Green lifestyles and ethical consumption have become increasingly popular strategies in moving towards environmentally-friendly societies and combating global poverty. This book aims to scrutinize the emergent phenomenon of ‘eco-chic’: a combination of lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spirituality, beauty and health. Case studies cover Basque sheep cheese production and Ghanaian Afro-chic hairstyles to Asian tropical spa culture and Dutch fair-trade jewellery initiatives. For those interested in sustainable consumption, this book is an interesting look at the intersection of ethics, fashion, and power from a largely anthropological perspective, writes Kira Matus

Matus, Kira J. M.

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2014-6-25Book Review: Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic edited by Bart Barendregt and Rivke Jaffeblogs.lse.ac.uk /lsereviewofbooks/2014/06/25/book-review-green-consumption-the-global-rise-of-eco-chic/Green lifestyles and ethical consumption have become increasingly popular strategies in moving towardsenvironmentally-friendly societies and combating global poverty. This book aims to scrutinize the emergentphenomenon of ‘eco-chic’: a combination of lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spirituality, beauty and health. Casestudies cover Basque sheep cheese production and Ghanaian Afro-chic hairstyles to Asian tropical spa culture andDutch fair-trade jewellery initiatives. For those interested in sustainable consumption, this book is an interesting lookat the intersection of ethics, fashion, and power from a largely anthropological perspective, writes Kira Matus.Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic. Bart Barendregt andRivke Jaffe (eds.). Bloomsbury Academic. February 2014.Find this book:  The role of the individual as a consumer is becoming an increasingly prominentaspect of discussions around sustainable development. The concept of ‘greenconsumption’ dates back to the 1970s, but the precipitous rise of corporationstouting green agendas and products, along with increasing prominence placedon systems of certification and eco-labelling, have signalled a growing relianceon individual choices to enact environmental policy. In a world where market-based policies are ever more the norm, the day to day consumption ofindividuals thus becomes an inherently political act.Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic is a volume that delves intowhat co-editors Bart Barendregt and Rivke Jaffe call ‘eco-chic’: ‘…a combinationof lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spiritualism, beauty and health, combinedwith a call to return to simple living’ (p.1). The authors rightly note that this blursthe lines between ethical consumption, elite consumption and sustainable consumption.  The challenge ofdisentangling these ill-defined and overlapping motivations for consumption is tackled by dividing the book into threeparts, each with multiple case studies. The first, which is concerned with ‘From Production to Consumption’investigates the way that concepts of eco-chic travel from the global North to South, and the divergent interests thatemerge from the interactions of large, often global actors with local level efforts to improve sustainability. Thesecond section, ‘Spacialities and Temporalities’ contains three cases that probe the ways in which eco-chicprivileges narratives of the ‘local’ and nostalgic references to a slower, simpler past, through the marketing of‘authentic’ and placed-based goods (champagne or beauty products from the Red Sea fall into this category, as doany goods which have a value or appeal contingent on their place of origin). The final section, ‘Bodies and Beauty’examines the concept of eco-chic from the perspective of the developing world, with cases that highlight how globalaesthetics are reflected back through traditional and local practices to form new and emerging eco-chic fashions.This treatment of the concept of ‘eco-chic’ has a great deal of potential, especially in its attempts to examinequestions of consumption from a variety of different spatial perspectives. While there are several cases that focus onEurope and North America, there is a great deal of effort spent teasing out what eco-chic means in parts of the worldwhere significant parts of the population are struggling with under-consumption, not over-consumption. That beingsaid, nearly every narrative in this volume has at its core issues of inequality; be it the power inequalities betweenlarge global brands like Coca Cola and its local NGO partners, the inequality between wealthy Dutch consumersand the individuals using traditional, non-toxic methods to pan for gold to sell into their jewelry, or the inequalitybetween those in Jamaica or south-east Asia who can afford to pay for luxury beauty treatments, and those who are1/3still struggling to meet more basic needs. In all of the cases, eco-chic, as described in the volume, is a privileged,elite activity. And across the cases presented in the book, a picture emerges of a movement whose very attempts toreduce inequality through ethical consumption is one that is only made possible, and may in fact reinforce, the veryinequality that consumers are attempting to overcome.Designers prepare for Eco Fashion Week, AW 2012, in Vancouver Canada. Credit: Jason Hargrove CC BY-NC-ND 2.0This problem of inequality and the limitations this places on a strategy that depends on individual choices as a routeto sustainability is most clearly on display in the chapter by Kate Cairns, Kim de Laat, Josée Johnston, and ShyonBaumann, ‘The Caring, Committed Eco-Mom: Consumption Ideals and Lived Realities of Toronto Mothers’. Theircase study of ‘caring consumption’ and its relationship to ‘eco-consumption’ beautifully illustrate the power of theideal of the Eco-Mom, whose choices are good for her children and the planet. But as their study shows, for mostwomen, this ideal is far from the reality of their lives. Most women find that limitations of time, money, andinformation severely constrain their ability to live up to the image of the eco-consumer. Even in Toronto, in one of themost well-to-do cities in one of the highest-income nations in the world, for most women, a strategy of consistenteco-consumption remains firmly out of reach. Only the elite of an already relatively elite group can afford theinvestment in resources which consistent eco-consumption demands.The implications of this study are important. The first is that this chapter, beyond any other in this volume, makesclear the underlying challenge to sustainability strategies that rely on the individual consumer as political actor andmarket driver. The ability to reflect these preferences into behaviour is limited – even for those from relativelyprivileged areas. In other words, if ethical consumption is difficult for highly motivated, well intentioned mothers inToronto, how narrow is this niche, and is it scalable in any meaningful way? As is pointed out by several authors, amovement that relies on inequality, and in some cases, may even exacerbate it, has a serious internal contradictionto overcome if it is more than a passing fashion.The ambiguity and blurred distinctions between different kinds of consumptions that make up eco-chic is wellproblematized, and often insightfully addressed by the case studies in the first two sections of this book. Theweakest section is the third section, on ‘Bodies and Beauty.’ Here, the cases are on the one hand fascinatingexaminations of how global aesthetics are reworked through local traditions, practices and preferences. But thesethree chapters, unlike the others, are less willing to confront the issues of inequality, as well as the problems offetishization of authenticity that were gamely acknowledged, if not challenged, in the earlier chapters. This section,while raising interesting issues around concepts of beauty and the self in ways that push back against globalhegemonic ideals, fail to connect this in more depth to the real implications this has for sustainable consumptiondecisions generally, and eco-chic more broadly. As the closing section of the volume, it also sets up a ratherdangerous dichotomy in the structure, where the eco-chic sensibilities and choices of largely wealthier individuals inthe global North are depicted as superficial and striving for an authenticity that has largely disappeared from their2/3culture, while those in the global South are fetishized as the real location of authentic culture and practice. This flirtswith a kind of ‘orientalism’ that seems misplaced, distracting, and undermines rigorous scholarship around culturalaspects of sustainable consumption practices.Overall, for those interested in sustainable consumption, this book is an interesting look at the intersection of ethics,fashion, and power from a largely anthropological perspective. For scholars of politics or of business who arecontemplating the role that consumption has in sustainable development, it raises important points about thecomplexity that underlies consumption, and the role of culture and fashion, as well as competing values andpriorities, that must be considered. It is also an important reminder that acts of political consumption on the part ofindividuals has limitations as a tool of policy. Eco-chic as a concept is well reflected by Chris Hudson in his chapter‘Green is the New Green: The Eco-Aesthetics of Singapore’:“The paradox [of Singapore] is that it maintains anobvious commitment to a sustainable environment while at the same time continuing its dependency onconsumption.” As this work makes clear, this is the dependency that none of the eco-chic cases in this volume havehad any ability to alter.———————————–Kira Matus is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Management in the Department of Government at theLSE. Her research focuses on the intersection of innovation, policy, and sustainable development, with a focus onsustainable production consumption systems, certification systems, and the interface of science and policy. She isthe project co-director of the ‘Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development’ project atHarvard’s Sustainability Science Program. She has a PhD in public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard(where she was a doctoral fellow in the Sustainability Science Program), an MS in Technology and Policy from MIT,and a BSc in Chemistry from Brown University. Read more reviews by Kira.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: green consumption: the global rise of eco-chic edited by Bart Barendregt and Rivke Jaffe

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