The Greening Of Everyday Life

The Greening of Everyday Life develops a distinctive new way of talking about environmental concerns in post-industrial society. It brings together several conceptual frameworks with a diversity of case studies and practical examples of efforts to orient everyday material practices toward greater sustainability. The volume builds upon internal criticisms of dominant strands of contemporary environmentalism in post-industrial societies, and develops a new approach which emerges from a number of disciplines, but is unified by a normative concern for the material objects and practices familiar to members of societies in their everyday lives. In exploring alternatives, the chapter authors utilize conceptual frameworks rooted in environmental justice, new materialism, and social practice theory and apply it to the everyday; attention to urban biodiversity, infrastructure for storm water run-off, green home remodelling, household toxicity, community gardens and farmers markets, bicycling and automobility, alternative technologies, and more. With contributions from leading international and emerging scholars, this volume critically explores specific strategies and actions taken to generate homes, communities, and livelihoods that might be scaled-up to promote more sustainable societies.

The Greening of Everyday Life develops a distinctive new way of talking about environmental concerns in post-industrial society. It brings together several conceptual frameworks with a diversity of case studies and practical examples of efforts to orient everyday material practices toward greater sustainability. The volume builds upon internal criticisms of dominant strands of contemporary environmentalism in post-industrial societies, and develops a new approach which emerges from a number of disciplines, but is unified by a normative concern for the material objects and practices familiar to members of societies in their everyday lives. In exploring alternatives, the chapter authors utilize conceptual frameworks rooted in environmental justice, new materialism, and social practice theory and apply it to the everyday; attention to urban biodiversity, infrastructure for storm water run-off, green home remodelling, household toxicity, community gardens and farmers markets, bicycling and automobility, alternative technologies, and more. With contributions from leading international and emerging scholars, this volume critically explores specific strategies and actions taken to generate homes, communities, and livelihoods that might be scaled-up to promote more sustainable societies.

Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.

The idea of “sustainability” has gone mainstream. What began as a grassroots movement to promote responsible development has become a bullet point in corporate ecobranding strategies. This BIT examines the conflict between ecobranding and true sustainability and considers the ambiguous influence of Prius-driving movie stars.

Everyday People Save the Planet and So Can You: A Qualitative Examination of Green Lifestyles in Lowcountry South Carolina examines three interview studies, conducted over the last two decades, with green parents, choice utility bike commuters, and necessity utility bike commuters. This book draws on qualitative analyses of the data and literature (social practice, social innovation, embodiment, and attention economy research/theory) to ask and answer the question of how advocates and policy makers can enable pro-environmental behavior in people’s everyday lives. Deborah McCarthy Auriffeille begins by focusing on the particularities of living green in Lowcountry South Carolina, a region that is both highly conservative and conservationist. She then examines the pathways to, challenges of, and meanings/motivations that practitioners told about green living. Finally, she draws on analyses of respondents’ narratives and interdisciplinary theory to make policy recommendations and suggestions for future social science research directions.

The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening are not only physical but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning—a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.

A multidisciplinary consideration of how effective environmental citizenship can be in achieving sustainability, with theoretical, practical, and ethnographic perspectives.

With every new day's headlines the world is shifting into a new reality. Freakish weather patterns, widespread smog alerts, and unsafe water advisories are problems that we all need to tackle. But we still have to drive cars, pack school lunches, do laundry, unclog toilets, and throw dinner parties. So how do we do the things we do without making a mess of our world? Green for Life is a practical guide to living the life you want, but with the reduced impact the planet needs. Well known for her involvement in environmental issues, Gillian Deacon takes you through the stuff of everyday life and explains how to do it with minimal environmental impact. Green for Life is a must-have guide for people who know they have to do something, but don't know where to start.