Cultivating Surfers’ Sense Of Place: Community Building And Environmental Action On Oahu’s North Shore

Abstract

The relationship between surfing and environmental action has been widely debated by scholars of surfer environmentalism, surf ontologies, surf tourism, and through popular surf media. Scholars have argued that while surfing promotes a relationship with the environment, it often fails to lead to surfers’ active engagement in local environmental action. However, this body of scholarship has not fully addressed how individual surfers' relationships with surfing and the local surf community impact their engagement with environmental action. In this thesis, I examine how surfers develop a sense of place and juxtapose it against responses by resident surfers and surf tourists, in order to reveal the relationship between community building and participation in environmental volunteering. I argue that surfers’ sense of place is increasingly authenticated through participation in environmental volunteering on Oahu’s north shore. This is highlighted by a range of environmental programs that have proliferated across the North Shore and, in recent decades, have become increasingly important as community building activities. Today, environmental volunteering activities are central to the local surf community and extend the community well beyond surfers to include non-surfers and non-residents. This thesis sheds new light on the relationship between surf communities and environmental action. In chapter one, I survey current literature of community building, surfer ontologies, sensing place, and coastal development as well as outline my methods. In chapter two, I investigate a range of variables to identify what constitutes the North Shore surf community. In chapter three, I examine North Shore surfers’ pro-environmental action, and illustrate how surfing and community recognition are motivational factors for environmental action. In chapter four, I examine how surf tourists on the North Shore immerse themselves in the local North Shore surf community and its implications for their development of an “authentic” sense of place during their visit. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of surfers’ authenticated sense of place within the local surf community and its impacts on community building, environmental volunteering, and environmental programs developed by both small surf community and large surf industry organizations.