Demonstrating Environmental Citizenship? A Study of Everyday Life Among Green Activists more

Demonstrating Environmental Citizenship? A Study of Everyday Life Among Green Activists 1 Dave Horton Introduction What might environmental citizenship look like, and how might such a citizenship be produced? This chapter posits that, across the range of their everyday practices, green political activists demonstrate a distinctive, important, and potentially replicable form of environmental citizenship. Following a brief consideration of the concept of environmental citizenship, the chapter is divided into three parts. First, activists' typical 'green lifestyles', which emerge from a shared green culture, are described. Leading these green lifestyles, which embody a culturally produced awareness of environmental risks, rights and responsibilities, activists assemble their diverse everyday practices - from the most 'personal' to the most 'political' - into a coherent whole. Second, the chapter discusses and analyses the role of green networks, spaces, materialities and times in the assemblage of activists' green lifestyles; it thereby draws attention to the specific resources required for the production and reproduction of those lifestyles. Third, the chapter explores how, in the search for 'sustainability', this activist-derived 'elite model' of environmental citizenship might be broadened. The concept of environmental citizenship The concept of environmental citizenship currently tends to be used in one of two main ways. In the first, it refers to the teaching of values and practices appropriate to the achievement of sustainability. Already familiar from the writings of the environmental movement, governmental policy discourse which emerged in the wake of the first Earth Summit also tends to follow this meaning, so that, for example, householders need to be encouraged to switch off lights, insulate their homes, conserve water, and increase their recycling rates. The assumption animating such interventions is that progress towards sustainability is achievable through incremental shifts in everyday personal behaviours. Here then, environmental citizenship is an individualised project, and its discourse is primarily disciplinary. Whether through governmental programmes or the pronouncements of environmental organisations, people need to be made more aware of environmental problems and become environmentally responsible citizens; they need to be disciplined into 'good', 'green' behaviours. In the second main contemporary use of the concept, environmental citizenship refers less to environmental responsibilities and much more to environmental rights. Specifically, the language of citizenship is used to name and critique the uneven spread of putative environmental rights. Particular groups, for example, are said to Early versions of this paper were presented to an Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy 'sandwich seminar' at Lancaster University, and the 'Citizenship and the Environment' workshop organised by Derek Bell and Andrew Dobson and held at the University of Newcastle. Many thanks to everybody who participated in those events. I owe particular thanks, for their very helpful comments and suggestions, to Anne Chapman, Andrew Dobson, Sue Holden, Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry. A serious debt is of course also owed to Lancaster's many wonderful environmental activists. 1 1 lack the right to clean air, to a safe environment, or to healthy working conditions (Bullard 1990; Harvey 1996). Such discussions are obviously connected to the global politics of gender, class, 'race' and ethnicity. Here, environmental citizenship is a way of talking about differential risks to specific human bodies, and the ways in which governments and corporations often trample on the environmental rights of specific peoples. This then is primarily a discourse of (the struggle for) social justice. This chapter thinks about the concept of environmental citizenship somewhat differently from either of the ways outlined above. It considers environmental citizenship as a non-territorial form of citizenship, developing not in the institutions of the nation-state but within the cultural and political spaces of contemporary environmentalism. Such a citizenship is in many ways consistent with the 'postcosmopolitan ecological citizenship' articulated by Andrew Dobson (2003). In the context of a deeply unequal world with sustainability as a key objective, Dobson claims that responsibility for action is asymmetrical. Consequently, citizenship ought to be rooted in 'identifiable relations of actual harm' (Dobson 2003: 81), thus limiting non-reciprocal and unilateral obligations to those implicit in those harmful relations. Correspondingly, privileged groups in the most affluent societies bear the greatest responsibility for taking action to combat the negative effects of their unsustainable lifestyles. Contemporary environmentalism is, perhaps, producing citizens appropriate to the task which Dobson sets. Through attempts to transform their own 'private' everyday practices in ways consistent with sustainability (see Dobson 2003: 51-6; 135-9), environmental activists demonstrate awareness of their own (asymmetrical) citizenship obligations. And through identification and political targeting of unsustainable institutions and practices, activists also strive to inform others individuals, groups, governments and corporations - of their own asymmetrical obligations. Accordingly, a key cultural and political space for the practice of environmental citizenship is produced by the groups and networks constituting contemporary environmentalism. If, as de Tocqueville claimed, the virtues required of citizenship are built through voluntary association, the virtues required of environmental citizenship are perhaps best built through voluntary association in environmental groups, campaigns and organisations. Historically, social movements have been crucial actors in the fight for citizenships (Turner 1986), and the environmental movement can be seen as continuing this tradition (van Steenbergen 1994). Pursuing this approach to the study of environmental citizenship, then, such citizenship is being promoted and organised by big international environmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, green political parties, and increasingly visible transnational networks of resistance, which converge sporadically and temporarily for 'People's Summits', 'Social Forums' and 'Days of Action' (for one recent overview of the remarkable diversity constituting this ‘global anticapitalist movement’, see Notes from Nowhere 