12 Tania Lewis
necessarily reflexive and/or cosmopolitan, and may be articulated to concerns that
are not necessarily framed in terms of sustainability (i.e., food safety, social justice,
community health, land management, and/or rural identity), many of these practices
revolve around and construct communities of risk in which there are shared, strategic
moments of connectivity and civic participation. As Calhoun puts it,
Addressing risks affecting all humanity is crucial, but action is not likely to
be organized simply on the scale of humanity as a whole, nor in some sort
of “glocal” connection of the largest and smallest units. It will involve the
forging of solidarity of a range of scales from local communities to ethnic
groups, cities, countries, social movements, and religions
(Calhoun 2010, p. 605)The focus in this collection, then, is largely on initiatives that straddle the
boundary between civic forms of engagement and ordinary, everyday practices
life—what Scholsberg and Coles have termed “the new environmentalism of
everyday life” (Schlosberg and Coles 2015). In some cases, such practices have
developed due to a level of skepticism regarding political will and governmental
action toward environmental issues. As we’ll see, these kinds of practices are not
necessarily just driven by middle-class consumers but often bring together eclectic
communities of actors. While some of the cases discussed here may be small
scale and localized, they offer examples of how we might do things differently
across a range of scales of sustainability transition. Participatory, “community”-
forming but often digitally and globally connected, they suggest a kind of located
cosmopolitanism premised on local decision making rather than top-down modes
of environmentalism that often marginalize certain actors. This is not an argument
against policy-driven changes in socio-technical regimes but rather a call for policy
initiatives that draw from the lessons learned from grassroots innovations, enabling
democratic forms of change at the level of collectivized life practices and habits.
***The chapters in this volume speak to a range of the broad themes touched upon
in this introduction, from larger-scale discussions of urban design, discourses,
practices, and lifestyles to specific, focused case studies of “green” consumption
and sustainable living. While the first chapter sets the scene with a regionally
focused discussion, the remaining chapters offer a mix of national, city, and locally
based case studies. Chapters 3 to 6 focus on green consumption and eco-tourism;
chapters 7 to 9 discuss the role of media, activism, and environmentalism; while
the last three chapters examine community-based experiments in urban living,
with a particular focus on food production—an arena which, as Vandana Shiva’s
work foregrounds, has been a key site for battles around environmental justice
but also for modeling other ways of living beyond a dependence on fossil fuels
(Shiva 2008).