Part II
Living here
Green distinctions: the performance of
identity among environmental activists1
Dave Horton
Introduction
With increasing media attention to ‘the environment’, a dominant representation
of environmental activism is of spectacular and often confrontational
events in the public sphere. Many studies of social movements, tending primarily
to focus on political protest, follow this preoccupation with the most
visible and dramatic manifestations of contemporary environmentalism.
Although some scholars are interested in analysing the ‘non-political’dimensions
of social movements like environmentalism, this interest is often circumscribed
by the extent to which ‘the cultural’ can be used to explain ‘the political’, which
remains for most theorists the proper concern of social movement research.
Environmentalism is a political force and high-proﬁle environmental controversies
are important objects of study. But environmentalism is also about the
everyday. Some activists might occasionally participate in media-friendly stunts,
but as part of their green campaigns most activists also issue press releases, write
letters, organize town centre stalls, and attend public inquiries. And beyond
these public performances exists a less visible world of continuous action. All
social movements are sustained by ‘submerged networks’ (Melucci, 1985, 1989),
and within the submerged networks of ‘the green movement’ activists organize
and attend meetings, study a whole range of environmentally relevant texts, and
grapple with the development of green cultural practice. This sphere of everyday
life is an important, and frequently overlooked, part of contemporary environmentalism.
Material culture is a hugely signiﬁcant constitutive component
of this sphere of ‘the everyday’. Particular objects, and particular ways of living
with the material world, are vital to the production and reproduction of both
the everyday lives of environmental activists and environmentalism as a whole.
This chapter explores the importance of materialities to the performance of
identity. It argues that distinctive and distinguished green lifestyles depend
on the material objects environmental activists tend to live with and without.
Further, it argues that activists’ material relations are themselves performative
of distinctive green lifestyles. The case of environmental activists provides a
clear demonstration of the wider signiﬁcance of materialities to the performance
© The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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64
of identity, a signiﬁcance which remains relatively unexplored within contemporary
social science.
How does one earn ‘green distinction’, the markings of a green identity? This
chapter argues that among environmental activists green distinction is not
earned through the rational articulation of green perspectives or the correct
espousal of green political ideology, so much as through the embodied performance
of appropriate green identity. Through following the logic of their
habitus, playing according to green cultural codes, activists perform an identity
which earns them distinctively green distinction.2
It should be clear that by performance
I do not mean the occasional and ephemeral staging of an ordinarily
hidden identity, but rather the ongoing, repeated and routinized enactment of
the green cultural codes promoted by the discourses of contemporary environmentalism,
which brings forth a distinctive way of life. The green identities of
environmental activists are, in other words, performed throughout everyday life.
The setting
My ethnographic research, comprising participant-observation alongside a set
of focus groups and a series of individual interviews, was centred on the green
networks of Lancaster, England. Situated in a relatively remote and rural part
of the north-west, between the sands of Morecambe Bay and the moors of the
Forest of Bowland, the city is close to the upland National Parks of the Lake
District and Yorkshire Dales. With good road and rail links, and near to some
of Britain’s most prized landscapes, Lancaster’s location makes it something of
a ‘gateway’ to important areas of outdoor recreation.
Lancaster’s population of around 50,000 includes very signiﬁcant numbers
of students, who come to study at its two institutes of higher education. The
city’s green networks are comprised almost entirely of people who originally
came to the city to study, and who decided to remain once their formal education
was complete. These green networks are unusually vibrant. Since Lancaster
University’s foundation in 1964, the city has developed a reputation as a centre
for new social movement politics (Bagguley et al., 1990), and in recent years this
reputation has become distinctively greened. There has been longstanding and
very effective opposition to proposed road and housing developments, occasional
‘radical’ environmental protest events such as Reclaim the Streets and
Critical Mass, and prominent campaigns by local members of national environmental
organizations such as Friends of the Earth and Transport 2000. Currently,
the area also has the highest number of elected Green Party councillors
in the country.
