“If I don’t do it, it feels wrong”: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices

Abstract

Second-generation practice theoretical research on sustainable consumption has largely overlooked the role of environmental ethics. This is likely due to associations of “ethics” with culture and symbolic understandings of consumption. This article investigates how some environmentally aware and engaged consumers actively try to cultivate ethical and sustainable practices in order to develop ways of living more sustainably. By combining a practice theoretical framework with Michel Foucault’s work on ethical self-cultivation, I combine the ethical – understood as emerging in specific places and time as part of cultural formations – with processes of embodiment and ethical reflexivity to understand how environmental ethical reflexivity can play a role in the sustainable change of practices. The article argues that changing consumption practices based on changed environmental ethics requires an ongoing reflexive and bodily process of training the bodymind to embody skills and mold sensory, affective, and perceptual dispositions. This is a processual change requiring time and effort, in which research participants nevertheless experience meaning and hope as they are able to create sustainable change in their own lives and, over time and to some degree, live up to their ethical ideals. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two locations using audio-visual methods in participant observation and interviews with research participants who are actively engaged in changing their everyday practices.