Computers, Cars and Televisions:

The Role of Objects in Cultivating Sustainable Lifestyles

 

 

 

 

Dave Horton

 

 

 

 

Shifting Ground (www.shiftingground.org) and Department of Sociology/Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YG.

Email address: dhorton@ntlworld.com

 

 

 

Paper presented to Environmental Thought - Environmental Practice

Manchester Environmental Forum Postgraduate Conference, 31st January 2003, School of Geography, University of Manchester.

 

 

 

 

Abstract

 

 

This paper comes out of recently completed doctoral work, researching everyday life among environmental activists.  It explores the importance of material culture to the construction of distinctively green, political lifestyles.  Particular attention is paid to the key role played by three kinds of object in the formation of a green lifestyle: how do the computer, the car and the television affect everyday life?  What difference does their absence make?  In theoretical terms, the paper challenges the neglect of material culture by social movement literature.  In policy terms, the paper argues that our relationships with objects are enormously important in the search for sustainability.
Introduction

 

This paper emerges from doctoral research, and is predominantly extracted from my thesis, Searching for Sustainability: An Ethnography of Everyday Life Among Environmental Activists.  The thesis argues that, rather than explore only activist protest, the green cultural worlds and lifestyles developed among environmental activists are also important objects of study.  In this paper, my aim is to demonstrate the importance of objects, both present and absent, in the construction of lifestyle; and particularly to describe the repercussions for everyday life of environmental activists' relationships with three key material objects: the car, the television, and the computer.

 

Social movement literature has neglected the potential significance of everyday material practices to the forging of new oppositional identities.  This is surprising for two main reasons.  First, there is now an extensive social scientific literature demonstrating the significance of consumption processes to the formation of contemporary subjectivities (see, for example, Lury, 1996; McCracken, 1988; Slater, 1997).  Indeed, some analysts argue that, with the declining significance of work in constructing coherent biographies, consumption choices are becoming principally constitutive of individual identity (Uusitalo, 1998; Wynne, 1998).

 

Second, the neglect of consumption by social movement scholars runs counter to a central concern with the dominant materialities of high consumption societies, and to so-called 'overconsumption', within the discourses of new social movements, and especially environmentalism (among those calling for reduced consumption are Goldblatt, 1998; McLaren et al, 1998; Trainer, 1995).  Green texts advocating less consumption-hungry lifestyles sit on the bookshelves of most green homes.

 

Existing literature around the environment and consumption also tends to assume that environmentally significant consumption is centred on the purchase of goods in the marketplace.  In consequence, the term 'green materialities' is here preferred to 'green consumption'.  Green materialities are broader than, but include, green consumption practices.  Materialities involve the ways in which activists purchase or otherwise acquire objects, the beginning of a relationship with an object.  But materialities also involve the complex ways in which activists live with and use/reuse multiple objects, the development of the relationship (Dant, 1999).  Materialities also incorporate, and this is very significant to people concerned with the impact of their practices on the planet, the eventual ending of a relationship with goods, whether through disposal or some form of recycling (O'Brien, 1999).  And perhaps most importantly, green materialities are the assemblage of various objects into a more or less coherent green lifestyle.

 

I am interested in how activists live with, or without, material objects, and the effects a green material culture has on everyday life.  Distinctive materialities, resulting from and contributing to shared values, tastes and practices, are produced and reproduced by particular lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1984).  Green materialities make visible and communicate both a person's cultural affiliations and their cultural distance from others (Douglas, 1996; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979).

 

 

The Importance of Absence

 

Especially within high consumption societies, but increasingly globally, the spectacular rise of car and television ownership since the end of the second world war has had a revolutionary impact on people's daily lives (Ravetz and Turkington, 1995).  These two objects are no longer perceived as 'mere luxuries', enjoyable appendages to the real business of living; in many parts of the world, they are today regarded as 'needs'; their possession and use has become constitutive of a meaningful sense of civic participation, of what it means to be a modern subject (Urry, 2000).

 

The extraordinary significance of the car and the television to modern life stems from the complex ways in which they are embedded in multiple networks (on the related concept of 'systems of provision', see Fine and Leopold, 1993).  The car is not only a material object, but a vehicle around which massive infrastructures - of lifestyles, cities, nations, continents - have developed and within which the smallest details of individual lives are now led (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Whitelegg, 1993; Zuckermann, 1991).  More than any other media, the television has shaped the contemporary subject's understandings of the world, and schedules the most intimate details of people's everyday lives (Scannell, 1996; Szerszynski et al, 2000).  At both a general and a personal level, life without the car and television has become barely imaginable.

