Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia 11Global North but “have left behind a legacy of toxic pollution in Chinese villages,
due to poor manufacturing infrastructure and illegal dumping” (Zhang 2015, p. 333).
Transforming lives
[W]e can continue to do largely nothing to avert impending climate disaster,
or we can [...reconstruct] this moment of crisis as a perceptible opening for
the actualization of significant social and political transformation
(Skillington 2015, p. 232)While climate change is largely framed in policy and governmental discourses
in terms of a crisis of contemporary fossil fuel–based ways of living, governmental
and political “solutions” based on technology and market-driven approaches have
had a poor track record in providing real, socially equitable alternatives to carbon-
intensive collectivized life practices. As we saw with the Chinese examples above,
while Asia as a “developing” region more broadly has a major opportunity to lead
the way in terms of offering alternatives to “imperial” lifestyles, through drawing
on a range of different social and cultural practices, and governmental, economic
and political heritages, its governments are often imbricated in global marketized
systems of value and relations of power that greatly limit the ability or will to change.
As noted, Ulrick Beck has argued for a refiguring of understandings of the
global shared risk of climate change in terms of “a cosmopolitan perspective” in
which a full recognition of the consequences of climate change involves what he
terms “emancipatory catastrophism.” For Beck, the era of the anthropocene is one
that radically reframes our basic ethical and existential parameters:
Climate change is not climate change; it is at once much more and something
very different. It is a reformation of modes of thought, of lifestyles and
consumer habits, of law, economy, science and politics
(Beck 2015, p. 79)There is not much evidence of Beck’s emancipatory global cosmopolitanism
to date at the level of nation states, and global organizational efforts likewise, it
could be argued, do little more than fiddle around the edges of capitalist modernity
rather than offering a radical new cosmopolitan imaginary. Craig Calhoun,
discussing both the potential and the limits of Beck’s conception of climate-based
cosmopolitanism, argues that “destruction of the environment may be proceeding
on a global scale, creating shared risks that put all humanity into a ‘community
of fate,’ but this does not guarantee that we will find a cosmopolitan solution”
(Calhoun 2010, p. 607).
Given this context, this collection is concerned with thinking through how
everyday social practices and ways of living might offer a more fruitful point of
access into enacting and modeling the necessary changes in sustainability practices
required on a shared, collective level. While the practices examined here (from
food communities to air pollution monitoring) are often highly localized, are not