Consuming the Environment

Consuming the Environment explores the environmental impacts of consuming everyday products and explains how we can consume more sustainably.

Written in an accessible style, this book begins with our everyday mundane experiences of consuming products – online, in the grocery store, at the mall – and shows how these practices are connected to a global system dependent upon ever increasing consumption. Drawing on the expertise of researchers in topics such as energy, food, water, land, fashion, electronics, eco-tourism, green products, and (micro)plastics, this volume unpacks the complex and largely invisible relationships that consumerism has with resource extraction and manufacturing. By focusing on a diverse range of everyday consumer products, as well as more subtle things that have been transformed into products, such as knowledge, waste, and pets, the chapters are structured around the central argument that we must re-orient ourselves as citizens rather than consumers. It is as citizens that we may help to organize our communities and hold our governments and industry accountable to planetary sustainability boundaries.

With the inclusion of summary boxes, directed discussion, assignment questions, and further reading in each chapter, this book will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses on consumerism, sustainable consumption, and environmental sociology.

Myra J. Hird is a Full Professor, elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Queen's National Scholar in the School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Canada. Hird is Director of Waste Flows, an interdisciplinary research project focused on waste as a global scientific-technical and socio-ethical issue. Hird has published 12 books and over 90 articles and book chapters on a diversity of topics relating to science studies. Hird’s 12th book, written with Hillary Predko, is called Extracting Reconciliation and is published by Routledge. Hird represented Canada at the G7 Science Meeting on Plastic Pollution in Paris, France.