 

Of course, both the car and the television have also been, and continue to be, fiercely contested objects.  The television has been blamed for a whole array of contemporary ills, from turning citizens into an apathetic mass and politicians into 'mere' celebrities (Castells, 1997, Ch. 6), to destroying family meal times and the art of conversation (Putnam, 2000).  The car is similarly implicated in a long list of horrors, from increased rates of childhood asthma and reduced levels of fitness (Whitelegg, 1997), to the erosion of civility and destruction of community (Putnam, 2000).  In Britain, it is especially the car, together with the infrastructures co-constituted through the car, which has been the focus of much recent environmental protest.  Protest events like Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass have sought to bring the system of automobility temporarily to a halt (Carlsson, 2002; Jordan, 1998); a whole series of longer-term, site-based road protests has attempted to obstruct state road building programmes (Merrick, 1996; Wall, 1999a; Welsh and McLeish, 1996); and direct action against major transnational corporations, such as Shell and Esso, aims to challenge practices of the oil industry perceived as ecologically devastating and socially immoral.  This recent phase of environmental politics has elevated the car's status, in Britain at least, to the most highly and recurrently contested object of contemporary material culture.

 

Intriguingly, however, although the car and the television constitute key materialities of daily life for a still growing majority of citizens in industrialised western societies, they are notable much more for their absence from, than for their presence in, the day-to-day lives of environmental activists.  The degree to which these material goods are absent from everyday life varies across green culture, but there are three general characteristics of environmental activists' relationships with the car and the television.  First, without fail, activists' express highly critical orientations to both these material goods (consistently and without prompting for the car, but only under questioning for the television).  Certainly, in both talk and practice, activists can also occasionally demonstrate ambivalence to both the car and the television, but they never display unalloyed enthusiasm for, and acceptance of, either of these mobile technologies.  Second, the exclusion from everyday life of either object, but most especially of both objects together, provides a key indicator - to other cultural members - of a green lifestyle.  On a wider social level, life without either a car or a television (and especially both) instantly marks a person or household out as (at the least) slightly eccentric; but within green culture, their joint absence signals 'good, green living'.  The conspicuous absence of these relatively status-rich goods from everyday life is symbolically powerful as a mark of disaffiliation from conventional cultural codes and, correspondingly, a mark of affiliation to green cultural codes.  Third, given the well rehearsed and very significant effects of both these (unequally gendered) objects, it would be surprising if their absence did not produce similarly significant effects, at least at the level of personal lifestyle.

 

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam (2000) identifies the television and the car as two chief culprits in the tide of civic disengagement sweeping across the USA.  If lifestyles based around the car and the television lead, according to Putnam, to civic withdrawal, might the lifestyles of environmental activists - which demonstrate a certain aloofness from the ordinary appeal of these goods - provide insight into the possibilities for civic rejuvenation?  Certainly, the everyday lives of environmental activists suggest that the absence of the car and/or television from daily life does promote participation in civil society.

 

1.      The Car

 

How absent is the car from the everyday lives of environmental activists?  Among the most involved and committed activists, almost completely.  Nearly all of Lancaster's key activists live life without a car; as one prominent activist in the local Green Party bluntly put it, "I've never owned a car and I never will" (fieldnotes, May 2000).  These activists move around by bike, on foot and - for longer journeys - by train and, less frequently, bus.  Under exceptional circumstances, they might take a taxi, but in the normal course of everyday life, at the local level, core activists rely almost exclusively on cycling and walking.  During four years of more or less intense participant observation in Lancaster's green networks, I shared a road-based motorised vehicle with environmental activists on only four occasions: two of these were for relatively local journeys, in the car owned by one older, male activist on the network fringes; on one occasion a group of us travelled to a late-night concert in Morecambe in an activist's car; the other occasion was with a larger group of activists, when travelling by minibus across to the ferry port at Hull, on England's east coast, in order to attend climate change protests in The Hague.

 

In a reversal of the dominant mobility hierarchy, within green culture walking and cycling are highly regarded practices, and driving is stigmatised.  Within green networks cars are regularly, routinely and recurrently constructed as pollutants to green lifestyles.  Expressions of hostility towards the car produce the effect of its renunciation.  Because living without a car is widely recognised as one of the key markers of a green lifestyle, an activists' credibility is jeopardised, and their level of ecological capital eroded, by car ownership.

