‘I Talked to My Tree and He Talked Back’: Activism, Nature and Meaning-making

Abstract

This inquiry is primarily concerned with how activists construct meaning about their experiences defending nature. In the previous chapters I surveyed radical environmentalism, realised that not enough attention is given to the nature activists defend and developed three concepts to help understand what is going on when radical environmentalists defend nature. This chapter describes how the research was undertaken and provides some demographic information about the research participants. It develops a research to gather the kind of data needed to shed light on the research questions and explores how to interpret the stories that were told. The first half of the chapter is largely theoretical, while the second half reflects upon my experiences interviewing activists.