Ecological Interaction Ritual Chains and the Moral Energy of Persistence in Climate Activism

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 12. Ecological Futures & Climate Activism

Abstract

Why do activists persist when the causes they defend appear already lost? Explanations of movement endurance emphasize organizational continuity, collective identity, and affective management, yet they largely treat the environment as a passive backdrop. This paper argues that persistence in climate activism can emerge from ecological interaction rituals: repetitive, embodied encounters between humans and dynamic natural forces that generate emotional energy and sacralized human–nonhuman relations. Extending interaction ritual theory beyond exclusively human co-presence, I conceptualize the environment as an agentic co-participant in chains of interaction rituals. Drawing on ethnographic research with a coastal environmental organization in Southern California, I identify a four-stage mechanism linking ecological encounter to sustained commitment: immersion, ritual inversion, entrainment, and moral expansion. Immersion recalibrates perception and affect as participants enter ecological space. Ritual inversion reorders agency as environmental forces act upon activists, generating humility and respect. Through repeated exposure, activists develop entrainment—rhythmic synchronization with environmental time—which heightens sensitivity to ecological disruption. These processes culminate in moral expansion, as solidaristic concern broadens to encompass marine life, coastlines, and future publics. Climate change thus threatens not only ecosystems but a sacred relational order experienced as morally binding. Persistence emerges not as irrational endurance but as the ongoing renewal of obligation through embodied human–nonhuman reciprocity. By identifying a nonhuman source of moral energy within interaction ritual chains, this study advances social-movement, cultural, and environmental sociology and provides a micro-foundation for understanding activist commitment under conditions of likely defeat.

Author

• Daniel Joseph Belback, University of California-San Diego