as women, trans*gendered people and climbers whose gender and sexuality do not adhere to restrictive dominant notions, disabled folks, and other marginalized groups/identities), it serves to both sustain and justify the whiteness that characterizes many climbing spaces. The participation barriers that result, in turn, determine the access-oriented roles, programs, and initiatives that fall under the purview of climbing advocacy organizations.

Thus, the prevailing conceptualization of “climbing access” effectively legitimizes certain barriers to access as within the scope of climbing advocacy organization concern, while dismissing others. Squarely within this scope are legal, bureaucratic, and material impediments to climbing area admission and resource use, including regulatory restrictions, the transfer of public lands to private control, and land development. Not included under the definition are constraints and barriers to the practice of the sport itself. For example, a nation-wide survey of indoor climbers found not having relevant equipment to be the number one barrier cited by respondents to climbing outdoors (61% of respondents), followed by a lack of knowledge (47%), and a lack of climbing partners (46%; Carter, 2020). Not having outdoor climbing opportunities nearby, in contrast, was cited by only 19% of respondents as a barrier.

The racialization of climbing access becomes clearer with an appreciation of the systematic disparities between different groups and/or identities. In particular, a robust and long-standing finding in recreational and leisure studies research indicates that folks reflecting groups/identities marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender tend to face far greater barriers in taking up and participating in outdoor recreation activities that are economic (e.g., not having the resources) and social (not having the relationships and/or socially acquired knowledge) in nature (Ghimire et al., 2014; Johnson et al., 2001; Schwartz & Corkery, 2011). More overt discrimination is also a factor, such as the racism, sexism, misogyny, and ableism that participants might encounter in predominantly white and masculine recreational spaces (Floyd, 1998). Thus, many barriers faced disproportionately by people of marginalized identities/groups are not recognized under the prevailing understanding of climbing access, which legitimize only those barriers that are not inherently overcome by what Ho and Chang (2021, p. 6) call the “presumed privileges” held by mostly white recreationists.

Climbing advocacy as racialized structure

According to Ray (2019, p. 33), organizations’ power as racializing structures comes from the “ability of schemas to muster material or social resources.” The mobilization of resources in pursuit of a narrow, racialized conceptualization of climbing barriers and access is readily apparent in climbing advocacy organization’s goals, activities, and claimed successes. For example, in an evaluation and assessment of local climbing organizations, Maples et al (2019) find that of the top four celebrated local climbing organization accomplishments, three pertain explicitly to access, including: partnerships with landowners, public land managers, and other community organizations “to maintain climbing access over time” (p. 5); direct access successes, such as leases and land owner agreements, and; acquisitions of climbing resources. Nowhere are matters of connecting climbers with material (e.g., equipment) or social (e.g., relationships, mentors) resources. In the same report, access and stewardship dominate the training that local climbing organization representatives expressed interest in, with “diversity and inclusion” ranked number 11 of 14 queried topics (p. 16; although this may be shifting in some organizations, as discussed below).

Although efforts are underway to meaningfully engage Native communities in advocacy efforts, climbing advocacy organizations have historically marshaled resources on the basis of racialized access schemas in even more direct and explicit manners by pursuing access to Native culturally significant locations—acts that can be clearly interpreted as in service of contemporary colonization. Perhaps the most infamous of such cases is a 2003 Access Fund suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a Forest Service climbing ban at Cave Rock, Nevada (Makley & Makley, 2010). In addition to being culturally and spiritually sacred to the Washoe Tribe, Cave Rock was a multi-use recreational area and site of world-class sport climbing (Matous, 2003). Access Fund challenged the climbing ban, arguing that it promoted the Washoe religion and that climbing imposes no significant impact on the Cave. In a 2007 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision ruling against Access Fund, Judge McKeown observed “Access Fund’s argument misses the point. The value of Cave Rock is not simply geological; it is also cultural and historical.”

Less dramatic examples of recreational colonization are observed in climbing access arrangements lauded as “balancing” competing interests by striking compromises between climbing (and other forms of outdoor recreation) and the desires of Native American communities (Matous, 2003). For example, Mato Tipila—also known as Wyoming’s Bears Lodge Butte or Devils Tower—holds special prominence for many Native American groups, and climbing on it is considered disrespectful.⁵ Some consider the existing “voluntary ban” on climbing during the month of June to be an effective management compromise (Dustin et al., 2002). However, Freedman (2007) notes that from a tribal perspective, the generally recognized “public interest group” involved in the situation (the Bear Lodge Multiple Use Association) was the primary litigant against Indigenous claims to sovereignty, self-governance, and self-representation.

