Glitch environmentalism

Birding is a form of wildlife recreation that often involves exclusive communities and spaces, where both access and practice are policed along hegemonic lines. This paper examines the experiences of birders from marginalised communities who, through online networks, were able to challenge birding's historical hegemonies during the COVID-19 lockdowns and beyond. Our research participants were members of the Self-Isolating Bird Club (SIBC), a grassroots birding group founded on social media in 2020, which challenged preconceptions concerning both who wildlife was for and how it could be enjoyed. We contextualise the SIBC alongside other digitally-empowered wildlife communities and theorise these practices as ‘glitches’ in contemporary environmentalism. We present glitches as generative fissures that dissent, dismantle, and disorient the status quo, yet their impacts are generally understood to be fleeting and momentary. Engaging Legacy Russell's manifesto, Glitch Feminism, and recent geographical scholarship on the glitch's political atmospheres, this paper examines the conditions in which the fleeting impact of glitches can gain duration and engender lasting social change. Informed by affirmative, qualitative accounts of female-identifying members of the SIBC, we outline the participatory work through which the disruptive effects of glitches can endure and note their implications for wildlife recreation spaces like bird hides, parks, and nature reserves, which have historically made non-conforming bodies and marginalised people feel unwelcome or unsafe. Accounting for such duration, we develop work on glitches in digital geography and digital ecologies by conceptualising ‘glitch environmentalism’.