 

What are the most significant effects of the absence of the car from everyday life?  Many activists perceive their car-free lifestyles to be among their more important contributions to the search for sustainability; their lives represent 'one less car' and consequently reduce the alarming social and ecological impacts of car culture.  Here, the intention is not to dispute this kind of claim; it is obvious that were huge numbers of people similarly to renounce their 'freedom to drive', the social, economic and political effects would be very profound.  It is similarly obvious that, in contemporary high consumption societies, life without a car - when it cannot be interpreted as a symptom of poverty - is a powerful announcement of difference.  And, from the activists' perspectives, another significant effect of a car free lifestyle is the elimination of an ordinarily major expenditure.  In describing their low-cost lifestyles, activists sometimes mention that the absence of the car saves them a considerable amount of money.

 

But I want to note a different set of effects, centred on the consequences of the car's absence for activists' everyday spatialities.  Without a car, the spatialities and socialities of environmental activists tend to be predominantly local.  Although lack of access to a car is elective, and although activists' attitudes to alternative mobilities (and especially walking and cycling) are generally positive, carlessness is an important incentive to the development of a localcentric perspective.  The choice to live without a car produces a self-imposed localness on environmental activists, especially outside of the 'peak periods' of 'public' transport, when the level of train and bus services drops, sometimes very dramatically.  High dependence on walking and cycling configures the very contours of ‘the local’.

 

I want to note two of the most imporant effects of elective carlessness.  First, living without a car tends 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 which is worth fighting for.  Second, renunciation of the car tends to be allied with, and to promote, participation in a lifestyle world in which a few sites of social centrality act as spatial hubs; here, spatially constrained but publicly active lives ensure that activist paths frequently intersect, and network vitality is correspondingly high.

 

The entry of a car into a green lifestyle constitutes a significant threat to the everyday spatialities which keep activists tied into local green networks and their socialities.  The car's presence contributes to the dispersal of an individual's mobilities and social networks, and hastens an erosion in the force of green cultural codes on subjectivity.

 

2.      The Television

 

For the majority of people today, at least in high consumption societies such as Britain, television is intimately bound up with everyday life.  Ruth Madigan and Moira Munro (1996, 44) note that, over the last half-century, “the central focus of the modern living-room has switched from the fire-place to the television”.  This material object has had, and continues to have, a profound effect on people's schedules, with 'televisual flow' forming a "constituent part of the texture and rhythm of everyday life for much of the world's population" (Szerszynski et al, 2000, 99; also Robins, 1995; Silverstone, 1994).  Moreover, the television forms part of both an increasingly complex home-entertainment infrastructure and a growing range of complementarities, comprising: video cassette recorders, DVDs, camcorders and computer games; 'convenience' or 'TV' foods, along with the technological devices, like the deep freeze and microwave, on which they depend; viewing guides; and an endless procession of materialised offshoots (theme parks, toys, books, videos) of more or less successful programmes.  In short, television is immensely important in the constitution of contemporary life (Scannell, 1996; Urry, 2000, 66-70).

 

Yet the everyday lives of most activists are not patterned by the distinctive socialities, spatial presence and temporal schedules of the television.  Just how absent is the television, with all its myriad worlds, from the everyday lives of environmental activists?  Like the car, absence of the television is not universal, but it is common.  Nowhere in Lancaster's green cultural world could I find a television occupying centre-stage in the principal living-room.  The very appearance of present-day television sets would look incongruous amidst the fabric and feel of most green homes; the big screen, combined with black plastic surround, of the currently most popular television sets lends an industrial-technological effect incompatible with the worn and faded, closer-to-nature, aesthetic found in the green house, in which a notable feature is the (almost) complete absence of anything obviously new and, most especially, shiny.

 

The homes of many environmental activists are completely without a television set.  In a few green homes, an old, small, black-and-white portable set can be found tucked away in an inconspicuous corner, or hidden from view (from where it emerges on rare and special occasions) entirely (on the similar noting of this tendency among environmental activists to store their televisions in closets, see Lichterman, 1996, 163).  One activist keeps a small portable television in the bathroom cabinet, "away from the licence inspectors, and one of the few spare spaces in the house".  At present (summer 2002) it emerges every Wednesday night, as there is a series of James Bond films being shown; "I like them because, although they're terribly sexist, they're action movies without all the killing you get in films these days.  And they're really funny" (fieldnotes, August 2002).