There are visible signs of the city’s green distinction. Most obviously, close
to the city centre is a ‘green complex’, comprising three important spaces: a vegetarian
wholefood workers’ co-operative; a vegetarian café, the favourite informal
meeting place of environmental activists; and a basement ofﬁce, currently
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tives over the years. Beyond this ‘green complex’, a short distance across town
lies a thriving community centre which is the site of many ‘green meetings’, both
the formal, planned meetings of speciﬁc groups and campaigns, and the informal
and often unplanned meetings of the city’s environmental activists. These
signs of an ‘alternative culture’ can be found in other British city centres; in
Lancaster, however, such places act as important supports to a green community
larger than would be expected from the city’s relatively small size.3
The activists
My ﬁeldwork concentrated on post-1960s expressions of environmentalism. The
label ‘environmental activist’ therefore includes people aligning themselves with
well-known if relatively ‘new’ environmental organizations such as Friends of
the Earth and the Green Party, as well as people more resistant to organizational
labels and, whilst identifying with groups such as Reclaim the Streets and
Earth First!, tending to form loose and ephemeral networks around speciﬁc
direct actions. The category ‘environmental activist’ thus conﬂates important
differences in the forms of politics practised by individuals. Broadly, the
‘reformists’ tend to recognize and work within existing political structures, while
the ‘radicals’ tend ordinarily and deliberately to bypass the established political
system, and instead favour ‘direct action’.
These different styles of environmental activism are performed by, and performative
of, different material assemblages, and result in distinctive green
lifestyles. At the ‘radical’ extreme, for example, activists often favour highly
mobile and ‘close-to-nature’ modes of dwelling, such as yurts and benders.
‘Radical’ activists also sometimes embody a ‘counter-cultural’ ethos through
transgressive styles of dress and hair. At the other extreme, the lifestyles of some
‘reformists’ differ in remarkably few ostensive ways from the lifestyles of people
beyond the boundaries of green culture.
At one point in the research process a group of locally-based activists
engaged in ﬁerce (and predominantly ‘online’) debate around the reformulation
of the traditional ‘reformist’/‘radical’ split according to the dress codes of
‘ﬂeece’ and ‘khaki’. Beyond acting as visible boundary markers, and contributing
to the constitution of collective identities, these two broad styles of dress
are powerfully symbolic of different predispositions to the ‘natural world’:
among ‘reformists’ the wearing of ‘ﬂeece’ fabrics (as well as walking boots and
hi-tech waterproofs) signals an ever-present orientation to the outdoors, a willingness
to be out in, engage with, but ultimately move through ‘nature’; among
‘radicals’ the wearing of khaki (and many layers of more ‘natural’ fabrics) symbolizes
a desire to dwell more permanently, and perhaps even to make a home,
in ‘the natural world’; to merge in an embodied way, and become one, with
‘nature’.
Whether primarily ‘radical’ or ‘reformist’ in orientation, activists tend to be
educated to at least degree level. Activists with the strongest green identities tend
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to be in their late-20s or 30s, to be childless, and to be committed to activism
as ‘a way of life’, either surviving without much paid work or ﬁnding ways of
getting paid to be an activist. Many other activists, not such central actors in
the local green networks, are employed in health, education and social welfare
professions, and maintain their green political commitments alongside career
and parenthood. If people tend to enter green networks in search of sociality
among like-minded others, they tend eventually to reduce their involvements,
and sometimes altogether leave these networks as a result of growing commitments
to family and work (see Klatch, 2000). This does not mean the pursuit of
a green lifestyle is a passing fad; but it does mean that for many people the phase
of group-based political activism which forcefully contributes to the greening of
lifestyle tends to be of limited duration.
What unites activists is a willingness to perform environmental commitment
in public. Activists seek to demonstrate their understandings to and impress
their concerns upon others (Barry, 1999). Whether they do so rumbustiously
or quietly, these activists are in their different ways responding to, and acting
on behalf of, a variety of ‘natures under threat’. Typically, activists’ concerns
include: the planet and its people; confronting the relentless spread of capitalism,
consumerism and related ills such as ‘climate chaos’; a geographically proximate
and intimately known ‘local nature’, jeopardized by roads, urban sprawl
and polluting factories; and their own bodies, bombarded by an increasingly
complex cocktail of chemicals with highly uncertain consequences.
The greening of distinction
People in afﬂuent societies are experiencing weakening identiﬁcation with, and
corresponding loss of commitment to, a whole range of institutions around
which strong identities were once built (Bauman, 1993, 1995). Ties to locality,
class, work, religion, politics and family which once structured a person’s orientation
to the world, are all now in various states of ﬂux and rupture. In contrast
to the more prescribed collective identities of the past, today’s search for
social solidarity and sense of belonging tends increasingly to revolve around
lifestyles, with their shared values, interests and commitments (Hetherington,
1998; Maffesoli, 1996). Environmentalism is an important recipient of this contemporary
search for new forms of community.
In the high consumption societies at least, environmentalism tends to be a
class-based politics. In line with previous studies (Berglund, 1998; Cotgrove and
Duff, 1980; Eckersley, 1989; Jasper, 1997; Lichterman, 1996), Lancaster’s environmental
activists, almost without exception, belong to the educated fractions
of what is often called ‘the new middle class’ (Butler and Savage, 1995). Yet, like
other ‘new social movements’, environmentalism seems to be values-led, and to
lack clear class interests. In other words, environmentalism is ‘of a class’ but not
‘for a class’ (Offe, 1985). Environmentalism is a critique of the untrammelled
pursuit of economic growth, and challenges the hegemony of material afﬂuence
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and conspicuous consumption as routes to distinction. Environmental activists,
in questioning the value of economic capital, seek to promote new versions of
legitimate taste, prioritizing the earning of what might be called ‘green capital’.
‘Taste classiﬁes, and it classiﬁes the classiﬁer. Social subjects, classiﬁed by
their classiﬁcations, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make’
(Bourdieu, 1984: 6). Bourdieu’s analysis of lifestyles in 1960s France can be
applied to the green lifestyles developed among environmental activists in
Britain today. In particular, Bourdieu’s descriptions of the lifestyles of ‘the intellectuals’,
those high in cultural capital and low in economic capital, seem apposite.
Environmental activists distinguish themselves by the ‘austerity of elective
restriction’, the ‘self-imposed constraint’ of ‘asceticism’, which is one strategy
through which the dominated fractions of the dominant class demonstrate their
freedom from ‘brutish necessity’ on the one hand and proﬂigate ‘luxury’ on the
other, and assert the distinctive power of their cultural capital. This provides
them with a means of seeing the world differently, and of playing according to
a different set of rules to everyone else (Bourdieu, 1984: 254–5).
Lifestyle practices form around shared tastes. Taste is ‘the product of the conditionings
associated with a particular class of conditions of existence [and so]
unites all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing
them from all others’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 56). Those with approximately equivalent
levels of cultural and economic capital share a habitus, which is productive
of values, tastes and practices cohering into a distinctive lifestyle (Bourdieu,
1984: 260). For me, one of the great achievements of Bourdieu’s work, Distinction,
is the way it so persuasively demonstrates that lifestyle, ‘a systematic commitment
which orients and organizes the most diverse practices’ (1984: 55–6,
172–4), is inherently cultural. In other words, particular lifestyles depend for
their organization on speciﬁc spaces, times, and—the focus here—materialities.
Environmental activists lead distinctive ways of life. Typically, activists practise
vegetarianism, favour organic and locally-grown foods (often growing it
themselves), and move around locally on foot or by bicycle; they also tend to
live without either a car or television, and they strive to reduce their dependence
on ‘wage labour’. In some of the ethnographic descriptions which pepper Distinction
Bourdieu could be talking about contemporary British environmental
activists. Activists’ ‘leisure pursuits’ are oriented to the ‘culturally most legitimate
and economically cheapest practices’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 267), such as
walking and cycling, and a taste for ‘natural, wild nature’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 220).
Activists values, tastes and practices cohere into what might be called ‘ascetic
lifestyles’ (Savage et al., 1992: ch 6).
Identity performance and the assemblage of green lifestyle
Without strong ascribed identities, individuals must make choices about the
kind of person they will become (Melucci, 1996a). With evermore ‘options’ for
the investment of identity, people must learn to belong to a culture; the active
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construction of lifestyle becomes a personal responsibility. Like the ethnographer
approaching the culture as an object of study, would-be environmentalists
enter, negotiate and develop competence within an initially strange cultural
world. Over time, immersion within a shared world produces appropriate forms
of performance and competence in culturally speciﬁc behaviours and understandings,
what Melucci (1996b) calls ‘cultural codes’ and what Bourdieu (1984)
terms ‘a scheme of perception and appreciation’. Gradually the person learns
to belong, to feel ‘at home’ (on the progressive internalization of the forces structuring
any ﬁeld of action, and the consequent development of the accomplished
actor, or ‘player’, see Bourdieu, 1990, 1998).
The green cultural world, or habitus, is productive of green performances.
These green performances are enacted according to a continuously made and
remade set of green cultural codes, which regulate ‘appropriate’ behaviour.
These codes, similar to norms, are the encapsulation of behaviours appropriate
to the green cultural world. They are neither so rigid, mechanical and determining
as rules, nor so free and voluntaristic as options.
Here, it might be helpful to distinguish between what I am calling ‘green
codes’ on the one hand, and ‘green scripts’ on the other. Scripts are more settled
narratives to which activists must conform, whereas codes are speciﬁc behaviours
which can be breached so long as they are made to ﬁt a relevant script.
Put differently, green scripts are comprised of green codes which are widely and
routinely recognized, if not always faithfully adhered to. Thus, for example,
shopping in a supermarket is a breach of green cultural codes, but by placing
this behaviour in context, and appealing to mitigating circumstances, such as
‘lack of time’, the ‘need for economy’, or ‘the requirements of non-green others
(children, guests)’, supermarket shopping can still conform to a green script.
Here, supermarket shopping is done ‘guiltily’, with the appropriate awareness
that it is not ‘good, green’ practice. Similarly, ‘moving to the country’, in order
to lead a ‘greener’ lifestyle involving greater self-sufﬁciency in food and more
intimate, embodied contact with ‘the natural world’ is a green script to which
many activists aspire; it is also one which, it is commonly recognized, almost
inevitably leads to the breaking of the green code of carlessness. The breaking
of green cultural codes depletes green capital, but the deviation from green
scripts spoils green identity. Thus, provided performances conform to a settled
green cultural script, they are able to negotiate and manipulate speciﬁc green
cultural codes.
Operating ordinarily as implicit and embodied principles, green cultural
codes are most noticeable when broken (see Butler, 1990; 1993). For example,
arriving at a green meeting by car and dressed in business attire would constitute
a ‘misperformance’ of appropriate green cultural codes. As a breach of the
expected performance script of arrival on foot or by bicycle, in casual (even
‘scruffy’) dress, it would be highly conspicuous. The boundaries of the green
cultural world are also transgressed and rendered visible through ‘overperformances’
of appropriate behaviour. For example, to scold someone for using a
disposable tissue rather than a washable handkerchief constitutes, for the majorDave
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ity of activists, an overperformance of green cultural codes. Such a rebuke treats
a code as a rule, and stretches too far both the appropriate ‘purity’ of a green
identity and the appropriate external monitoring of ‘personal’ practices.
Reiterative performance of distinctive cultural practices, emanating from a
particular habitus, produces hexis, an embodied orientation to the world which
is visible to the eye: a certain gait and bodily disposition above and beyond particular
styles of dress, modes of mobility, and forms of speech. Here performance
has become unconscious, behaviour learned to the point that it takes
on an inevitability. That ‘radical’ and ‘reformist’ environmentalists ordinarily
occupy different habitus, which converge only occasionally, becomes evident in
the discomfort that each sometimes feels in the others’ cultural spaces. At such
times, ordinarily unconscious performance is rendered conscious, as the activist
becomes aware of their inability to know ‘how to proceed’. Self-consciousness
and discomfort emerges with the awareness that one does not know the cultural
codes, and thus does not know how to perform appropriately in the setting. This
results in the feeling of clumsiness, the opposite of the hexis of Bourdieu’s
accomplished player, in command of the rules of the game.
Discomfort can emerge over something so seemingly trivial as ‘milk’. Faced
with a choice of ‘milk’, whether at a green meeting or when shopping, the
activist confronts a choice of identity. There is no one ‘right milk’, and ‘milk’
correspondingly becomes a site around which identities are distinguished and
performed. How should one buy one’s milk? Should it be delivered to the door,
lugged home from the supermarket, or fetched from the corner-shop? From
where can organic milk be bought? Is the best milk container made of glass,
plastic or reinforced cardboard? How can one best ensure one’s milk is produced
locally? Ought one to abstain from the consumption of animal milk entirely,
and choose soya ‘milk’ instead? What if the only soya ‘milk’ available is nonorganic,
and potentially genetically modiﬁed? Given the impossibility of satisfying
all these criteria simultaneously, which ones ought to be privileged when
making milk-drinking decisions? Which elements of the diverse ‘milk economy’
should be supported, and why? Through their choice of ‘milk’ activists perform
and are performed by their positioning within green networks.
Different kinds of relationship to milk are appropriate in different green networks.
However trivial the dilemmas surrounding milk consumption might
seem, minor differences in favoured milk-purchasing behaviour signal important
differences in activist lifestyle; like many other mundane elements of daily
life, milk preference performs the cultural afﬁliations of its drinker. Committed
vegans might buy soya milk irrespective of its geographical origins (and even its
genetic ‘contamination’); devout localists might privilege geographical origin
above all else; activists seeking to support organic production sometimes buy
milk from supermarkets, where other activists would not tread. Many activists
perform concern for all these positions, and either shift preferences across contexts,
or remain ambivalent.
