Consumption

2016/06/20

Sustainability as a Key Idea informing Social Practice and Order

tl;dr: Sustainability is a social phenomenon of political, economic and ethical struggles to change social practices towards more ecological and societal equity with care.

Why on Earth another scholarly book, an introduction even, on Sustainability? Because most introductions focus on a list of definitions, principles, and cases for Sustainability and sustainable development. They present a panopticum of »everything sustainable« but lack the focus on its social and political nature. This is often reserved for more advanced texts but we – Thomas Pfister, Martin Schweighofer, and I – were deeply convinced that you have to introduce Sustainability as essentially political and thus essentially contested.

2014/12/29

Between Capitalism and Subsistence

At the Degrowth 2014 Conference in Leipzig, we were discussing the issue of postgrowth practices in production and consumption, how those are developing within business and consumer contexts and transform each other. Production and consumption appears to coevolve in front of a degrowth, postgrowth or “transitions” reference frame, with emerging concepts like the sharing of products, collaboration for producing and distributing energy and food, subsistence work and subsistence tools in Fabrication Laboratories, the rise of commons-based thinking and so forth.… Read more

2013/11/182014/04/25

The End of the Car and the Re-birth of Cities

Three recent news articles spanned an image of how transformation to a post-growth society might look and feel like on the communal level. The first was from the Worldbank (yes, the Worldbank…), focusing on sustainable transportation as a means to battle climate change. Secondly, an article on the increasing restrictions to car use in developing economies. There, national and communal governments engage on what is called “vehicle demand management”, partly for decreasing air pollution in heavily urbanized areas but also for reducing congestions.… Read more

2013/08/312013/09/01

Lessons from Gothenburg

After returning from the 6th Lifecycle Management Conference in Gothenburg, where I delivered one of the keynotes dedicated to “Sustainability Beyond Growth”, I noticed that some of the talks and topics really stuck with me. Especially two presentations remain notable. One was from Danone and their new tools for calculating their Carbon Footprint in the supply chain. With their yoghurts they can now see perfectly clear that the “original producers” aka “the cows” are responsible for most of it.… Read more

2010/02/07

Sustainable Lifestyles @ KIT

The mysteries of blogging… My first article about my talk at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) suddenly disappeared because this scientist here definitely is a learner as regards blogging 😉
Anyway, I wanted to readdress the issue I was raising: When talking about sustainable lifestyles, the question often revolves around the issue of “what type of people do we need for that?” or “what kind of education is necessary?” In my point of view, this is pointing into the wrong directions.… Read more