2003). In this chapter, then, environmental citizenship is approached neither as a disciplinary project of the state, nor as about the extension of environmental rights to those deemed currently to be excluded from them, but as the practice of groups and networks of the environmentally concerned and committed. Everyday life among green activists 2 This activist-oriented concept of environmental citizenship is based on the study of a specific green cultural world. Ethnographic research into the everyday lives of green activists, centred on the city of Lancaster in north west England, was conducted between 1998 and 2002. Those researched included local Green Party and Friends of the Earth activists, people involved in looser collectives emerging around specific direct actions, and those campaigning against proposed developments such as local road- and house-building projects. In contrast to many studies of new social movements, the primary aim of the research was not to analyse the most obviously 'political' practices of green activists, but instead to examine and understand their more mundane, ordinary practices. So exploration of the ways in which activists live from day-to-day, and the distinctive characteristics of their lifestyles, took precedence over specific political campaigns and protests. Of particular interest, for example, were activists' shopping practices, leisure activities, social relationships and travel patterns. Besides participant observation, this ethnographic research comprised a set of focus groups, and a series of individual interviews. What does everyday life among green activists look like? Environmentalism is an embodied politics (Lichterman 1996), and activists tend to incorporate their environmental concerns and commitments into everyday cultural practices; they seek consistency between their 'political' positions and 'personal' preferences, pursuing practices compatible with the visions they strive collectively to create (Melucci 1989). One particularly striking effect of the personalised style of politics practised by green activists is a tendency to be incredibly concerned about consumption. What toothpaste one uses, where one shops, and how one moves around both locally and further afield, are things which really matter. Some types of product, such as meat, cars, cosmetics and package holidays, are generally avoided altogether. For other objects of consumption, such as financial services, food and household cleaning products, 'ethical' versions are consistently favoured over the 'ethically suspect'. Typically, where they do not grow it themselves, activists buy 'organic' food. Activists also tend to be enthusiastic, even obsessive, recyclers; indeed, a key characteristic of the green networks to which they belong and contribute is the passing on and sharing of all manner of ordinary and extraordinary goods, with the purpose of maintaining them as actively useful things for as long as possible. Activists tend also to lead remarkably local lives. Moving around on foot or bicycle, their everyday geographies stay near to home. Favouring residential locations relatively close to central shops and services, their paths tend regularly to cross the paths of other activists, promoting the sense that they are always bumping into people they know. Local activists also patronise the same shops, socialise in the same cafés and pubs, and attend the same kinds of meetings and events. The outcome is a constantly reproduced and locally-occurring green world, comprised of individuals involved to varying extents in green politics and lifestyles. Some of these activists through the friendships which tend to develop from shared values, common interests and collective political action - are linked by what, in social network analyses (for example, Diani 1995), are known as 'strong ties'. But it is the predominance of 'weak ties' which is more significant to the production and reproduction of the local green world. These weak ties are built and maintained through visibly shared habits (in styles of dress, movement, diet and leisure) and joint participation in key festivals and protests which occasionally bring the broad green world into intense moments of copresent sociality. Weak ties enable people to recognise and be recognised by one 3 another as belonging to the same political community, and are the basis of political solidarity (on the importance of weak ties, see Granovetter 1973). Demonstrating environmental citizenship? Green activists see themselves as 'activists', not 'citizens'; they do not use, and are unlikely to adopt, the language of citizenship to describe their practices. So why suggest they are demonstrating environmental citizenship? If we are serious about social and political change in the direction of sustainability, any practice worthy of the name ‘environmental citizenship' surely needs to entail shifts in currently dominant practices, and this inevitably requires conflict. Unless 'ordinary' everyday practices are scrutinised, critiqued and challenged, and unless more sustainable alternatives are developed to replace them, the dominant unsustainable order will not be transformed. Beyond overt political campaigns, through a whole range of oppositional practices bicycling not driving, boycotting 'unethical' foods and shops, innovating methods of recycling consumer 'durables' - green activists are a key group generating conflict. It is currently the case that these 'good environmental citizens' define themselves - and are defined - as activists. But in contexts of struggle it is precisely those meanings of 'good citizen' and 'activist' which are constantly contested and re-negotiated (Isin 2002); we need only think of the political biography of Nelson Mandela to recognise how dominant interpretations of ‘the same person’ shift across time and space. The model of environmental citizenship provided by contemporary green activists living in a city in north west England represents only one among many possible such models. Yet there are two very good reasons for exploring, and increasing our understanding of, the lifestyles of these activists. First, they are elective; activists choose to learn about and respond to growing environmental risks, choose to take the environmental rights of human and non-human others into account in their personal/political actions, and choose to pursue environmentally-responsible lifestyles. 