 

Another activist (interview 8) keeps his small black-and-white portable, "the one my parents bought in 1974", covered with a cloth, high up on a shelf in a corner of the living room.  The strangely marginal position of the television is very deliberate, "I don’t like the idea of it dominating your life to the stage where you think 'oh, this is on, I want to stop doing what I’m doing and watch it'.  It’s better just to forget about it really, and up there I do tend to forget about it".  He watches it only occasionally, "it sits up there for a few weeks at time, but I get it down now and then".  He is highly selective in his viewing, "sometimes there's something which sounds worth watching, from an environmental point-of-view, or some news which is unlikely to be covered by the radio".  In general, he much prefers the radio, "I listen to the radio a hell of a lot more".  Would he miss the television if it was no longer there?  "No, I don't think so, not really; there are far more important and interesting things to do, and I’m too busy to watch much TV anyway ".  Indeed, by September 2002, this activist had bid farewell to his faithful old television set altogether, saying that he watched it too rarely to justify the licence fee.

 

Discounting occasional video footage of recent protests, shown in sites of green social centrality with the aim of mobilising local activists, I saw a television set switched on only twice in almost four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Lancaster's green networks.  On one occasion I was specifically invited to a television-owning activist's home, in order to watch a documentary, written and narrated by the radical campaigning journalist John Pilger, about the effects of western sanctions on Iraq.  On the other occasion I was witness to the rare emergence of the 1974 portable black-and-white set described above.  As a frequent visitor to this activist's home, I had begun to believe that he never turned his television on; but then one evening he invited fellow Green Party activists to gather at his house to watch live coverage of the European election results, in which Green Party candidates stood some chance of winning seats.  In the event, no one seemed very interested in watching the television, particularly when it became apparent that the broadcast was largely ignoring the Green Party's participation in the elections.  But interestingly, on both these occasions, the television was used to reinforce rather than undermine green identities.

 

The most important effect of the television's absence from everyday life, for the present discussion, is the release of leisure time to be spent in alternative ways.  In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam (2000) provides strong empirical support for the moral accusations frequently directed at television's supposed role in eroding civic life.  Based on extensive social research into changing patterns of life among US citizens, Putnam claims that television is "lethal to community involvement" (2000, 192), and that it "privatizes leisure time … TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations" (2000, 236-7).  Like the car, but for different reasons, the television represents a significant impediment to the assemblage and maintenance of a green lifestyle.  Where the television is absent from an individual's everyday life, their 'non-work' time tends to be remarkably 'active'; its arrival contributes to that time becoming increasingly 'passive'.

 

 

The Computer: An Increasingly Important Presence

 

 

The recruitment of the computer into the assemblage of distinctively green lifestyles is in contradistinction to the other mobile technologies of the car and television.  Given environmental activists' typical relationships to the car and TV, it might seem that green materialities express simple and straightforward hostility to popular technologies.  Yet, in spite of strong antipathy to the car and remarkable lack of interest in TV, and notwithstanding a powerful stereotype of 'the environmentalist' as 'neo-luddite' (Sale, 1995), activists are not wholly opposed to dominant, popular technologies (McNeish, 1999, 80).  Activists' acceptance, and incorporation into everyday life, of certain technologies is nowhere more apparent than in their enthusiastic and widespread uptake of the computer (see also Lichterman, 1996).

 

Green culture is a highly 'literate' one, and the computer has quickly become invaluable to green cultural participants.  Word processing packages are now vital to many activists' tasks: composing press releases; drafting and editing responses to government consultations; writing letters and newsletters.  And the internet, and especially email, has revolutionised the ways in which activists communicate.  One activist summarised the current situation; "how", she wondered, "did people manage to be politically active before computers came along?" (fieldnotes, March 2000).

 

The internet has become a very important tool for the majority of environmental activists.  Not every activist has access to the internet, and the allegedly anti-democratic nature of email as a means of communication has been, and remains, a point of contention.  But the vast majority of activists do now own a networked computer.  Many local groups have developed websites.  But most significant is the email.  Today, email represents an abundant and growing type of social interaction within both local and dispersed green networks.  Unlike phone calls, email does not restrict activists to dyadic interaction.  On the contrary, emails are sent variously to individuals, groups and news groups.

