Everyday Possibilities

The common, often mundane routines of everyday life are largely absent from research and teaching on global environmental governance. Few essays on the topic appear in this journal, for instance, and the major textbooks of the field are equally silent. Everyday life is, after all, so “everyday,” even when marked by small acts of environmental stewardship: it is uneventful, sometimes idiosyncratic, often banal, and wholly incommensurate with the magnitude of change required by any transition to sustainability. It is little wonder, then, that the field is more comfortable with the interplay of elite behavior, concentrated economic power, scientific knowledge, social movements, and transnational bargaining and blocking, with everyday life as the dependant variable in the equation. From this analytic perch, the routines and small choices that define our day are things to be acted upon by larger forces that can be analyzed and shaped, rather than the domain of power and change in their own right.

As convenient as it may be to view daily choice and household routine as the product of larger forces and structures (e.g. price, subsidies, information flow, prevailing norms, the architecture of consumer choice), drawing the causal arrow in only one direction may be analytically incomplete and politically foolish, especially at a time when the deficiencies of science based, elite driven, state-brokered regime building are so evident. A closer look at everyday life—its rhythms and possibilities as they bear on an individual and collective politics of environment—may open up critical lines of inquiry and action. In the search for a potent politics of transformation, everyday life may not be so everyday after all.

One such line of inquiry, advanced implicitly by Jason Czarnezki in Everyday Environmentalism: Law, Nature, & Individual Behavior, engages the politics (or lack thereof) of green consumption. Many have argued that as well-intentioned as “buying green” may be, the ultimate biospheric impact of these everyday choices is marginal at best.¹ Moreover, to the extent that voting with one’s wallet comes to supplant voting with one’s ballot or, worse yet, one’s sustained activism, green consumerism can undermine a norm of civic responsibility central to lasting regulation of global production and consumption. Most debilitating, though, is the social-change narrative that green consumerism quietly advances. By privileging easy, “low hanging fruit” behaviors like swapping out light bulbs or reducing the idle time of one’s automobile (which make aggregate sense only if a large portion of the population diligently participates), advocates of green consumption unwittingly propagate the myth that social change occurs only, or best, when super-majorities unite around small changes in everyday life. To the extent that contemporary environmental action has tilted toward an unpromising politics of guilt focused on the individual behavior of the many, rather than an engaging politics of structural transformation that mobilizes the most committed, we have only the green-consumption advocates to blame.

Czarnezki, though, is unpersuaded. His tightly written book (weighing in at 150 pages with sometimes extensive legal footnotes) is written for the uninitiated who may, in the author’s words, “lament that the environmental field is ‘hopeless,’ ‘sad,’ ‘full of problems,’ or simply ‘depressing’” (p. 4). Like many before him, Czarnezki hopes to remedy such despair by underscoring small, individual eco-actions accessible to all. After an opening history of consumption in the United States, his book turns to climate change and carbon, food, and sprawl. Each chapter documents how small acts of everyday life conspire to generate enormous environmental damage, identifies lifestyle changes that might reduce the trauma, and documents a variety of state regulatory action that could fill the breach.

Everyday Environmentalism is least promising when it uncritically extols the promise of “low hanging fruit.” The simple and easy things will not save us; privileging them in any political analysis denies the necessity and promise of...