Running in the Family: Australian Migrants’ Environmental Care as Inter-generational and Domestic Civic Practice

Abstract

This article presents and analyses findings from a pilot project in which seventeen young first- and second-generation migrants resident in metropolitan Sydney were interviewed about their environmental care practices. From this and other comparable studies, it theorises about the value of documenting and framing intergenerational migrant practices that may or may not be deliberately framed as ‘environmentalism’ as a form of civic practice working ‘quietly’ or inadvertently to resist environmental crisis. A close analysis of responses from the interviews and the subsequent workshop reveals that contrary to mainstream narratives of what is seen as ‘sustainability practice’ and who is understood as engaging in it, many migrants learn to practice environmental care within everyday domestic settings and from their family members. Moreover, these may begin inadvertently due to the need to be thrifty in one’s early period of settlement in a new country but are often continued by subsequent generations even when the economic necessity has been addressed. The article builds on scholarship about the need to untap and learn from the everyday domestic practices of culturally diverse communities in immigrant nations in the Global North, even though these may not be viewed as conventional, middle-class environmentalism.