2 And second, these activists tangibly demonstrate one actually existing model of a way of life which strives to take seriously these environmental risks, rights and responsibilities. So this chapter takes green activists to be demonstrating one form of environmental citizenship. This is not to say they are perfectly or puritanically green, leading some ideal or idealised 'sustainable lifestyle', but simply that they provide a potentially useful model. Green activists represent a relatively small group of people, but it is precisely because they are an elite that they merit special interest. Through better understanding the conditions for their style of environmental citizenship, there is a chance that those conditions can be more widely instituted, for the sake of the planet and its people. More precisely, because green activists represent a minority which is doing 'good environmental citizenship', what we need to know is just how this minority of green activists is able to do good environmental citizenship. Thus we need to look at the specific set of conditions which produce their admirable environmental citizenship. Then we need to set about expanding those conditions, so more people can enact similar kinds of environmental citizenship (to that extent green activists are Of course, choice is inevitably to some extent determined by the range of predispositions appropriate to one's habitus (see Bourdieu 1984). Thus a person's socio-structural location effects the chances of their being drawn to green culture and green activism. 2 4 role models, but they are not role models who can straightforwardly, unproblematically be emulated; we have, instead, to learn how their example might be emulated). The central argument of this chapter is, therefore, that the project of environmental citizenship would be effectively promoted through an expansion of those conditions required for the practices of good environmental citizenship currently being demonstrated by a small and unrepresentative sample of green political activists. It is, correspondingly, those conditions on which I want to concentrate. Overall, then, this chapter aims to contribute to debate on environmental citizenship by setting out the distinctive lifestyles of green activists, examining how these lifestyles are produced and reproduced, and suggesting how the conditions for these green lifestyles might be broadened for the sake of environmental citizenship. The main body of the paper is devoted to exploring the production of activists' distinctively green lifestyles. The lives of green activists are approached in turn through four concepts: networks, spaces, materialities and times. In uncovering the ways in which the distinctive lifestyles of green activists are culturally produced, the analysis aims convincingly to demonstrate that the wider uptake of those lifestyles cannot straightforwardly depend on the role modelling of appropriate green virtues, on the power of persuasion, or on information and education alone. The final section then reflects on the everyday lives of green activists in light of the assumed need for a wider project of environmental citizenship, and suggests how such citizenship might successfully be broadened. The promotion of the kind of environmental citizenship green activists are modelling requires, I argue, the promotion of the green culture from which activists' ordinary everyday practices emerge. The chapter concludes that the promotion of this green culture crucially depends on the development of a green architecture. The production of environmental citizenship Green networks Would-be green activists must enter and negotiate an initially strange cultural world. Involvement in the diverse groups and campaigns which comprise green networks, and especially face-to-face interaction with fellow network members, exposes an individual to the slowly shifting meanings of contemporary environmentalism. Only through such involvement do people gradually learn how to act, developing competence in culturally specific behaviours and understandings. Participation in green networks, then, is powerfully productive of green performances, ensuring that an individual's talk and practice comes to conform closely to green cultural codes (on cultural codes, see Melucci 1996; on performance according to such codes, producing green identities, see Horton 2003). Through participation in green networks there is, over time, a convergence between a person's talk and practice and the (never static and often contested) norms of the cultural world with which they are engaging and striving to belong. In other words, ongoing and elective involvement in green groups disciplines one into the range of appropriate green cultural performances. What forms does such cultural participation take? Green networks are constituted out of three main kinds of intermingling. The first kind of intermingling is the green meetings of local networks. During green meetings ordinarily dispersed but 5 geographically proximate activists temporarily converge to centre their green identities. 3 Green meetings obviously include the most formal, planned and regular meetings of specific environmental groups and campaigns; people often first enter green networks through participation in these relatively open and accessible meetings. But green meetings also include the many informal interactions surrounding and separating these organised times: chats in the bar afterwards; more private gettogethers to accomplish specific tasks with one or two other activists; wider social and political events of particular appeal to green activists, including protests, video evenings, parties and 'public' meetings; and chance encounters with activist friends and acquaintances whilst, for example, shopping in the wholefood co-op or relaxing in the vegetarian café. A second kind of intermingling constitutive of green networks is the green gathering. The green gathering sees the temporal and spatial convergence of geographically dispersed network members. Assorted conferences, workshops, courses, festivals and protest events provide opportunities for ordinarily far-flung activists to dwell in, replenish and reaffirm their elective and collective green identities. And a third kind of intermingling is increasingly important to both green meetings and green gatherings. Interactions mediated by information and communication technologies, and particularly email, are gaining significance in promoting and sustaining the whole range of face-to-face green socialities (see Horton 2004). Besides these kinds of intermingling, the formation of friendships between fellow cultural members means participation in green networks extends well beyond conventional understandings of political participation. Among friends sharing green commitments and enthusiasms, network participation also commonly encompasses much informal social interaction, including extra-local activities such as group bicycle rides, walks and 'green holidays'. One result is the development among green network members of close-knit normative reference groups, sharing and sustaining similar values, tastes and practices (on reference groups, see Merton 1957). How do the varied socialities of local, dispersed and virtual green networks contribute to the greening of activists' lifestyles? In these green socialities, people orient to, perform and develop their green identities, learning to be 'authentic' environmentalists. Within the multiple socialities of green networks the primary orientation of talk is obviously to green issues. Shared environmental interests bring activists together, and provide the basis, at least initially, for their interactions. Green identities are privileged and performed. It is the performance of these identities across broader expanses of everyday life which leads to the greening of diverse cultural practices and the assemblage of green lifestyles. 