2 research outputs found
Waste and everyday environmentalism in modern Britain
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordFollowing recent work among social historians and geographers on the concept of ‘everyday
life’, I argue that current historical uses of the term are problematic, at least for
environmental historians, in that they lack a sufficiently disciplined or coherent conceptual
basis. Henri Lefebvre’s approach to the everyday offers one productive way of rethinking the
significance of the environment for social history. Through an empirical study of the politics
of urban waste disposal in twentieth-century Britain, I deploy some of the key categories of
Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ to rethinking the social history of environmentalism. In
particular, I seek to explore what Alex Loftus has called an ‘everyday environmentalism’. I
argue that the concept of ‘everyday environmentalism’, with its attention to dialectics,
antinomy and contradiction, can transform the ways in which we study the social history of
the human relation to nature, which has too often been viewed through reified notions of
environmental change. The paper concludes that the history of environmental politics should
focus far more on environmentalism as a concrete social phenomenon emerging from lived
experience.Some of the research for this article was supported by the Wellcome Trust under Grant
091819/Z/10/Z