Hueco Tanks, Texas, is a similarly contested climbing location. Renowned for its extensive Native American rock imagery, the state park also gained attention for its significant climbing opportunities, particularly of bouldering, a climbing subdiscipline (Grijalva et al., 2002). As bouldering grew in popularity in the 1990s and with a desire to minimize negative impacts on the petroglyphs and pictographs, park managers redesignated three quarters of the area as requiring guides. The fourth was limited to 70 climbers each day. However, there is still an uneasy spatial and ideological balance between seeing the rocks as a location of cultural and historical significance and seeing them as a recreational climbing opportunity. Many of the more than 1,900 bouldering problems are in areas now closed to climbing because of their proximity to sensitive rock art imagery or pigment remnants, and in 31 other instances, rock art imagery is “within or near currently open bouldering problems” (Goodmaster et al., 2017, p. i). Over the years, there have been management frustrations from both Indigenous and climbing groups, as well as compromises and a tacit acknowledgement of all parties’ perspectives.

Climbing advocacy and racial ideology

As described throughout the preceding paragraphs, climbing advocacy presents a relatively straightforward illustration of civic recreation organizations as racializing entities. Many climbers have enjoyed the privileges of whiteness that allowed them to (often ignorantly) sidestep other material, social, and cultural barriers to the sport. As a result, they tend to share an unchallenged schema of “climbing access” as isolated to matters of land management, policy, and development. They combat and overcome these recognized barriers by marshaling climbing advocacy organization rules (i.e., the focus and positions of volunteer committees) and resources (e.g., attention, fundraising, advocacy strategies and tactics)—sometimes to overtly colonizing ends. The mobilization of resources in pursuit of a racialized understanding of climbing access is self-reinforcing, as overcoming the climbing access barriers facing mostly white climbers sustains the whiteness of the sport.

Reproduction of inequality and disenfranchisement in climbing spaces is one way that climbing advocacy feeds into civic recreation racial ideologies as explicit justifications of racial structures that empower certain people (of dominant characteristics/identities) and disadvantage others (those already marginalized; Ray, 2019, p. 32). Importantly, recognizing access as a racialized schema, which often operates below the level of consciousness, helps explain how climbing advocacy activities can generate racializing outcomes absent conscious discriminatory intent, such as overt or intentional racism. Indeed, a climbing advocacy organization may simultaneously implement formal programs directed at increasing diversity, equity, justice, and/or inclusion and also generate racialized impacts when the formal programs operate parallel to existing organizational practices, without challenging or amending racialized schemas (a phenomenon referred to Ray as “decoupling”; 2019, p. 42).

An actively unfolding example of seemingly conflicting values is unfolding in Indian Creek, in southeastern Utah. Often presented as an exemplar for future land management practices, the area’s designation as Bears Ears National Monument in early 2017 created a rare example where tribal sovereignty and management was interwoven with federal bureaucratic support (via the U.S. Department of Interior) to prioritize Indigenous governance of sacred spaces. Subsequent threats to repeal the area’s monument status elevated the concern of local and national climbing organizations and outdoor recreational corporate supporters. What remains is a set of potentially contradictory social pressures that position relatively high impact recreational practices against the sacredness of these spaces for the people who have historically stewarded landscapes (Baker & Fick, 2022). Climbing advocacy, in this case, is not opposed to Indigenous management at a practical level, as these two entities tend to align in many ways. However, climbing advocacy’s primary commitment to narrowly defined access privileges an ahistorical approach that may come to conflict with the approaches tribes hope to pursue in Bears Ears National Monument management.

Discussion

The opening paragraphs of this paper identified two overlapping benefits of our examination of civic recreation organizations as racializing entities: to situate civic recreation organizations as elements of a greater institutional landscape maintaining the “whiteness” of many outdoor recreation settings, and to explain why - even during time when many organizations are focused on social justice matters - civic recreation practitioners may be challenged in realizing anti-racist and/or anti-colonial outcomes. Our illustrative application of elements of Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations to the example of climbing advocacy organizations speaks to the role of civic recreation organizations as meso-level entities that mobilize racialized schemas by connecting them with civic recreation rules and resources to produce and justify outcomes that are inherently racialized. The end result is that in the socio-political-cultural intersection of outdoor recreation and environmentalism that civic recreation sits, prevailing assumptions of whiteness and recreational colonization held by civic recreation advocates are realized in a manner to sustain existing social hierarchies based on race (among other identities, characteristics, or affiliations, as addressed below).