4 Of course, these socialities, crucial People have multiple identities, and are variously enabled and disabled from performing them across time and space. It is situational context which determines which of a person's multiple identities is centred, and which are backgrounded as less relevant or irrelevant. Specifically green contexts, such as green meetings, thus enable a person's green identity to come to the fore. Individual subjectivity is opened most powerfully to the force of green cultural codes; the gradual internalisation of these codes produces a progressive greening of lifestyle. 4 By performance I mean not the occasional and ephemeral staging of an ordinarily hidden identity, but rather the ongoing, repeated and routinised enactment of the green cultural codes promoted by the discourses of contemporary environmentalism and centred within green network socialities, which brings forth a distinctive way of life. Activists' green identities are, in other words, performed throughout everyday life. 3 6 to the performance of activists' identities and the production of their green lifestyles, are also spaced. Green spaces Certain sites constitute settings for the green meetings, the face-to-face socialities of local green networks, noted above. Here activists most frequently meet, centre and perform their green identities, and so develop their green lifestyles. The two most important places for the intermingling of Lancaster's green network members are a vegetarian café, the Whale Tail, and an arts and community centre, the Gregson. With 'private' meeting rooms, large hall, 'public' bar, and long opening hours, the Gregson is the main venue for the regular planned meetings of local environmental groups. The Whale Tail, situated above both a wholefood workers' co-op and a green activist office, forms part of a green complex; located in the city centre and Lancaster's chief vegetarian eating place, it is more popular for informal meetings during the day. But both venues are sites of a wide variety of face-to-face interactions, from chance encounters, to planned meetings, to get-togethers of green friendship groups. Green places such as the Whale Tail and Gregson are 'spaces of interruption', in two ways. The first is in their role as sites affording the articulation of alternative discourses, and the performance of oppositional identities; they promote, in other words, interruptions to dominant cultural narratives. The second is because, within them, it is generally acceptable and appropriate to interrupt the socialities-in-progress of others. It is worth briefly elaborating on these two meanings of 'interruption'. The Whale Tail and Gregson are stylistically similar. They share a taste for bare wood and a distaste of plastic, have similar noticeboards displaying similar messages, have comparable kinds of artwork adorning the walls, and - via the use of deep warm colours and chalkboard menus - they achieve a similarly distinctive aesthetic. Both places provide left-leaning newspapers, play certain styles of music, and provide toys for use by customers' children. The signals sent by these place, and the reputations they develop, attract members of green networks, facilitate face-to-face interaction between them, and contribute to the performance of green identities, and so the maintenance of local green culture. The Gregson and Whale Tail, in other words, provide sites for the performance of elsewhere marginal(ised) identities. A generation ago, Ronald Inglehart (1977: 365) noted that 'the conventions and institutions of western countries are based on materialist assumptions. To have a postmaterialist worldview means that one is apt to be out of harmony with the type of society in which one lives'. Embodying such postmaterialist worldviews, green activists and their lifestyles find a home in green social spaces such as the Gregson and Whale Tail, where one can comfortably perform a 'greenness' which other places tend to suppress. Beyond affording interruptions to dominant discourses, Lancaster's green places also provide sites where interrupting socialities-in-progress is legitimate. It is in the places most central to local green networks that activists are particularly likely to bump into one another; so much so that people often visit these places alone, confident they will find others with whom to socialise. The Gregson and Whale Tail provide activists with 'public' places where they feel 'at home'. Neither so public that people moving through them are rendered anonymous, nor so private that within them people meet only those they already know well, these places constitute what Ray Oldenburg 7 (1989) calls 'third places'. They facilitate the maintenance of weak ties, and therefore help sustain myriad relationships based on acquaintance which are especially significant to the reproduction and continued vitality of local social networks. 5 Why is it acceptable to interrupt and join the socialities of others in these green places? There are four main reasons. First, there is an implicit cultural awareness that places like the Whale Tail and Gregson function, at least in part, as sites of chance encounter. However, to some extent this is an effect more than a cause of the legitimacy of interruption; as a distinctive cultural pattern of 'normal interaction' builds up, its continuation becomes increasingly routinised. Second, people are limited in the number of friendships they can service at any one time (Allan 1989). Most acquaintanceships struck through participation in local environmental groups must therefore remain at that level of familiarity. Yet people typically want to sustain their weak ties, if in a way which will not lead to them becoming stronger. Certain places, in permitting a generous (because ephemeral) orientation to spontaneous faceto-face socialities, keep one 'tied into the scene'. 6 Third, participation in a shared green culture comprised predominantly of acquaintances requires the performance of culturally appropriate identities. The chance encounters afforded by the interruptions of those with whom one has weak ties thus keeps one within the flows (of gossip, mobilisation attempts, important events) of local and dispersed green networks. These encounters tend also to encourage the performance of, and so consolidate, the most significant and uncontested green cultural codes. Fourth, people approach these places already oriented to their green identities. These identities are cultural and public, both in the sense they result from (and depend on) continued interaction with others, and in the sense they are directed to the search for sustainability, an important component of which is widely recognised as increased levels of reciprocity and conviviality. The two ways in which green places like the Whale Tail and Gregson provide spaces of interruption conjoin. These places, which interrupt dominant cultural narratives and facilitate experimentation with alternative environmental discourses, are central to the everyday lives of green activists. And the norms of social interaction governing these places ensure the performance of face-to-face socialities across the breadth of local green networks. Together, then, these two kinds of interruption enable the development of a sense of community among individuals exploring and performing alternative green identities; they provide a spatial infrastructure where individuals with identities which are elsewhere marginalised can meet, 'publicly' (if not overtly 'politically') centre their elective identities, and feel themselves to belong. Green materialities As well as being importantly socially and spatially organised, green lifestyles are also materially organised. Indeed, the distinctive materialities of activists' green lifestyles are continuously produced and reproduced through the strongly spatialised socialities of green networks. Everyday life is powerfully shaped by material objects, and this 5 Of course, through the clues provided to potential interrupters in a range of subtle signs and gestures, participants can achieve different levels of 'privacy' within these 'public' places (on hybrids of 'public' and 'private', see Sheller and Urry 2003). 6 Specific culturally popular times provide particularly good opportunities to participate in the convergence of locally proximate but ordinarily dispersed green networks. During these times, in green meeting places, people tend to feel a heightened sense of belonging to the broad 'green community'. 8 section considers the effects of both material presence and absence on the development of green lifestyles. By producing and reproducing participation in the distinctive socialities, spatialities and temporalities of green networks, specific material objects facilitate the greening of lifestyle; examples include bicycles, organic food, and walking boots, but it is the increasingly important computer, along with the internet and email, which is briefly focused on below. Other objects hinder the greening of lifestyle, and so it is their absence which is important. Two significant absences in the everyday lives of green activists are noted in this section; the television (hereafter, TV) and car. The computer is now central to everyday life among green activists. Word processing packages are vital to many activist tasks: composing press releases; compiling and updating membership lists; drafting and editing responses to government consultations; producing newsletters and flyers; and writing letters and articles. But beyond the computer's significance for writing and managing data, the arrival of the internet, and especially email, has revolutionised the ways in which activists communicate. Over a four year period of research into the lifestyles of green activists, the growing popularity of email resulted in significant increases in both the volume and frequency of communication between activists at the local level. More generally, the computer has been embraced by green activists as a technological assemblage which facilitates pursuit of a green lifestyle, especially at the local level. One activist summarised the current situation; 'how', she wondered, 'did people manage to be politically active before computers came along?' (fieldnotes, March 2000). Today, the computer is activists' key political tool. 7 If the computer is increasingly present, the car and TV are remarkably absent from the everyday lives of green activists. The degree to which these objects are missing obviously varies, but there are two general characteristics of activists' relationships with the car and TV. First, activists are highly critical of both these material goods; although in their talk and practice activists can also sometimes demonstrate ambivalence to both objects, they never display unbridled enthusiasm for and acceptance of either. Second, the exclusion from everyday life of either object, but especially of both together, provides a key indicator to other network members of a green lifestyle. At a wider social level, life without either a car or TV (and especially both) marks a person or household out as either poor or (at least) slightly eccentric, but within green culture their active avoidance signals 'good, green living'. Among the most involved and committed green activists, the car is almost completely missing from everyday life. These activists move around by bicycle and foot, and for longer journeys by train and sometimes bus. The car's absence is particularly 7 The computer's significance as a political tool does not guarantee its straightforward incorporation into all activists' everyday lives. Having become indispensable to contemporary environmentalism, activists are now problematising computer technologies, and their own relationships with those technologies. In other words, there are signs that, at least as a complex material assemblage, the computer is currently undergoing processes of politicisation. Activists are asking where computer components come from, exploring the social and environmental consequences of those components, and questioning where the world's computers will end up, and with what effects. Correspondingly, current cultural work strives to ensure computer technologies fit better with pre-existing green cultural codes. Many activists, for example, support alternative operating systems such as Linux, acquire equipment second-hand, and either develop or support local structures through which unwanted gear can be recycled. 