Environmental Publics

How do ordinary people think about the environment as they go about their daily lives? Does thinking about the environment make them do things differently? This book is the first to explore the idea of ‘environmental publics’, that is, the ways in which ordinary people engage with environmental issues across different practical contexts of work, play and home.

Emphasising the practices of ‘environmental engagement’, it examines how people consume the environment, learn about it, campaign for its protection and enjoy it through their leisure time. But the book avoids relying on idealisations of ‘consumers’ or ‘citizens’ or theoretical constructs about behavioural norms that have traditionally dominated research in this field. Instead, this book differentiates environmental publics not by who they are but by what they doing – their daily practices. It also analyses specifically the geographies of those practices, that is, how what people do affects the environment but in different ways across time and space and at different scales – aspects of practices that are neglected in the literature.

With an interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in geography, sociology, science and technology studies, political science and anthropology. It is written in an accessible and readable style, so as to be useful for preliminary and more advanced courses in environmental management, perception and policy, as well as in studies of modern society, consumption and environmentalism."

Sally Eden is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at the University of Hull, UK, having joined the department as a Lecturer in 1998. She is human geographer who is strongly committed to interdisciplinary environmental research. Sally examines how the environment is understood, shaped and remade by diverse actors, including consumers, citizens, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), scientists and the state. Through diverse projects funded particularly by the UK’s Research Councils (especially ESRC), she has explored how knowledge for sustainable consumption is understood, promoted and contested, how environmental management is shaped by science and politics, and how rivers are managed, rehabilitated, restored and perceived by diverse publics and published work on sustainable consumption, public understanding of environmental science, public perception of environmental management and river restoration. She is also a committed teacher, with excellent feedback from students on my research-led teaching as well as on core skills and employability learning.