This interdisciplinary volume develops a distinctive new way of talking about environmental concerns in post-industrial society.

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.

ÔThe question Chris Gibson and his colleagues answer in this book is simple: ÒWhy is it not easy being green?Ó In 20 concise, focused and accessible chapters Ð from birthing to dying, from toilets to Christmas Ð they unveil the ambiguities, instabilities and paradoxes of affluent household living in the 21st century. In so doing, they temper the easy rhetoric of sustainable lifestyles with some authentic realities drawn from the affluent world. Earth system science is showing us the deep complexity of our material planet. This book brilliantly reflects back to us the complex materiality of our cultural lives.Õ Ð Mike Hulme, University of East Anglia, UK Contrary to the common rhetoric that being green is ÔeasyÕ, household sustainability is rife with contradiction and uncertainty. Households attempting to respond to the challenge to become more sustainable in everyday life face dilemmas on a daily basis when trying to make sustainable decisions. Various aspects of life such as cars, computers, food, phones and even birth and death, may all provoke uncertainty regarding the most sustainable course of action. Drawing on international scientific and cultural research, as well as innovative ethnographies, this timely book probes these wide-ranging sustainability dilemmas, assessing the avenues open to households trying to improve their sustainability. The authors engage critically, and constructively, with the proposition that households are a key scale of action on climate change. They confront dilemmas of practice and circumstance, and cultural norms of lifestyle and consumerism that are linked to troublesome environmental problems Ð and question whether they can be easily unsettled. The work also illuminates the informal and often unheralded work by households Ð frequently the poorest Ð in reducing their environmental burden. This important book is critical to understanding both the barriers to household sustainability and the ÔunsungÕ sustainability work carried out by householders. Containing a unique combination of science and cultural research, this fascinating book will appeal to researchers and students of environmental science, environmental studies, sustainability studies, climate change adaptation, geography, sociology, cultural studies, science and technology studies, as well as energy studies and housing research. Policy-makers in various levels of government working through sustainability problems, environmental educators, social planners and sustainability officers working for governments, will also find much to interest them in this unique book.

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.

′Bennett provides a well organized, very readable and interesting discussion of a number of significant everyday cultural forms and I am confident student readers will find the book very valuable′ - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice. Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to ′the cultural turn′, which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed. Following this are themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture, such as media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive literature review is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance to our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is explained. Lucid, meticulous and illustrated with a host of examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies.

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.

Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia offers the latest understanding of complex global problems in the region, including nuclear weapons, urban insecurity, energy, and climate change. Detailed case studies of China, North and South Korea, and Japan demonstrate the importance of civil society and ‘civic diplomacy’ in reaching shared solutions to these problems in East Asia and beyond. Each chapter describes regional civil society initiatives that tackle complex challenges to East Asia’s security. In doing so, the book identifies key pressure points at which civil society can push for constructive changes¯especially ones that reduce the North Korean threat to its neighbors. Unusually, this book is both theoretical and practical. Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia presents strategies that can be led by civil society and negotiated by its diplomats to realize peace, security, and sustainability worldwide. It shows that networked civic diplomacy offers solutions to these urgent issues that official ‘complex diplomacy’ cannot. By providing a new theoretical framework based on empirical observation, this volume is a must read for diplomats, scholars, students, journalists, activists, and individual readers seeking insight into how to solve the crucial issues of our time.

This is the academic Age of the Neoliberal Arts. Campuses—as places characterized by democratic debate and controversy, wide ranges of opinion typical of vibrant public spheres, and service to the larger society—are everywhere being creatively destroyed in order to accord with market and military models befitting the academic-industrial complex. While it has become increasingly clear that facilitating the sustainability movement is the great 21st century educational challenge at hand, this book asserts that it is both a dangerous and criminal development today that sustainability in higher education has come to be defined by the complex-friendly “green campus” initiatives of science, technology, engineering and management programs. By contrast, Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts takes the standpoints of those working for environmental and ecological justice in order to critique the unsustainable disciplinary limitations within the humanities and social sciences, as well as provide tactical reconstructive openings toward an empowered liberal arts for sustainability. Greening the Academy thus hopes to speak back with a collective demand that sustainability education be defined as a critical and moral vocation comprised of the diverse types of humanistic study that will benefit the well-being of our emerging planetary community and its numerous common locales.

Contemporary architecture, and the culture it reflects dependent as it is on fossil fuels, has contributed to the cause and necessity of a burgeoning green process that emerged over the past half century. This text is the first to offer a comprehensive critical history and analysis of the greening of architecture through accumulative reduction of negative environmental effects caused by buildings, urban designs and settlements. Describing the progressive development of green architecture from 1960 to 2010, it illustrates how it is ever evolving and ameliorated through alterations in form, technology, materials and use and it examines different places worldwide that represent a diversity of cultural and climatic contexts. The book is divided into seven chapters: with an overview of the environmental issues and the nature of green architecture in response to them, followed by an historic perspective of the pioneering evolution of green technology and architectural integration over the past five decades, and finally, providing the intransigent and culturally pervasive current examples within a wide range of geographic territories. The greening of architecture is seen as an evolutionary process that is informed by significant world events, climate change, environmental theories, movements in architecture, technological innovations, and seminal works in architecture and planning throughout each decade over the past fifty years. This time period is bounded on one end by the awareness of environmental problems beginning in the 1960's, the influential texts by Rachel Carson, E.F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller and Steward Brand, and the impact of the OPEC Oil Embargo of 1973, and on the other end the pervasiveness of the necessary greening of architecture that includes, systemic reforms in architectural and urban design, land use planning, transportation, agriculture, and energy production found in the 2000's. The greening process moves from remediation to holistic models of architecture. Geographical landscapes give a global account of the greening process where some examples are parallel and sympathetic, and others are in clear contrast to one another with very individuated approaches. Certain events, like the Rio Summit in 1992 and Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and themes, such as the Hannover Principles in 2000, provide a dynamic ideological critique as well as a formal and technical discussion of the embodied and accumulative content of greening principles in architecture.