9 consequential for activists' everyday spatialities. Without a car, the geographies, and thus the socialities, of green activists tend to shrink towards the local. Carlessness produces compact lives, with the spatial ranges afforded by the practices of walking and bicycling configuring the very contours of this local. Lacking the flexibility enabled by the private car, extra-local mobilities need to be planned in advance. Living without a car tends also to result in the ethical and aesthetic elevation of the local, the cultivation of an intimate, embodied relationship to the immediate environment, and the development of a sense of place worth fighting for. So, against evermore dispersed, car-dependent and greenfield housing, activists advocate the kind of spatially dense development which facilitates their own green lifestyles. Against new roads and the motorised traffic they generate, activists call for greater measures to promote their own favoured mobility practices of walking and cycling. Against new supermarkets and out-of-town developments, activists argue for others, like them, to support centrally-located small shops and businesses. If most green homes have no car parked outside, inside a TV set is also often 'missing'. In a few green homes, an old, small, black-and-white portable can be found tucked into an inconspicuous corner, or hidden from view (from where it emerges on rare and special occasions) entirely. One activist, for example, kept a small portable TV in the bathroom cabinet, 'away from the licence inspectors, and one of the few spare spaces in the house' (fieldnotes, August 2002). Among the most important effects of the TV's absence from everyday life is the way in which it releases leisure time to be spent in alternative ways. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam persuasively argues TV’s role in eroding civic life; he claims that TV is 'lethal to community involvement' (2000: 192), and 'privatizes leisure time … TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations' (ibid.: 236-7). Conversely, among green activists the TV's absence provides a significant incentive to participation in the green public sphere. Green times We have seen that green culture in general, and green lifestyles in particular, are networked, spaced and materialised. They are also timed. As with networks, spaces and materialities, certain times are compatible with and productive of green lifestyles, and other times are not. Times affording orientation to green identity and the production and reproduction of green lifestyles include green meetings, green festivals, green holidays, and environmental protest events. Protest events, and other public performances of green identity such as running city centre stalls and canvassing for elections, are particularly powerful times for the constitution of green identities, because here people are announcing that identity to wider society, to those potentially hostile others beyond the boundaries of the green cultural world. Time spent in local, dispersed and virtual green networks results in the acquisition and performance of culturally appropriate knowledge, awareness and understandings, and the ongoing reorganisation of everyday life according to green cultural codes. Diverse aspects of daily life are converted into conformity with green cultural codes, resulting in the assemblage of a green lifestyle, a lifestyle recognised, affirmed and reaffirmed by other green activists. For a time, environmental politics and the greening of everyday life constitute a ‘project’ (Castells 1997; Giddens 1991), or ‘central life interest’ (Dubin 1992). During this period, activists develop 'green routines'. In a 10 focus group comprised of Green Party activists, for example, one person commented, 'I don’t even think about not eating meat, or not driving a car; I haven't done them for so long they just don't occur to me'. A life without car and TV, centred on places like the Whale Tail and Gregson, and organised around green meetings, becomes familiar. It likewise becomes normal to choose (and pay a premium for) all manner of green goods, from 'green toothpaste' and 'green washing powder' to organic, fairly-traded foods and recycled paper. It becomes second-nature to take the train, walk or cycle. At this point, a green lifestyle is lived, as ordinary, and we might perhaps say that the activist is a ‘model environmental citizen’. But green lifestyles are themselves timed. Most activists can highlight times when they were at their 'most radical', when the intensity of their attachments to green cultural codes was at its peak. This is their 'green period'. Although green lifestyles are temporally more durable than the period of particularly public activism which often strongly contributes to their assemblage, they are prone to processes of unravelling and de-routinisation. 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 is limited. Other commitments, typical of movement across the life course, can get in the way of activism. So what happens to green lifestyles? Where do they go, and when? Typically, through their phase of greatest activism, people are neither working fulltime nor active parents. Most green lifestyles are therefore assembled during a relatively time-rich period of the life course. For such a lifestyle to continue in more or less the same form, personal circumstances need to remain relatively stable. Activists know this, and some choose and struggle to prevent their lives, and thus their green lifestyles, changing in dramatic ways. Specifically, these activists might avoid taking on full-time work, or elect not to have children. Many activists strive to reduce their dependence on paid work, and to find more 'freedom' to develop personal projects, engage in politics, and become increasingly 'self-sufficient'. For other activists, potentially de-greening effects such as active parenthood and career cannot easily be separated from, and treated independently of, their present values, tastes and practices. Here, activists strive to pursue work and parenthood according to pre-existing commitments (see also Klatch 2000; Lichterman 1996, esp. Ch. 5). In the narratives of some (ex-)green activists, life events such as the birth of a child or the need to earn a living are experienced less as ruptures than as pivots around which values, tastes and practices rotate. The person's past accompanies them into the present, and shapes their future. Green lifestyles change, but do not disappear. One way in which a person's green commitments