Household Sustainability: Challenges and Dilemmas in Everyday Life

Household Sustainability: Challenges and Dilemmas in Everyday Life

Article Type: Books and resources From: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Volume 15, Issue 1

Chris Gibson, Carol Farbotko, Nicholas Gill, Lesley Head and Gordon Waitt

Edward Elgar publishing

Cheltenham

May 2013

256 pp.

£67.50

ISBN 9781781006207

Contrary to the common rhetoric that being green is "easy", household sustainability is rife with contradiction and uncertainty. Households attempting to respond to the challenge to become more sustainable in everyday life face dilemmas on a daily basis when trying to make sustainable decisions. Various aspects of life such as cars, computers, food, phones and even birth and death, may all provoke uncertainty regarding the most sustainable course of action.

Drawing on international scientific and cultural research, as well as innovative ethnographies, this timely book probes these wide-ranging sustainability dilemmas, assessing the avenues open to households trying to improve their sustainability. The authors engage critically, and constructively, with the proposition that households are a key scale of action on climate change. They confront dilemmas of practice and circumstance, and cultural norms of lifestyle and consumerism that are linked to troublesome environmental problems – and question whether they can be easily unsettled.

The work also shows the informal and often unheralded work by households – frequently the poorest – in reducing their environmental burden. This book will help in understanding both the barriers to household sustainability and the "unsung" sustainability work carried out by householders.

Walter Leal Filho

Faculty of Life Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany