Social Practice & Environmental Skill

Just as the Manifesto for the New Materialism held that the response often put forward to destructive consumerism is to withdraw from the world of things, or become ascetic, so too is much environmental and sustainable development policy and practice in the ABC model framed in a way which appears to try to separate the social/cultural and natural spheres, encouraging a duality between

destructive humans ‘in here’ and a nature ‘out there’ which is in need of

protecting. This dualism is seen in the focus of much environmental policy on

negative ‘harm reduction’ or control and management, whether reducing certain

‘impacts’ (such as pollution or carbon emissions), say, or in evaluating

as if the environment were something quantifiable and apart from us, which we

then harm or ‘impact on’ (Rip, 2006).

This approach has largely proved inadequate in provoking any serious transitions towards more sustainable trajectories. As we have already seen, practice theory provides one possible alternative to such dualism, particularly relevant to this thesis in the more recent emphasis of practice scholars on embodied and posthuman/hybrid aspects of practices (Maller, 2015), for example as developed in Maller and Strengers’ (2015) work on practice memory, inspired by related ideas

around ‘muscle memory’, Royston’s (2014) work on skilled management of energy

use in the home, Watson and Shove’s (2008) examination of competence and more-than-human elements of DIY, and Gherardi’s (2017: 47) work on following

“objects and their becomings with humans” in the “entanglement of sociomaterial practices”.

Coeckelbergh (2015) has also critiqued the manner in which this culture/nature or human/environment duality is doubly reinforced in much environmental thought. His philosophical work instead tries to work towards “a new environmental ethics, which shifts from a modern approach focusing on “nature” (external and internal)

and recommending self-control, a strong will, independent thinking, liberation, purity, knowledge (know-that), rationality, feeling, naturalness, and authenticity, to a non-modern, more relational approach that starts with recognising our ‘being- in-the-world’ and which recommends skilled engagement with the environment”

(p. 201).

Coeckelbergh’s primary goal is to examine, and overcome, a classic conundrum in

the environmental behaviour change literature: the disparity often found to exist

between a person’s knowledge of environmental issues and their propensity to act on those issues – a disparity that confounds ABC-type interventions. This is the so-called value-action gap (Whitmarsh et al., 2011), which means, as Coeckelbergh summarises it, that “when it really comes to doing things differently and to living differently, even those who are sympathetic to green thinking fail to make changes

to their lives or limit their efforts to cosmetic “lifestyle” changes” (see also Evans [2014]).20 _{Coeckelbergh, like the social practice theorists (see Shove, 2010), notes}

that the value-action gap is only mystifying if we assume that cognitive values and propositional knowledge should lead to more environmentally-benign behaviours and denies that pro-environmental behaviour change can be reduced to learning and acting on information in this manner. In order to overcome this misconception, he says, an appreciation of ‘know-how’ – a topic which has been largely neglected in the environmental social science literature (Royston, 2014) – must instead be brought into play. This would highlight the importance of skilled activity in everyday life, with its requisite emphasis on embodied, pre-discursive

and habitual knowledge. “The problem with the gap between knowledge and action,” he states (p. 200), “was that, as moderns, we understood “knowledge” as

knowing-that to the exclusion of knowing-how.” Indeed, Brown and Duguid (2001: 204) posit a reverse causality, that “only by first spreading the practice in relation

to which the explicit makes sense is the circulation of explicit knowledge

worthwhile. Knowledge, in short, runs on rails laid by practice.”

A growing literature posits that a shift away from an emphasis on ‘knowing that’

environmental problems exist, to much more practical and embodied ‘know how’,

could allow us to move towards a more sensitive, active and skilful engagement with the environment, foregrounding processes which “are sensory, situated and relational, and also temporally complex” (Royston, 2014: 155). This emphasis on practical experience accords with Maiteny’s (2002: 303) assertion that “the less

experiential and more individualistic is the sense of connectedness with the environment, the more tenuous or fragile seems to be the commitment to

behaviour change.”

