The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict, Complicity

by Kirstin Munro

Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, this book describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices. The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems.

Genres: Sociology, Theory

197 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 28, 2023

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is a social scientific study of how "eco conscious" families in Portland think about their sustainability habits (and their limits). Munro offers a marxist account of the household which seeks to go beyond the tendency to valorize it as a site of women's labor or gendered conflict, which she sees as upheld in the limited trotskyish versions of "social reproduction theory." instead, for Munro, the household is a site of accumulation and capitalist reproduction (i.e. reproduction of the capital relation) in a synthetic triad with the state and capitalist firms. though something of a quick theoretical gloss, the ensuing study is ultimately a matter of examining household practices like waste, heating, and cleanliness. though some of it is the bourgeoise politics you'd expect, Munro is generous to her interlocutors who are diverse in family shape and form, and many of whom balance the constraints of time and money against percieved sustainability and interpersonal or interfamilial conflict. Munro's repurposing of Gary Becker allows her to see these choices, constraints, and trade-offs--but of course she positions them as stemming from the compelled forces of capitalist accumulation. The most fascinating chapter is the one on "doing your own research"--a critical impulse which sees science aas something that is "not neutral," but has the potential to warp these people towards some rather wacky ends. Munro is quite readable and funny in examining these different types of responses, even if from a distance they can seem exhausting, futile, even sad: how does it come to happen that these minute decisions are seen to be the realm of environmental activism? this is an underread book, and somewhat specific--but also very helpful and thorough in reflecting on a particular kind of environmentalism.