 

Despite a higher proportion of activists being (at least potentially) interconnected by telephone, among those with access to it, email has very quickly become the preferred mode of communication.  For environmental activists there are clear advantages: one email can be simultaneously posted to a large number of people, so - for instance - an activist can get feedback on a draft press release within hours, and without leaving her desk; emails can be amended or otherwise added to, and then forwarded on to still more people, so that a message originating at a national or global level can quickly be made locally specific and sent on to interested local activists; email interactions can incorporate a gradually expanding circle, with initially private exchanges getting 'copied' to other potentially relevant activists and developing into group discussions.  Moreover, once the necessary infrastructure has been acquired, the costs - in terms of both money and time - of communicating without co-presence have been substantially reduced.  So that across the local green networks, what used to be accomplished only for the more 'important' messages and, via a laborious process, through a 'phone tree', can now be achieved by one person in a matter of seconds.  And over more dispersed networks, messages can be sent to countless recipients across the globe in 'instantaneous time' (Urry, 2000, 123-30).

 

During my research I developed a three-fold categorisation for emails:

-         Informational emails (maintaining weak network ties): collectively, these emails constitute something akin to a green newspaper.

-         Outreach emails (strengthening weak network ties, or acting as bridges between  networks): attempt to mobilise others into some kind of action, and often promote face-to-face interaction.

-         Reinforcement emails (maintaining strong network ties): increase the density of linkages between already interconnected nodes, and thus keep activists tied into regularly co-present networks.

 

The growing incidence of email communication between activists tends to increase, rather than diminish, the number of co-present socialities.  However, the continuation of face-to-face sociality appears to be growing increasingly dependent on intervening virtual interactions.  Reinforcement emails, in particular, are increasingly important to the normal routines of everyday life among more committed environmental activists.  One of them, who had been using a computer borrowed from a friend but had then needed to return it, and was thus temporarily rendered 'unplugged', noted, "I've suddenly lost touch with what's going on.  It's made me realise how these days everything's happening over email.  Without it I don't know what meetings are happening when, I just can't keep up with things really" (fieldnotes, June 2001).

 

What are the other effects of the extraordinary recent growth in email communication and interaction on green networks?  First, and beyond all doubt, the advent of email has resulted in a quantitative leap in 'green interactions'.  By dramatically increasing both the volume of information flowing down to local activists from dispersed green networks, and the amount of interaction taking place between activists at the local level, email has created additional network linkages.  Second, email has produced new green worlds of interconnectedness.  It has brought together - albeit through weak ties - activists who were previously separate, and - through increasing the volume and density of interlinkages in the local green networks - it has also strengthened weak ties and facilitated a range of face-to-face socialities.  Third, email has enabled frequent, fast and cheap interaction between geographically dispersed activists.  As such, it has either created or facilitated spatially dispersed green network ties.  However, these predominantly virtual activist networks could not be sustained without occasional 'green gatherings'. 

 

The computer has been embraced by environmental activists as a technological assemblage which facilitates pursuit of a green lifestyle.  Robert Putnam hopes that "internet technology can reinforce rather than supplant place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks" (2000, 411).  My research suggests that it can.  Nevertheless, the ethical and aesthetic impurity of the computer to a green lifestyle mean that this object is becoming increasingly politicised, and its status within green culture is currently under negotiation.  The computer's significance as a political tool does not guarantee its straightforward, frictionless incorporation into all activists' everyday lives.  In fact, having become indispensable to contemporary environmental activism, activists are now increasingly problematising computer technologies, and their own relationships with those technologies.  As one activist told me, "it's a huge can of worms, waiting to be opened, the environmental politics of the computer".  Another activist said, "the number of computers now being made, and the number being dumped, is astronomical; there's never been such a big and complicated piece of technology with such a short life-span" (fieldnotes, March 2002).

 

Activists are beginning to ask questions about where computer components come from, and the social and environmental consequences of those components; and they are questioning where the world's computers end up, and with what effects.  Relatedly, and despite (or because of) its centrality to green networks, a whole range of interventions seek to improve this material object's fit with existing green cultural codes.  Thus, many activists strive to acquire second-hand machines, and a few build their own.  And activists are searching out possible future uses for their unwanted computers.  Moreover, activists' aversion to the 'virtual' monopoly created by (Bill Gates') Microsoft (or 'Micro$oft') is feeding into the growing awareness of alternative, 'counter-cultural' operating systems such as Linux.