Coeckelbergh is not alone in working towards this explicitly non-modern, non- dualistic understanding of the cultivation of pro-environmental practices in

20 _{In fact, Coeckelbergh cites research which purports to show that exhorting people to be more} environmentally virtuous in their attitudes and behaviours can indeed have the opposite effect, as people shun being dictated to.

society. Steven Vogel (2015) makes a remarkably similar move21_{. He begins by}

examining the many inconsistencies in contemporary uses of terms such as nature and wilderness, and explores what reality, if any, is to be found in the designations between the natural and the artificial. Vogel draws a crucial distinction, however, between his postnatural environmental philosophy and past accounts of nature labelled ‘social constructionist,’ such as influential and widely-cited work by William Cronon (1996). Vogel claims that Cronon and colleagues made the

anthropocentric error of flirting with idealism by ‘confusing epistemological issues

with ontological ones’ (p. 35). That is, while social constructionists showed that

the idea of nature is constructed culturally, their arguments quickly become a form

of idealism when discussing actual, material “nature”. Formulating an argument very close to that of the new materialists, and drawing on work from the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, Vogel states that:

The confusion of ontological with epistemological questions is characteristic of a modernist or Western reason that systematically mistakes itself for the world, unable to acknowledge the difference between its own conception of things and the things themselves. (p. 35)

Rather than abandoning social constructionism entirely, Vogel explores what a more coherent use of that phrase might be, and builds a formidable case for a more literal social construction of nature, through practice. Coming full circle with theories of social practice, he holds that dualistic tendencies in contemporary thought work to underplay the extent to which our environment is built:

The interest of a postnaturalist environmental philosophy

in “social constructionism” would then mean this: an

interest in the social processes through which the actual environment we currently inhabit – which is above all a built one – came to be built (constructed)….Indeed, one

might argue that the environments human beings inhabit are all built ones: building an environment, which is to say transforming the world around them through their

21 _{Meyer and Kersten (2016) also link Vogel’s work with new materialism and social practice}

practices, is what human beings do (“by nature,” so to

speak). And they do it socially: the transformative practices through which humans construct the environments they inhabit are themselves socially organized ones, by which I mean that they are normatively and intersubjectively structured. (p. 43)

Here, we can see fruitful parallels emerging with the ideas put forward in Simms

and Potts’ Manifesto for New Materialism. Rather than the usual proposition of

humanity as alienated from ‘nature’ per se, Vogel notes instead that our species

is alienated, to a lesser or greater extent, from their environment, for instance by mechanisms such as the market economy. In the latter case, those living in market economies tend to take their surroundings as a fetishized given and, through this fetishization, remain neither able to see its construction, nor able to care for it.

Vogel, as we have already seen from the previous quote, discusses the thorough sociality of our environment (everything from urban spaces to global climate change); that is, its construction through practices, and speculates on how we can

engage in a project of what he calls ‘democratic environmentalism,’ constructing

our environment in a more participatory manner, more ‘carefully, humbly, self-

consciously’ (p. 232). The fundamental question for environmentalists, summarizes Vogel, is this:

What kind of world would be the best for us—and not just us, but also the many creatures, animate and not, with whom we share it—so that all of our lives can be flourishing ones, and the world we inhabit can be as beautiful as possible? (p. 237)

Just as Shove maintains that there are no quick fixes or technological solutions, so do Vogel and Coeckelbergh decline to present easy solutions. Instead, as Coeckelbergh (2015: 208-209) holds, “developing environmental skill and

conviviality is a process of trial and error, of experiment; there is no final design, no blueprint, no original state of nature that can save us”. What we do need is

with the environment, from environmental habitus, from our involvement as environmental beings in natural-social practices, in embodied and materially and culturally mediated activities. If we have that kind of knowledge…we can bridge

the gap between knowledge and action; in skilled activity, we are already moved

and “internally” motivated.”

Vogel and Coeckelbergh show faith that through skilled engagement with the environment and the building of democratic community, we could not only build more humane environments – environments conducive to human flourishing – but also pursue many of the more traditional projects of environmentalism: the project of protecting green spaces, or species at risk, or, indeed, landscapes which humans have had little role in constructing. Writing from a philosophical angle, they can be forgiven for not exploring in more detail the practicalities and specificities of this question. However, as practice is inherently social (Duguid, 2005), and as this thesis deals with particular forms of ‘community’ spaces, I now

discuss literature from the social sciences discussing the notion of ‘community’ as

it relates to this bringing about of pro-environmental practices.