Environmental Publics

How do ordinary people think about the environment as they go about their daily lives? Does thinking about the environment make them do things differently? This book is the first to explore the idea of ‘environmental publics’, that is, the ways in which ordinary people engage with environmental issues across different practical contexts of work, play and home.

Emphasising the practices of ‘environmental engagement’, Environmental Publics examines how people consume the environment, learn about it, campaign for its protection and enjoy it through their leisure time. But the book avoids relying on idealisations of ‘consumers’ or ‘citizens’, or theoretical constructs about behavioural norms that have traditionally dominated research in this field. Instead, this book differentiates environmental publics not by who they are but by what they are doing – their daily practices. It also analyses specifically the geographies of those practices – how what people do affects the environment but in different ways across time and space and at different scales – aspects of practices that are neglected in the literature.

With an interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in geography, sociology, science and technology studies, political science and anthropology. It is written in an accessible and readable style, so as to be useful for preliminary and more advanced courses in environmental management, perception and policy, as well as in studies of modern society, consumption and environmentalism.

Sally Eden was a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at the University of Hull, UK. She spent twenty years researching how people relate to the environment through consumption, leisure, knowledge and policy.