Here, it is precisely that elevation to a political status of mundane lifestyle
practices among activists which increases their symbolic power and importance
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as indicators of belonging to different habitus, as markers of inter-cultural and
intra-cultural boundaries, and as performances of identity. The remainder of
this chapter demonstrates the signiﬁcance of materialities to the performance of
green identity and the earning of green distinction more generally. What, in
other words, is the role of material culture in the performance of activists’ identities
and their green distinction?
The role of materialities in the performance of identity
Recent years have witnessed increasing possibilities for performing green cultural
codes, and therefore assembling a green lifestyle, whilst shopping. It is
within the realm of ‘routine provisioning’ (Miller, 1998), and especially food
shopping, that such greening processes are most advanced. The range of ‘environmentally-friendly’
food products available in the market-place has expanded
enormously; indeed, more generally, a ‘pre-ﬁx’ dominated food culture is on the
rise. With evermore ‘fairly-traded’ and ‘organic’ goods to choose from, ‘green
shopping’ has never been easier. Food is hugely important to the performance
of green identity among environmental activists. Whether through its display on
open kitchen shelving or through its sharing with other activists in green times
and places, food is a signiﬁcant ingredient of green distinction.
The undisputed site for ‘green shopping’ in Lancaster is the city’s wholefood
workers’ co-op. As a co-operatively run, small-scale retailer, sensitive to issues
of social and environmental justice, this shop ﬁts with, and is constitutive of,
green cultural codes. Places of consumption are part of the act of consumption.
Not merely sites where shopping takes place, they are an integral part of the
shopping experience (Shields, 1992; Uusitalo, 1998). The shop embodies the
values, tastes and practices of the city’s green networks; its interior is dominated
by wood, and signs of the co-op’s politics are evident in the contents of the magazine
racks, and the posters, leaﬂets and notices adorning its walls. The strict
ethical screening procedures enforced by the co-op ensure that purchases made
there conform to green cultural codes. Shopping here, and only here, therefore
eliminates the possibility of transgressing from a green lifestyle. This is a shop
where impulse-buying can be conducted, safe in the knowledge that everything
sold ﬁts with (heterogeneous and contested, but nevertheless bounded) green
cultural codes; food is organic and ethically-sourced, ethically suspect brands
are absent and packaging is minimal. In this shop, then, people buy their way
into green identities; their purchases form part of the assemblage of a distinctive
green lifestyle.
Of course, activists do not always want to be restricted to ‘the wholesome’,
and they sometimes shop elsewhere. Perhaps increasingly, given the proliferation
of ‘the exotic’ (Bell and Valentine, 1997), activists must negotiate the constant
possibility of slipping into ‘ordinary shopping’ practices. Although the
absence of the car from everyday life puts some temptations out of reach, many
of Lancaster’s activists ﬁnd the allure of supermarket shopping difﬁcult to resist.
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During the period of my research one activist made a ‘new year’s resolution’ not
to shop at supermarkets, which three years later he says he has kept to. Other
activists, though, must live uncomfortably with the signs of their ‘green infringements’,
their kitchen shelves revealing their seductions to fellow green cultural
members. This exposes the precarious nature of a green identity, which needs
constantly to be remade through appropriate performance in order to maintain
its credibility to both self and others.
People literally eat their way into identity positions. Like food shopping, the
eating of some foods and the refusal of others powerfully communicates lifestyle
(Beardsworth and Keil, 1997; Gronow, 1997; Warde, 1997). Green cultural codes
surrounding food are especially important, not only because green food choices
are proliferating but also because green socialities often include food. Food and
sociality come together particularly forcefully, to produce distinctively green performances
of identity, in Lancaster’s two key green ‘meeting and eating’ places,
the vegetarian café and the green-inclined community centre. These places are
where activists most often meet to perform and re-create their green selves, and
provide sites for the earning of green capital.4
Because of the centrality of eating
and drinking to green encounters in these places, food values are often made
explicit and centred in conversations taking place there.
Green distinctions and identities are also routinely performed outside these
‘sites of social centrality’ (Hetherington, 1998), during less public food events.
Here, green cultural codes are assembled into particular styles of cooking and
dining. The form of a ‘Jacob’s Join’, for example, in which each diner provides
a dish to be shared amongst the others, is a ritual re-enactment of the collective,
participatory and democratic principles favoured within green networks.
