Let’s Do It! Occasional Activism and the Politics of Care in the Europeanizing Baltics

Let’s Do It! is a media-based environmental campaign that began in Estonia in 2008. In Lithuania, the campaign gained instant popularity by drawing large crowds of volunteers: in 2016 as much as 8% of the country’s population were involved in cleaning illegal dumps and planning forests. Focusing on the Lithuanian case, we examine social mechanisms that enable such global, media-based environmental activism to take root locally. While the literature on environmental movements is voluminous, it tends to overlook the interplay and tensions surrounding global and local forms of mobilization. Relying on the feminist approaches to the ethics of care, we argue that the eventification (Jacob 2013) of global environmental campaigns where volunteers mobilize for a few hours are expressions of a particular form of care for nature that does not require long-term commitments, responsibility or engagement, yet generate powerful public experiences of collective action and leave a lasting material mark on local landscapes. To capture these processes of both commitment and non-commitment, this paper develops the notion of occasional activism. More broadly, we show how these forms of activism become sites for practicing and experiencing ecological citizenship (Dobson 2003). Building on participant observations and content analysis of media report, our research shows how ecological citizenship becomes linked to the state nation-building process through which global campaigns materialize in local performances of care for the national territory as well as the larger European project.