There are more general and distributed harms to civic recreation organizations’ perpetuation of narrow schemas reflecting assumptions of whiteness and settler colonialism than disproportionate benefits for already privileged people and further burdens on the disenfranchized. Ho and Chang (2021) explain how white environmentalist notions of wilderness distinguishing the “natural” from the artificial and the “wild” from the urban can serve to absolve white environmentalists and ecological stewards from the environmental destruction of other aspects of their livelihoods (see also Simon & Alagona, 2013). These other aspects can include the resource-intensive apparel and equipment of the “outdoor lifestyle” and natural resources, in the form of automobile and jet fuel, expended for recreationists to reach natural spaces. The point parallels Simon and Alagona’s (2013) argument that outdoor recreation participants, supported by educational and business institutions, are often cognitively divorced from the externalities and impacts of their preferred activities.

As we have hinted several times throughout this paper, the concern that civic recreation participants express for matters of diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion has certainly grown in recent years—particularly in the wake of heightened anti-racist activism following publicized deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police (Carter et al., 2020). Some organizations seem to have made meaningful strides. For example, Access Fund (2022c) claims a wide range of related actions and steps, including diversification of its Board of Directors, creation of a JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion) Fellow position, and recognition of diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion in their annual advocate awards. Access Fund further seems to be taking a more careful advocacy approach to culturally-significant Native landscapes and resources, even ceding advocacy and leadership where Native interests are organized and aligned. And the American Alpine Club started “Climb United,” an initiative designed to root out exclusionary practices, such as discriminatory climbing route names.

Many local climbing organizations have similarly undertaken diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion programs, initiatives, and collaborations. The impact of these actions for communities of color and/or Indigenous folks is unclear, and given how recent many are, it is too early to tell how effective they will be at motivating schema-redefining change. It is also possible some represent little more than “virtue signaling.” Civic recreation organization equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, their relative implementation across different organization types, levels, and foci, and of course their effectiveness offer promising opportunities for meaningful future research in the realms of civic recreation.

Finally, we return to our positionalities to underscore the contradictory feelings, perspectives, and actions that we undertake and embody as climbers and outdoor recreationists. We find it easy to support projects that require little or no sacrifice, such as initiatives to relabel derogatory climbing route names. More problematic would be proposals that, for example, require relinquishing access to iconic landscapes such as Indian Creek, Mato Tipila, Hueco Tanks, or any number of other sites that are sacred to Indigenous communities displaced and dispossessed through settler colonization. In this way, we sit at this very tension of anti-racist and anti-colonialist land management, on one hand, and knowing that doing so would require meaningful costs from us and our broader outdoor recreation communities, on the other hand. Sitting uncomfortably within this tension is the knowledge that we operate within the ideologies and practices of white privilege and colonialist dispossession.

Caveats and theoretical extensions

We end this section with three reflections on the limitations of our analysis, thereby highlighting promising avenues for the future. First, as we noted at this paper’s outset, the narrow conceptualization of access that motivates and bounds the work of most civic recreation organizations does more than racialize; it excludes and marginalizes many identities, characteristics, and affiliations beyond the dominant white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, and able-bodied archetype. Our choice to focus white environmentalism, recreational colonization, and racialization was made largely for practical purposes—to make the task tractable within the scope of an article—but a fuller understanding of the implications of civic recreation’s foundational schemas would include their implicit rejection of disabled bodies and most individuals with disabilities (Aitchison, 2009; Jaquette Ray, 2009), hostility toward women, trans* gender, nonbinary gender, and queer folks (Kling et al., 2020), and assumptions of cultural and linguistic assimilation that deny first languages and ethnicities (Floyd & Gramann, 1995), among others. Although we believe the logic of Ray’s (2019) theory would apply in these cases, each operates through particular assumptions, with distinct implications, impacts, and harms.

