The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating Ecological Habitus

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The Practice of EnvironmentalismCreating
Ecological Habitus

• Randolph Haluza-DeLay
• The Kings University College
• Edmonton, Alberta
• (American Sociology Association August 11, 2006)

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The Practice of Environmentalism.

• Social movements are insurgent realities
  (Lofland, 1996).
• collective challenges to mainstream conceptions
  of how society ought to be organized and how
  people ought to live.
• Environmentalism
• Failing to Challenge?
• Failing the Environment?
• How could it work better?

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The Practice of Environmentalism.

• This paper
• Draws on the sociological thought of Bourdieu
• Uses habitus towards explaining why
  socio-environmental change has been difficult
• Examines cognitive praxis in a theory of
  practice
• Considers social mvmts as sites of learning
• Asks What is the potential for the learning of
  an ecological habitus?

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The Practice of Environmentalism.

• Can environmental social movement organizations
  teach an alternate logic of practice
  sufficient for socio-ecological change?

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The Practice of Environmentalism.

• Social Movements (theories of)
• Political opportunists.
• Resource mobilizers.
• Cultural change (values, symbols, meanings, etc.)
• Insurgent realities?
• Producers of cognitive praxis.

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The Practice of Environmentalism.

• Cognitive Praxis
• SMs are distinguished by the new thinking that
  they bring.
• SMs are producers of knowledge/innovators.
• E.g. environmentalism
• The movement provided, we might say, the social
  context for a new kind of knowledge to be
  practiced. There was no talk, before the
  environmental movement began to put its
  ecological cosmology into practice, of ecological
  living or ecological lifestyles... The movement
  made the space for those types of knowledge and
  experience to be able to emerge (Eyerman
  Jamison, p. 73).

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Learning in Social Movements

• Considerable research theorizing in the field
  of Adult Education.
• SMs do educational programmes, but
• focus of this paper is the informal and
  incidental.
• Research has tended to be ethnographic.
• Adult educators // Social movement scholars
• Hall (2006) extensive State of the Field
  report.
• http//www.unb.ca/ALKCSymposium/alkc-sof.html

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Learning in Social Movements

• Review yields four Conclusions
• Not yet a comprehensive understanding of these
  learning environments or outcomes.
• Research has typically focused on activists.
• Learning has become that which is conscious to
  the participants themselves.
• Careful ethnography shows a tacit dimension to
  learning in social movements.

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Learning in Social Movements

• Experiential Learning Theory
• Learning is an action on the part of the learner
• Emphasizes reflection-on-experience
• Learning is socially situated
• Internalisation of Reflection?
• Learning must be understood as the gradual
  transformation of knowledge into knowing, and
  part of that transformation involves a deepening
  internalisation to the point that people and
  their knowing are totally integrated one with
  the other (Le Cornu, 2005, p. 175, emphasis
  added).

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.Creating an Ecological Habitus

• Bourdieus Theory of Practice
• Field
• Habitus
• Logic of Practice (sens pratique)
• The theory of action that I propose (with the
  notion of habitus) amounts to saying that most
  human actions have as a basis something quite
  different from intention, that is, acquired
  dispositions which make it so that an action can
  and should be interpreted as oriented toward one
  objective or another without anyone being able to
  claim that that objective was a conscious design
  (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 97-98).
• Forms of Capital/Symbolic Violence

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.Creating an Ecological Habitus

• Observations/Criticisms
• Transformation of individual habitus (e.g., more
  ecological) will be difficult apart from the
  field.
• Progressive social change conservative habitus
• habitus tends to ensure its own constancy and
  its defense against change through the selection
  it makes within new information by rejecting
  information capable of calling into question its
  accumulated information (Bourdieu Wacquant,
  1992, p. 167).
• Habitus is overly deterministic?
• NO, but
• We are constrained by our circumstances
• Habitus is generative, creative, inertial.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• Environmentalism will be challenged in a field
  centred around hegemonic versions of realities
  that are generally contrary to its goals.
• It will struggle to articulate its frames in
  contention with dominant logics in which it does
  not make sense.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• An ecological sens pratique negotiating an
  un-ecological society will need
• Details of ecologically sound lifestyle
  practices
• A critique of the social structures that inhibit
  ecological lifestyle
• An understanding of how social relations generate
  resistance to an ecological worldview and
  lifestyle
• An ecological habitus will thrive only in a
  social field that supports its maintenance.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• What is an Ecological Habitus?
• Cue Bourdieus relational sociology
• (Social relations are situated, and embodied
  beings are located the habitus is conditioned in
  its field.)
• Question What are all the relations of a place?
• An ecological habitus is an expertise that
  generates a practical logic of how to live well
  in this place.
• Therefore, an ecological habitus is described
  backwards from the practices of living well
  (socio-ecologically) in a place.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• It will not be easy.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• It will not be easy.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus

• CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS
• There is a theoretical potential for
  environmental organizations to provide
  opportunities for this transformation of habitus.
• To be effective, environmental SMOs would do well
  to include an intentionally experiential and
  transformative pedagogy as part of its movement
  praxis.
• Too few studies have focused on the everyday
  practices of people rather than activists.
• Bourdieus theory of practice does advance social
  movement theory.
• Environmental SMs are engaged in a struggle for
  ecological praxis.

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The Practice of Environmentalism Creating
an Ecological Habitus