Socio-psychological aspects of grassroots participation in the Transition Movement: An Italian case study

In this article, we present a case study investigating the socio-psychological aspects of grassroots participation in a Transition Town Movement (TTM) community initiative. We analyzed the first Italian Transition initiative: Monteveglio (Bologna), the central hub of the Italian TTM and a key link with the global Transition Network. A qualitative methodology was used to collect and analyze the data consisting of interviews with key informants and ethnographic notes. The results provide further evidence supporting the role of social representations, shared social identities, and collective efficacy beliefs in promoting, sustaining, and shaping activists\u2019 commitment. The movement seems to have great potential to inspire and engage citizens to tackle climate change at a community level. Grassroots engagement of local communities working together provides the vision and the material starting point for a viable pathway for the changes required. Attempting to ensure their future political relevance, the TTM adherents are striving to disseminate and materially consolidate inherently political and prefigurative movement frames \u2013 primarily community resilience and re-localization \u2013 within community socio-economic and political frameworks. However, cooperation with politics is perceived by most adherents as a frustrating and dissatisfying experience, and an attempted co-optation of the Transition initiative by institutions. It highlights a tension between the open and non-confrontational approach of the movement towards institutions and their practical experience. Corresponding to this tension, activists have to cope with conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalence of social representations about community action for sustainability, which threaten the sense of collective purpose, group cohesion and ultimately its survival

Environment for the People

Environment for the People, a joint publication of PERI and the Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE) in India, documents innovative strategies used by environmental activists around the world to build natural assets. In diverse landscapes, from Bangladesh's riverine delta to Somalia's arid uplands, ommunities are investing in ecological restoration. In 'extractive reserves' in the Amazon rainforest, the defense of sustainable livelihoods goes hand-in-hand with defense of bio-diversity. In the Peruvian Andes, indigenous communities are fighting to protect their lands and water from the ravages of the mining industry. And in cities around the world, from Los Angeles to New Delhi, communities are mobilizing to defend the right to clean air. These and other inspiring cases profiled in Environment for the People illustrate that humankind does not face an inexorable 'tradeoff' between protecting the natural environment and improving economic well-being. On the contrary, struggles for environmental protection and sustainable livelihoods are bound together

The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements

This article analyzes recent developments in environmental activism, in particular movements focused on reconfiguring material flows. The desire for sustainability has spawned an interest in changing the material relationship between humans, other beings, and the non-human realm. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with purely individualistic and consumer responses, a growing focus of environmental movement groups is on restructuring everyday practices of circulation, for example, on sustainable food, renewable energy, and making. The shift to a more sustainable materialism is examined using three frameworks: a move beyond an individualist and value-focused notion of post-materialism, into a focus on collective practices and institutions for the provision of the basic needs of everyday life; Foucault’s conceptions of governmentality and biopolitics, which articulate modes of power around the circulation of things, information, and individuals; and a new ethos around vibrant and sustainable materialism with an explicit recognition of human immersion in non-human natural systems. These frames allow us to see and interpret common themes across numerous, seemingly disparate initiatives focused on replacing unsustainable practices and forging alternative flows

Deconstructing the organic movement

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Organic agriculture has sought to establish its scientific validity and its origins. Conford (2001) claims that these can be traced to the 1920s, and that Anglican Christianity is pivotal to its history. However, organic agriculture takes many forms and the role of religion in society has changed. In the UK, a new incarnation of organic farming occurred in the late twentieth century as part of a wider response to environmental issues

The green movement

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Why is everyone talking about climate change … again?

In this short article, I reflect on the last 50 years of environmental mobilisations in Europe and ask why democracy is important for contemporary climate action. Although the current wave of climate protests seems to share many characteristics with its 1970s predecessors, there is also a sense that contemporary movements and campaigns present a new quality in the long history of combating global warming. Are there any lessons that can be drawn from the history of environmentalism that can help us understand the current condition of climate action? I hope that by putting the environmental movement in a historical perspective, we can gain an insight into the factors that play a decisive role in effecting socio-ecological change

Through a Green Gaze: Tentative Indicators of a Green ‘Text’

This paper seeks to re-claim for the idea ‘green’, something of the depth and range of its philosophical and ideological ideas at the time of its emergence and early formation from the 1960s to the 1990s, ideas which appear today to be largely unknown, forgotten or deliberately sidelined. It also seeks to provide for political, economic and environmental opinion-makers and decision-takers, a list of indicators by which to assess the green-ness of a ‘text’. The paper is also useful for educators wishing to examine the philosophical foundations of their practice and the texts that they use in educational work

Bataillean Ecology: An Introduction to the Theory of Sustainable Excess

A new ecology and a new environmentalism have arisen from the study of the thought of Georges Bataille. This paper both introduces this scholarship and advocates for environmentalist action based on it. Through both intellectual biography and theoretical inquiry, this paper distils a principle for guiding environmentalism from small-scale communities to the limits of the biosphere, a principle of sustainable excess, a kind of perpetual decadence