are carried into the future is via the process of professionalisation. Here, activist capacities, skills and knowledge are transferred into relevant paid work. So, for example, a Friends of the Earth activist finds employment in the organisation's London office, and a transport activist secures a County Council post dedicated to promoting bus use. Whilst this route to becoming a 'professional green' is open only to some, the vast majority of (ex-)activists manage to avoid work which seriously conflicts with their green values, and express strong resistance to the idea of taking 'unsustainable' jobs. Following the environmentalist challenge, 'if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem', activists strive to find 'good work' and to follow 'right livelihoods' (see Schumacher 1979; on similar 11 patterns among green activists elsewhere, see Berglund 1998; Cox 1999; Lichterman 1996). There is no doubt, however, that for many people full-time work and the onset of active parenthood impinge on the ability to sustain levels of participation in the networks, spaces, materialities and times sufficient to the maintenance of a strong green identity. The care of young children and/or the demands of full-time work make attendance at evening meetings difficult, and produce new responsibilities which compete with pre-existing green concerns and commitments. Consequent movement out from the important identity-constituting social times and spaces of green networks leads to a reduction in the disciplinary force of green cultural codes on subjectivity, and thus facilitates the breaking of those codes, widening a developing cultural gap, and leading to still further lifestyle change. An erosion of green convictions and falling involvement in the green cultural world follow each other in a slowly degreening spiral. Here, in short, lapsed participation in green networks produces a decline in performances of green identity and the gradual disassembly of a green lifestyle. 8 With insufficient structures to hold a person in their green place, it is easy to fall out of the green world. And as with green lifestyles, so for environmental citizenship; the final section therefore argues that such citizenship requires the production of green structures, in order to facilitate the exercise of green agency. Broadening environmental citizenship How can the above analysis of the production of green activists’ distinctive lifestyles inform our understandings of environmental citizenship? My argument is that green activists practise a kind of environmental citizenship, one which is produced through their ongoing participation in a cultural world comprised of green networks, spaces, materialities and times. Green performances emerge and build into a green identity as a result of intermingling with green others, dwelling in green places, surrounding oneself with and using green materialities, and spending green time. For as long as people are immersed in this green cultural world, green performances are ordinary and taken-for-granted; conversely, 'non-green' performances are extraordinary and tend to produce feelings of guilt, and to render one accountable to other cultural members. During the period of their lives when commitment to green politics and lifestyle is at its highest, the everyday routines of green activists are effectively governed by the force of green cultural codes. To provide the example of the car, removal from those green socialities which continuously produce the car as a polluting object combines with a less time-rich and more spatially-stretched lifestyle to increase the car's appeal. Upon departing central locations in green networks, (ex-)activists initially search out compromise positions between their previously complete renunciation of the car and their drift towards absolutely non-green car ownership, so as the structuring force of the green cultural codes operative within green networks successively diminishes, people become more inclined to borrow or hire cars, to organise 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 liquefied petroleum gas; such ownership typically begins with a resolution to use the car only occasionally, for 'essential' journeys. As the car becomes a greater polluting presence in their lives, the ability and desire to maintain participation in green networks diminishes. The car's entry into a green lifestyle tends also to undermine the everyday spatialities which keep activists tied into local green networks and their socialities. Its arrival can lead to the dispersal of a person's mobilities and social networks, and so hasten the erosion in the force of green cultural codes on subjectivity. 8 12 But how sustainable are the lifestyles developed among green activists? Most behaviour-forming structures in contemporary societies are still far from green. Thus, sooner or later, events of the lifecourse push many activists out from the green structures colouring their lives, and into 'de-greening' environments. Although people can and do adapt their green lifestyles, and continue to live their ethico-political commitments as a project, green infrastructures remain insufficiently developed to make the living out of 'green projects' a wider goal. Only the most concerned and committed currently stay green. Green activists might be pioneers of a new kind of environmental citizenship, but as yet there are no clear paths along which to follow them. The behaviours they are modelling are unattainable to the majority because the structures on which they depend are insufficiently developed; and the alternative route to such green behaviours requires an exceptional leap in agency which, though perhaps possible, could never be generalisable. A crucial question therefore seems to be this: how do we make more mainstream, more a part of dominant culture, those varied resources which are currently indispensable to the production and reproduction of the political subculture of green lifestyles and activism? If green activists demonstrate a form of environmental citizenship, they do so voluntarily. Yet broader adoption of such environmental citizenship, it might be argued, will inevitably require institutional and legal structures to promote and enforce 'right conduct'. But in thinking about how to broaden the kind of environmental citizenship portrayed here, is there an alternative to an elective/imposed dichotomy? An understanding of the production of activists' green lifestyles can, I suggest, enable fresh and potentially productive questions. How can appropriately green practices be facilitated? How might conditions of practice be transformed in order to afford the wider emergence