Sustainable Materialism: Environmental Movements and the Politics of Everyday Life

David Schlosberg · Luke Craven

gush 2019 · Oxford University Press

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A growing number of environmental groups focus on more sustainable practices in everyday life, from the development of new food systems, to community solar, to more sustainable fashion. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with either purely individualistic and consumer responses or standard political processes and movement tactics, many activists and groups are increasingly focusing on restructuring everyday practices of the circulation of the basic needs of everyday life. This work labels such action sustainable materialism, and examines the political and social motivations of activists and movement groups involved in this growing and expanding practice. The central argument is that these movements are motivated by four key factors: frustration with the lack of accomplishments on broader environmental policies, a desire for environmental and social justice, an active and material resistance to the power of traditional industries, and a form of sustainability that is attentive to the flow of materials through bodies, communities, economies, and environments. In addition to these motivations, these movements demonstrate such material action as political action, in contrast to existing critiques of new materialism as apolitical or post-political. Overall, sustainable materialism is explored as a set of movements with unique qualities, based in collective rather than individual action, a dedication to local and prefigurative politics, and a demand that sustainability be practiced in everyday life - starting with the materials and flows that provide food, power, clothing, and other basic needs.

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David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations, Payne-Scott Professor, and Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. His main theoretical interests are in environmental and climate justice, climate adaptation and resilience, and environmental movements and the practices of everyday life - what he terms sustainable materialism. Professor Schlosberg's more applied work includes public perceptions of adaptation and resilience, the health and social impacts of climate change, and responses to food insecurity. His previous authored, co-authored, or co-edited books with Oxford include Defining Environmental Justice, The Climate-Challenged Society, and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Luke Craven is a Research Fellow in the Public Service Research Group at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. Dr Craven's research focuses on developing new tools to understand and address complex policy challenges. He works with a range of public sector organisations to adapt and apply systems frameworks to support policy design, implementation, and evaluation. He is known for developing the System Effects methodology, which is widely used to analyse complex causal relationships in participatory and qualitative data. He is also involved in number of collaborative projects that are developing innovative solutions to complex policy challenges, which includes work focused on food insecurity, health inequality, and climate resilience. Dr Craven holds a PhD in Political Science at the University of Sydney, where he remains affiliated with the Sydney Environment Institute, and the Charles Perkins Centre.