1 Sustainability, lifestyle, and
consumption in Asia
Tania Lewis
A climate of contradictions
This edited collection is concerned with the lifestyle and consumption practices
of ordinary people and their implications for environmentalism. Discussions of
environmental issues in South and East Asia tend to be primarily framed as large-
scale problems of state and global governance, often in turn linked to market
mechanisms. In contrast, this book’s concerns lie with more everyday experiences
of and engagement with sustainability, including a focus on forms of everyday
activism and “experiments” in sustainable living. These alternative practices and
discourses are of course invariably shaped by larger state and civic structures
(although in some cases grassroots interventions may have a “trickle up” impact
on such structures), but they also can represent a significant critical counterpoint
to state logics of environmental governance.
There are a number of reasons why everyday environmentalisms are important
to examine in Asia, not least of which being the question of global environmental
justice given that historically the burden of environmental impacts created by
the Global North has fallen on ordinary people in so-called “developing” nations
(Shiva 2008). First, while localized environmental practices in the Global North
have been widely documented and debated across a range of academic scholarship,
there has been much less work done in this space in South and East Asia in Asian
or English-language contexts, though there has been growing media coverage
across the region of the sustainability practices of ordinary people, from rooftop
productive gardening in Hong Kong to China’s “back-to-the-land” movement and
the rise of permaculture in Malaysia (Choong 2014; Live Curiously Magazine
2014; Thompson 2014).
Second, while local practices may have sustainability outcomes, they may not
necessarily be defined primarily in terms of environmentalism. It is important
then to examine the ways in which issues of sustainability are performed and
negotiated on the ground, particularly in the context of countries where civil
society-state relations are only just starting to emerge. What social actors are
participating in grassroots initiatives that engage with sustainability and in what
ways? How do questions of class, gender, urban versus rural location, and so on
frame such engagements?