Second, extending from the preceding observation, our analysis shares with Ray’s (2019) original formulation a lack of engagement with intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1993, 2017), even though such a lens would undoubtedly be necessary to account for the exclusion and marginalization of many groups and individuals through civic recreation. Here, we find the comments of an anonymous reviewer particularly helpful in drawing our attention to ideas and frameworks that work from implicitly intersectional assumptions (rather than additive or piecemeal approaches). We see the immediate applicability of a Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2013) perspective, which extends from the assumptions (among others) that race and disability are interdependent social constructs that are both consequences of white supremacy and used separately and together to deny the rights of certain people. Indeed, dominant civic recreation notions of access discussed throughout this paper ignore or deny the access needs of many people of color, Indigenous people, and/or disabled people, collectively and simultaneously. The point is eloquently captured in disability justice conceptualizations of ableism, which reflects society’s assessment of people’s value based on any number of dimensions including appearance, culture, or ability to “excel” in particular ways (Lewis, 2022). Using such a definition, we see that most civic recreation organizations’ definition of access (and thereby, their attention and efforts) revolves around an elite conceptualization of what is “able” (of concern to civic recreation), thereby rejecting and devaluing those that do not meet the restrictive parameters as not the concern of civic recreation.

Third, the one manner in which our analysis incorporated interconnections and interdependence in marginalizing social categorizations is problematic in its own way. Our analysis intertwines and at times merges the extensions of what Harris (1993) referred to as “parallel systems of domination,” moving between and simultaneously addressing the experiences of Indigenous people and communities of color in the U.S. Most evidently, our empirical investigations illustrate racialization through civic recreation organization using examples of recreational colonization. However, settler colonialism is not solely a racial aggression—it is a political and legal attack on the sovereignty of heterogeneous Native nations and self-governing tribal communities (Biolsi, 2005). Future scholarship should investigate the alignment and divergence of how restrictive and privileged civic recreation schemas manifest to shape the experiences of Native persons and people of color, to better understand how organizational racialization and colonization processes interconnect, interact, and differ.

Conclusion

We set out in this paper to undertake a critical examination of a form of collective action recently recognized as “civic recreation.” A growing literature highlights constructive civic recreation impacts, including their roles in influencing the informal institutions that govern the “alternative” and “lifestyle” sports around which they are built (Carter et al., 2020), the positive environmental and conservation-related externalities that they generate (Carter, 2021; Schild, 2018), and the fact that they may serve as catalysts to greater civic engagement among practitioners (Schild, 2019). We sought a more nuanced understanding of civic recreation organizations’ benefits and liabilities by considering how they also reinforce the prevailing racial and colonizing dynamics of dominant cultures, and more specifically the white settler colonial groundings of overlapping outdoor recreation and environmentalism subcultures to which they belong (Boggs, 2017; Ho & Chang, 2021; Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2022; Wigglesworth, 2021).

We sought to illustrate, using the logic of Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations and the empirical example of climbing advocacy organizations, how fundamental assumptions tied to white environmentalism and recreational colonization are inadvertently perpetuated through civic recreation structures. The prevailing notions of climbing access around which much U.S. climbing advocacy is built reflect racialized schemas characterized by what Ho and Chang (2021, p. 2) deftly call “the presumption of equal access and the omission of colonial history that is rife in leisure and environmental discourse.” The analysis showed that even without intent to instigate racial discrimination, the coupling of racialized schemas and advocacy resources of climbing organizations has racializing effects that not only reproduce systematic marginalization but help justify it as well. We hope that by identifying and interrogating the foundational racialized schemas that undergird much civic recreation, advocates and stewards can devise, in the words of Ray (2019, p. 48), “potential interventions into the stunning consistency of racialized organizational inequality.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David P. Carter

David Carter is an associate professor of public policy and administration at the University of Utah. He researches policy and program design, community self-governance and collective action, and civic recreation organizations, among other topics.

Jeffrey N. Rose

Jeff Rose is an Assistant Professor in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism at the University of Utah. His research examines systemic inequities expressed through political economy, relationships to nature, class, and race.

Notes

1 The same critique has been made of the literature that studies outdoor recreation and leisure, more generally (Aitchison, 2009).

2 While it is likely that the subject of our paper overlaps or share similarities with other settler colonialist settings (i.e., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.), the U.S. has particular relationships to race and indigeneity that compel us to geographically, culturally, and politically situate our analyses.

3 Following Harris (1993) and Ansley, white supremacy is a social structure that systematically privileges white people across political, economic, cultural, and legal domains of society, rather than the more common referral to explicit racism expressed by hate groups.

4 The terms “Native” and “Native Americans” refer to tribal citizens that descend from Indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands, and we recognize that the term fails to reflect the diversity of independent nations, communities, and cultures that it serves as a stand-in for (Champagne, 2018).

5 The site is officially known as Devils Tower National Monument, managed by the National Park Service under the U.S. Department of the Interior.