Also at such occasions, raw ingredients, preferably home-grown and organic, are
concocted into a vegetarian dish. In this way, the dietary boundaries, cooking
styles and gustatory preferences which ﬂow from the codes implicit in the green
networks are produced, recognized and reinforced. Diners are bound together
into a symbolic community with shared values at its heart.
The ‘Jacob’s Join’ is the ordinary form of food event within Lancaster’s green
networks but on one social occasion, a ‘harvest supper’ which brought together
local activists from different environmental groups, the green cultural codes surrounding
food were rendered particularly explicit. Everyone contributed a dish
towards the communal meal, and had been told by the organizer beforehand
that at least one ingredient of their offering should be home-grown. Before the
meal began, each person brieﬂy introduced, and recounted the history of, their
contribution. The comfort of diners whose dishes conformed closely to the relevant
green codes was matched by the awkwardness and apologising of diners
who had less successfully incorporated home-grown or local organic food into
their contributions.
The distinctive materialities of environmental activists extend beyond the
realm of food, and two objects play particularly important roles in producing
activists’ green lifestyles. Especially within high consumption societies, but
increasingly globally, the spectacular rise of car and television ownership since
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the end of the second world war has had a revolutionary impact on people’s
daily lives. Indeed, possession and use of the TV and car has become constitutive
of a meaningful sense of civic participation, of what it means to be a
modern subject (Urry, 2000). But it is the very absence of the car and TV from
activists’ everyday lives which facilitates their performance of appropriate green
identities, and their assemblage of distinctively green lifestyles. The maintenance
of a spatially close world of interaction is hugely enabled by the absence of the
car and TV. The absence of TV from the everyday lives of environmental
activists ensures the release of leisure time for the multiple socialities characteristic
of close-knit green networks. The absence of the car is similarly massively
consequential, and it is the car’s absence on which I want now to focus.5
The car is important as a conspicuous object of non-consumption among
environmental activists. Its absence demonstrates belonging to the elective green
lifestyle community. Nearly all of Lancaster’s activists live without a car; as one
prominent activist in the local Green Party bluntly put it, ‘I’ve never owned a
car and I never will’ (ﬁeldnotes, May 2000). These activists move around by bike,
on foot and—for longer journeys—by train and, less frequently, bus. Under
exceptional circumstances some might take a taxi, but in the normal course of
everyday life, at the local level, core activists rely almost exclusively on cycling
and walking.
Among environmental activists in green places, talk often turns to the politics
of transport, and the car is a common target of anger. Sometimes this
distaste is general, with activists expressing hostility to the social and environmental
effects of ‘car culture’. At other times talk is much more personal, based
on activists’ direct and negative experiences as pedestrians and cyclists. Such talk
continuously constructs car driving as a polluting practice, and thus maintains
the status of the car as a pollutant of green lifestyles. It produces car ownership
and use as one of the most powerful markers of the boundary between ‘green’
and ‘ungreen’. It is the absence of car ownership among activists which makes
this talk possible.
Absence of the car produces effects across the entirety of everyday life, and
leads to distinctive socialities, spatialities and temporalities. Carlessness promotes
spatially constrained socialities, ensuring that a handful of green meeting places
are frequented by almost all activists. The performance of walking and cycling,
the mobility practices considered typical of, and so constitutive of, activists’green
lifestyles, is promoted by carlessness. The spatialities imposed by these ‘green
mobilities’ promotes the face-to-face interactions of ‘chance encounters’, which
keep activists in ‘the thick of things’. Carless activists tend to produce, through
their everyday geographies, a spatially tight sense of ‘the local’. This ‘local’
encompasses residential locations relatively close to city centre amenities (including
the hubs of public transport, and especially the train station); and it includes
the close-to-home ‘natural world’. Put brieﬂy, in keeping life local the car’s
absence promotes the continued performance of green cultural codes.
An activists’ credibility is jeopardized, and their level of green capital eroded,
by car ownership. Failing to conform to one of the strongest green cultural
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codes, and with green identity consequently threatened, activists need to justify
their car use. One participant in a focus group of Green Party activists said:
‘I really worry that people think I’m a hypocrite for having a car, but I always consider
whether I need to travel and if I do, the best way to do it. And so I can justify
myself having a car . . . And in your own life you can do trade-offs . . . say you use
your car, it’s more convenient to use your car but you could have used the train, so
as a trade-off, instead of changing your bed whenever you change it, just say for argument’s
sake once a week, then you change it once a fortnight, so that you save on your
washing, your energy use. So you can do trade-offs in your own life, to try and make
yourself feel less guilty’.
