Sustainable Communities and Green Lifestyles ─ Consumption and Environmentalism

Efforts to find a sustainable way to live with each other and with the natural environment have produced a plethora of experimental lifestyle designs. Ecovillages and sustainable communities are growing around the world and this book is about their attempts toward constructing green lifestyles. Sustainable communities, in general, and ecovillages, in particular, offer a unique opportunity to examine how people who are committed to responding to social and environmental degradation are trying to do so.

This book’s detailed ethnographic study demonstrates how ecovillages are immersed within a larger discourse of class, race, and lifestyle choices that highlight the inseparability of environmental sustainability and social justice. The argument is extended that sustainable communities must address social inequality if they are to offer more than a superficial solution to social degradation, and they must confront the tensions and contradictions of social and environmental sustainability in a capitalist market economy. As new ecovillages expand locally and globally, they have the potential to redirect social and ecological solutions away from remediation and conservation and instead focus on the consumption of green technology and themed lifestyles that address social and environmental degradation within narrow unique spaces. Thus, ecovillages in the Western world elucidate the contradictory nature of green consumption in the struggle to create a socially satisfying and ecologically sustainable green lifestyle.

By exploring the everyday life of residents through extensive participant observation and in-depth interviews, this book reveals the social construction of a green lifestyle. The book should be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban planning and political ecology.

Tendai Chitewere is Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, USA.