 

 

Discussion and Conclusions

 

An analysis of green aesthetics might find the computer's centrality to activists' lifestyles anomalous.  But the centrality of the home computer to activists' participation in green culture helps make sense of this apparent anomaly of green lifestyles.  The tremendous advantages, from the perspective of most activists, of first, the computer and second, the internet, explain why these popular mobile technologies have been incorporated into activists' everyday lives whilst the car and TV have not.  The computer is a material object which clashes with, and seems to contradict, the aesthetic unity of the green house.  However, it is a technological assemblage which facilitates inhabitation of green social networks.  Although, like the car and TV, the computer might have been perceived, and thus vilified, as a privatising piece of technology, it has actually been enthusiastically embraced by activists as a publicising device.  The computer's status within green culture illuminates a wider logic governing green materialities: in general, environmental activists' everyday lives are characterised by acceptance and incorporation of goods which facilitate participation in the elective socialities of green networks, alongside rejection of goods which threaten green socialities.  In these ways, lifestyle produces and reproduces participation in the distinctive socialities and spatialities of green networks.

 

 

The absence or marginalisation of the car and TV is at the core of, and helps to anchor, a green lifestyle.  The refusal of these objects produces green spatialities and socialities which exert a structuring force over everyday life.  The distinctive materialities typical of environmental activists facilitate participation in green networks.  Green materialities are assembled and reassembled through participation in green socialities and spatialities, and lead - over time - to the individual becoming stitched into a green lifestyle which proves temporally durable.  Green materialities tend to have the effect of maintaining the dense, close-knit properties typical of green networks; they tend too, to secure allegiance to the range of spaces of social centrality to green culture; and they tend, finally, to embed lifestyle into patterns which, at least to some extent, are able to withstand the 'de-greening' tendencies which commonly accompany movement across the life course.

 

A distinctive assemblage of material objects, constitutive of a green lifestyle, is produced and reproduced through participation in green networks.  This material assemblage produces a stabilisation of personal identity.  Embedded in an assemblage of green materialities, people become 'locked' into a green lifestyle.  This material assemblage contributes to the temporal elasticity of lifestyle, which is only slowly eroded over time.  "Objects become a crucial part of the performance of subjects" (Thrift, 1996, 41).

 

Car-free living tends to produce locally concentrated socialities and spatialities.  In their talk, although they express it in ambivalent ways, activists typically produce accounts of these socialities and spatialities as elective.  On the whole, activists recognise and resist the styles of life which the car both presupposes and produces.  Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2000) note that automobility is not only flexible, but also coercive; at the same time that it extends spatialities it also imposes them, so that home, workplace, friends and leisure sites become dispersed across ever wider geographical distances.  The car has resulted in the "tearing apart [of] previously spatially integrated functions of urban life" (Girardet, 2000, 206).  A consequence is that, in contemporary car-based cultures, more and more time is spent in the car, and alone in the car (Putnam, 2000, Ch. 12).  In contrast, without a car the spatialities of environmental activists tend to shrink.  Geographically proximate lives, and especially lives lived in 'public' (walking, cycling, constantly in, out and across 'town') tend to enhance social connectedness.  Locally dense spatialities promote locally dense socialities; carlessness produces compact lives.  Thus, in the search for sustainability, it might well be the spatial impacts of car free life which ultimately prove more important than the direct ecological impacts of 'one less car'.

 

The renunciation of the car and TV from, and the enrolment of the computer into, the everyday lives of environmental activists enhances their participation in the green public sphere.  Green materialities are structured by a cultural preference for dwelling in the 'green public sphere'; the car and TV impede this 'green dwelling', whilst the computer enables it.  Environmentalists are sometimes portrayed as the group most likely to be innovating and practising the kinds of consumption which might, if broadly adopted, lead away from environmental catastrophe and towards sustainability (Douglas, 1996; Gabriel and Lang, 1995).  Do environmental activists assemble alternative materialities more attuned to the search for sustainability?  Certainly, the absence of the car and television, allied with a 'serious', political orientation to the computer, enables activists' public-spiritedness.  And it may well be this, above the reduction in ecological impact resulting from activists' distinctive materialities, which points the way ahead in the search for sustainability.

 

 

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