Here, although the green cultural code of carlessness is broken, an acceptably
green cultural script is followed—the person appeals to responsible use, and a
willingness to ‘trade-off’ their car use against enlightened ecological practice in
other spheres of everyday life. Other activists recognize their increasing seduction
by the car, and are aware of the potential consequences. During a focus
group comprised of ‘radical activists’, for example, one person said:
‘I used to be really adamantly against car use, but occasionally now for work I need
a car and I’ve got access to a car, which I never used to have, so I ﬁnd myself occasionally
using it when I don’t really have to, I could cycle to Morecambe in the rain
if I really wanted to, but sometimes I take the car . . . so I do feel like I’m becoming
less radical, or less consistent’.
Given the symbolic signiﬁcance of abstinence from the car to activists’ own
understandings of a green lifestyle, and given the vital role of such absence in
performing activists’ everyday geographies, increasing car use is interpreted, by
both self and others, as signalling lapsed cultural membership. Activists who are
in the process of leaving central locations within green networks tend to search
out compromise positions, between their previously complete renunciation of
the car and their drift towards absolutely non-green car ownership. As the structuring
force of the cultural codes operative within green networks diminishes,
people become more inclined to borrow or hire cars, to organize car-sharing
arrangements, or to buy a (small, second-hand, fuel-efﬁcient) car and then—
perhaps in a ﬁnal salve to their green conscience—convert it to run on liquiﬁed
petroleum gas. The green cultural codes are successively broken, and the green
cultural script of attention to ‘sustainable mobility’ stretched to its limit. If
this limit is ﬁnally breached, the ‘unapologetically ungreen’ motorist, underperforming
a symbolically central green cultural code, departs the green world; their
performances are no longer structured by the activists’ habitus, and from a green
scheme of perception and appreciation, they become inept.
Although environmental activists shun the car, an important distinction
emerges around their favourite vehicles. For some, the bicycle is the vehicle of
choice, whilst for others it is the van. The bicycle is homologous with an orientation
to, and concern for, ‘the local’, and also with the desire to get out into,
but ultimately move through, ‘the natural world’. As a relatively simple, cheap
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and non-polluting technology, it is deeply symbolic of the search for sustainability.
Locally, activists use their bicycles to sustain spatially close-knit networks;
extra-locally their bicycles are an important resource in the performance
of active, distinctive leisure identities. In conjunction with the train and ferry
(and sometimes the plane), the bicycle enables the performance of ‘green holidays’.
The van is homologous with a more nomadic way of life; it is simultaneously
visibly distinctive and provides a degree of privacy and security; and it is
a vehicle which permits the combination and blurring of mobility and dwelling;
here the quest is less for environmental sustainability, more the living out of an
alternative and at times politically antagonistic and controversial way of life (see
Hetherington, 2000).
Conclusions
Environmental activists distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make
between themselves and non-activists. Activists also make distinctions between
their own lifestyles and the lifestyles of other activists. These distinctions are
performed. And these performances produce and reproduce the boundaries of,
and within, the green cultural world. In this chapter I have speciﬁcally tried to
show that distinctive green cultural codes, and the environmental identities they
produce and reproduce, are performed materially. Through their distinctive
materialities, environmental activists continuously perform their adherence to,
and are enabled to maintain participation in, the green cultural world. Materialities
are crucially involved in shaping the everyday lives of environmental
activists. More generally, particular objects and the material assemblages of
which they form part are crucial to the performance of identity.
Performances of green identity do not, of course, remain static over time. At
a general level, new forms of distinction emerge. New kinds of food become available
in organic and fairly-traded varieties; sometimes such food is found more
cheaply in places which generate dilemmas of identity, such as supermarkets. The
production of fresh controversies politicizes new realms of everyday life, so that,
for example, a growing awareness of the potentially harmful effects of carpets on
health prompts the decision to expel them from the house. At the individual level,
the everyday lives of activists are not static, and their commitments and convictions
tend inevitably to shift over time. Initial hostility to the computer, internet
and email gradually gives way to a recognition of their usefulness to a political
life, and a process of incorporation into a green lifestyle. Changes in personal circumstance
which tend often to mark movement across the lifecourse, such as the
demands of parenthood and career, can ‘squeeze out’ commitments to environmental
activism, if not to a green lifestyle. Although many activists maintain
lifestyles which juggle activism with other commitments, activists’ environmental
identities can also fade, or become ‘professionalized’.