of desirable green behaviours among more than an elite of mainly white, educated, middle-class adults? How could access be broadened to the networks, spaces, materialities and times which among green activists form the basis for a recognition of environmental risks, the declaration of environmental rights, and the performance of environmental responsibilities? A common response to such questions is education, and the provision of information. People might be taught to be good, green citizens. Given sufficient details about the consequences of their actions, and strategies for taking action, it is assumed that people will alter their behaviours. Yet the kind of environmental citizenship practised by activists is not learned through formal teaching. Rather, it becomes steadily embodied through participation in green networks, spaces, material assemblages and times. Environmental citizenship of the kind outlined here emerges, in other words, through practise rather than pedagogy. Elements of it can of course be taught; the environmental movement is highly literate, and participants rely heavily on multiple sources of information and continuously emerging new green knowledge. But it is, above all, a citizenship which is performed. We know that regular, repeated performance is necessary to the constitution of identities and practices (Butler 1990). And activists' performances of environmental citizenship are produced and reproduced by a very specific green infrastructure, or architecture. Put slightly differently, rather than specific behaviours, I am arguing that it is the culture from which specific behaviours emerge which ought to be promoted. The expansion of an environmental citizenship rooted in the cultural practices of 13 environmentalists themselves thus requires the further development of what I call, for want of a better term, a 'green architecture'. Such an architecture is neither wholly concrete nor purely metaphorical; following my analysis, it comprises green groups, green spaces, green materialities and green times. What, more specifically, might this green architecture look like? To some extent, it already exists. In the UK there are a number of important green sites, such as the Centre for Alternative Technology in mid-Wales, the Eden Project in south-west England, and the Earth Centre in Yorkshire. 9 Regular temporary sites, in the form of 'green festivals' such as the Big Green Gathering and regional green gatherings, also already exist. But, unlike places such as the Whale Tail café and Gregson community centre, such spaces are geographically dispersed, and are distant from the everyday worlds of the vast majority of people. Rather, it is local green cafés, community centres and festivals which most effectively promote the routinised performance of the practices which build into green identities, and which might be recognised as 'doing good environmental citizenship'. Correspondingly, if we want more good environmental citizens, it is such sites which ought urgently to be promoted. Similarly, ever more cafés provide vegetarian options, a growing number of shops stock organic and fairly-traded goods, local councils increasingly provide residents with facilities for recycling, and towns and cities across Europe are beginning to experiment with low-cost, easily accessible bicycle rental schemes. 10 So a growing range of material affordances enable people in societies such as the UK to enact aspects of good environmental citizenship. But this gradual greening of a non-green culture still requires an agent to choose to be green; to know about, find and select, for example, the more expensive organic version from among the countless varieties on offer. In contrast, the importance of 'green contexts' is the way in which, by structuring the setting, they dilute the relevance of individual agency; they do not merely invite, but importantly structure and produce, green performances. The significance of a vegetarian café, for example, is that one is unable freely to eat meat there without breaking a cultural taboo, and must instead eat food which is meat-free. Likewise, shopping in a wholefood vegetarian co-operative prevents the purchase of goods which clash with green cultural codes. Again, the expansion of such sites might therefore produce an expansion in the green performances conducive to good environmental citizenship. Social change in a particular direction is inevitably highly uneven, occurring in some groups, times and places before others, and obviously a green architecture would not act in an homogeneous way. Many people are highly unlikely to frequent a vegetarian café or attend a green festival. The kind of green architecture I am envisaging and attempting to sketch is unlikely to be peopled by all, or even by some all of the time. But importantly, a green architecture might provide times, places and favourable material conditions for supportive and sympathetic people, who have yet to be enabled to act out their green concerns, convictions and commitments, increasingly to do so. There are surely many people who would be willing to act as good environmental citizens if conditions were only made more conducive for such actions. 9 For more information on these sites, see http://www.cat.org.uk, http://www.edenproject.com, and http://www.earthcentre.org.uk. 10 For details of one such scheme, 'Budgie Bikes' in Lancaster, see http://www.budgietransport.co.uk. 14 In this way, the development of a green architecture might gradually push out the boundaries of green culture, and thus bring evermore green performances into being. Such an architecture might enable, in other words, a steady trickling out of the performances of environmental citizenship. This model of social change in pursuit of sustainability obviously accepts a gradual permeation of green performances into the wider social body above any more drastic cultural shift. From a movement-building perspective, it suggests a strategy not only of recruiting evermore green activists but also of expanding the groups, places, material culture and times of the green movement. From the perspective of proponents of environmental citizenship, it suggests not strategies aimed at the direct making of environmental citizens so much as strategies aimed at increasing the range of places, times, and groups where environmental citizenship practises can be enacted; a project, in other words, of reinvigorating and greening 'the public sphere', as a prior condition to its peopling. Citizenship is less a quality of individuals than of the architecture which produces and reproduces that citizenship. 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