Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia 3a collective (carbon-emitting) species, in real terms some members of that species
are much less powerfully placed than others. Such inequities are highlighted
in the very calculative discourse of climate mitigation itself (May 2011). What
we might see as the “biopolitics” of the anthropocene for instance positions
Northerners as consumer-citizens with individualized carbon footprints. By
contrast, China’s 800 million rural people are depicted by that same politics of
regulation and “calculative value” as eco-masses, as the imagined other of climate
cosmopolitanism (May 2011).
This book then is a conscious and deliberate challenge to abstracted discourses
of biopolitics and quantified personhood. The chapters in this collection offer
instead a range of embedded socio-cultural perspectives on practices and
discourses that engage with sustainable modes of living, from farming in the city
to embracing cultural heritages of sustainable cooling practices. As such, this
collection also represents a challenge to the notion that the future of the region is
necessarily one of consumptive modernity, that is, that “developing” nations are
all on the same teleological path to capitalist modes of modernization through
industrialisation, post-industrialisation, and the like (Barry 2012; Shiva 2013).
This book aims in a modest way to offer a counterpoint to broad brush stroke
generalizations about environmentalism and Asia through offering grounded,
localized examples and case studies and highlighting the way in which notions
of and practices of sustainability are articulated to a variety of cultural, social,
political-economic structures at a range of scales—local, regional, national,
global. These are offered up not in order to deny the huge pressures and challenges
the region faces but to highlight the role of ordinary citizens and communities
in engaging with those challenges and attempting to develop alternative socially
and ecological sustainable futures.
This introductory chapter is structured as follows.
In the first section, I offer a brief overview of environmental governance,
movements, and civil society in South and East Asia, focusing on a few key
examples including China. The next section moves on to a discussion of lifestyle,
arguing that developmental models of Asia are often underpinned by normative
conceptions of carbon-intensive lifestyles and consumption. Discussing the gap
between discourses of Asian growth and the realities of Asian “middle-class”
lifestyles, I question the assumption that South East Asia is necessarily marching
along a path toward a Western modernity marked by globalized, middle-class
modes of living and consuming. The third section introduces the concept of
“multiple modernities” as a way of thinking through alternative pathways of
modernization. Discussing two Chinese exemplars of “ecological urbanization,”
however, I discuss the limitations of technology and market-driven “innovations”
that simply replicate the environmental and social costs of capitalism as usual.
Finally, I suggest that case studies of transformations in lifestyle regimes might
offer a more fruitful point of access into enacting and modeling the necessarily
major changes in sustainability practices required on a shared, collective level and
provide a summary of the chapters in this collection.