Do the distinctive lifestyles developed among environmental activists have
broader relevance to the search for sustainability? Activists’ green lifestyles tend
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75
to be highly participatory and locally-based, and to involve a different, and I
think more environmentally sensitive, orientation to the material world. These
lifestyles are enabled by the absence of key material objects, such as the TV and
car, together with the presence of other material goods, such as the bicycle and
computer. They are also enabled by places such as vegetarian cafes, wholefood
co-operatives and community centres where activists can act out their green
identities. And these lifestyles are enabled by occasions, whether a monthly green
group meeting, an annual green festival, a collective meal, or a sporadic ‘day of
action’, when performing a green identity becomes particularly appropriate.
So what precisely can the lives of environmental activists tell us about routes
to the greening of behaviour more generally? I think one implication of this
research is particularly important for debates around the making of a ‘sustainable
culture’. Until now, policies aiming to promote sustainability have tended
to rely on the provision of information and education, with the goal of producing
‘green citizens’. But this research suggests that it is perhaps the materialities,
as well as the spatialities and temporalities, upon which the lifestyle
performances of environmental activists depend which ought to be extended in
the search for sustainability.
Correspondingly, we need to devise what might be called a ‘new, green architecture’.
This architecture would be assembled from multiple materialities, times
and spaces which call forth green practices. It would be an architecture productive
of the performance of green cultural codes and broader green cultural
scripts. Although each component of such a green architecture might by itself
seem rather insigniﬁcant, as a whole such an architecture could enable the
assemblage of a speciﬁcally green identity, which could be carried with the
person and which would result in the production of a coherent green lifestyle.
Rather than aiming to produce ‘sustainable citizens’, therefore, it is perhaps the
making of ‘sustainable performances’ which should take centre-stage.
Identities cannot be ‘grounded’ but the conditions for their performance
can be instituted. A green identity is not an essence, and owes its appearance
of solidity to the regular, routine performance of green cultural practice. The
most centrally involved environmental activists are continuously constituted and
reconstituted as green subjects; they reiteratively perform green identity and
internalize the resources necessary for the assemblage of green lifestyles. So I
am arguing that we ought to think more about the provision of materials, times
and spaces which might afford the performance of a green identity. And I am
also arguing that we need a new green architecture. The wider adoption of green
lifestyles depends on the extension of the green architecture on which the green
performances of environmental activists currently depend.
Notes
1 Many thanks to Wallace Heim, Sue Holden and Bronislaw Szerszynski for their invaluable help
with this chapter.
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2 I take the concept of ‘habitus’ from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who uses it to explain class
reproduction in his epic ethnography of twentieth century French society (see Bourdieu, 1984:
101, 172–3). By speaking of ‘the habitus of environmental activists’ I mean the cultural space
within which activists’ green codes are produced and developed, where those codes become habitual
and embodied, and where activists’ green scripts are established and sedimented. This habitus
is where speciﬁcally green kinds of performance become taken-for-granted, and out of which distinctively
green lifestyles emerge.
3 How typical is the strength of ‘the environmental movement’ in Lancaster? Within Britain,
Lancaster’s relatively small size, combined with its geographical location and the presence of a
large population of students and, more especially, ex-students, has undoubtedly contributed to
its relative ‘greening’. But environmentalism is thriving in many other places, from big cities (such
as Manchester) to smaller cities (such as Oxford and Brighton) to small towns (such as Totnes,
Devon). Presumably, throughout high consumption societies a generally dispersed environmentalism
tends to establish strongholds in particular places, which become known as green centres
of ‘alternative living’.
4 Another important type of site for the performance of green identity is represented by places for
the performance of highly valued green practices, such as tending the allotment and garden, and
moving through ‘the great outdoors’; here activists engage in what John Urry terms ‘face-to-place’
interactions, and variously dig, pedal, climb and walk their way into green identities (Urry, 2002).
5 In Britain, the car and the infrastructures co-constituted with the car have been the focus of much
recent environmental protest. Protest events such as Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass have
sought to bring the system of automobility temporarily to a halt (Carlsson, 2002; Jordan, 1998);
a whole series of longer-term, site-based road protests has attempted to obstruct state road building
programmes (Merrick, 1996; Wall, 1999; Welsh and McLeish, 1996); and direct action against
major transnational corporations, such as Shell and Esso, aims to challenge practices of the oil
industry perceived as ecologically devastating and socially immoral. This recent phase of environmental
politics has elevated the car’s status, in Britain at least, to the most highly contested
object of contemporary material culture.
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