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Embodying the environment in everydaylife practices1

Phil Macnaghten

Abstract

This paper suggests ways in which ‘the environment’ needs to be reconfigured sothat it better resonates with how people are experiencing politics, nature and every-day life. Through empirical research on environmental concerns and everyday prac-tices, this paper sketches a framework through which the values associated withcontemporary environmentalism might be developed in a more reflexive relation-ship to wider transformations in society. In particular, the research critically evaluates the standard storyline of a ‘global nature’ under threat and in need of col-lective action by a global imagined community. In contrast to rhetorics of the globalenvironment, this paper explores ways in which the environment is being embod-ied, valued and experienced in an array of social practices. The paper further out-lines the significance of such embodied practices as significant yet undervaluedpoints of connection for wider, global environmental issues.

Introduction

There is growing recognition that the idioms, issue-framings and general com-municative body language in which environmental debates are being con-ducted are failing to augment a strengthening of connection with people’slived concerns, with the effect that environmental concerns remain on theperiphery of social life. Certainly, even though discourses of sustainable devel-opment now command widespread support amongst institutional actors, thishas rarely resulted in the widespread shifts in environmental behaviour thatwas anticipated and desired (Gibbs et al., 1998; Munton, 1997).

In the most recent British Social Attitudes survey, for example, there isreporting of a ‘plateauing’ of environmental attitudes over the last decade,and evidence that while environmental problems are perceived or felt to begetting worse, people are now less likely to engage in public actions such assigning a petition, joining an established environmental organisation or takingpart in a protest (Christie and Jarvis, 2001). Indeed, longitudinal survey evi-dence points to consistent and demonstrable levels of environmental concernlower in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, and levels of environmentallyfriendly behaviour in the UK that remain far lower than levels of environ-

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

mental concern (Christie and Jarvis, 2001; Dalton and Rohrschneider, 1998;Taylor, 1997; Witherspoon, 1994). Related research points to a similar‘plateauing’ of support in relation to membership of established ‘green’ or‘countryside’ organisations in the UK. Following a period of exceptionalgrowth through the 1980s and early 1990s membership appears to haveremained fairly constant over the last five years or so with almost one in fiveUK adults continuing to subscribe to such organisations (Office for NationalStatistics, 2001).

A further dynamic concerns the apparent differentiation of the environ-mental movement. Indeed, in the UK, it has become increasingly difficult to see common cause between the established environmental campaigninggroups, the siphoning of young energy into more direct action networks,perhaps best illustrated in the anti-globalisation movement, and the morereactionary rural social movements devoted to the defence of country sportsand its so-called (natural) ways of life (such as fox-hunting) (Jordan, 1998;Lloyd, 2001). These movements appear to render unreliable the notion of asingular environmental movement, traditionally defined as comprising bothenvironmental groups and the ‘attentive’ public, who while not necessarilymembers or supporters of those groups, nevertheless to some extent sharetheir values and beliefs (see Caldwell, 1990: 85; Lowe and Goyder, 1983: 9).

How might one explain the apparent lack of any coherent public responseto increasing awareness of environmental issues and threats in the context ofa seemingly fragmenting environmental movement? A number of contribut-ing factors have been highlighted as barriers that appear to be inhibiting widerpublic participation in collective environmental action. These include the lackof political commitment and leadership in the UK, the absence of joined-upthinking between sustainable development strategies and broader fiscalpolicy, the lack of trust in government and other institutions, the incompat-ibility between the timescales of environmental and political processes, andthe recognition that environmental issues are more complex and more uncer-tain than previously considered (see, for example, Adam, 1998; Macnaghtenand Jacobs, 1997; Munton, 1997; Real World Coalition, 2001).

In this paper I develop a novel form of inquiry to the so-called ‘value-actiongap’ in environmental policy (Blake, 1999). Rather than identifying the con-ditions under which ‘the environment’ might engender wider public supportand identification I focus more critically on the language of ‘the environment’and its connections to everyday life practices. How is the environment beingframed in government, media and NGO discourses? And how does thisconnect, or not, to the ways in which people are experiencing and valuing theenvironment in everyday life? These questions are addressed through empiri-cal research on environmental concerns and everyday life practices. Beforereporting on this research it is necessary to highlight some key shapingprocesses through which the environment as a political problem came to beconstituted (see Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: chapter 2).

Phil Macnaghten

64 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2003

The language of the environment

The contemporary configuration of ‘the environment’ in political and civic life is of relatively recent origin. The environment, as a set of diverse problems, had to be gathered up and presented as all symptomatic of a wideroverarching ‘global’ environmental crisis (Szerszynski, 1993; Wynne,1994). Beginning around 1962 with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the so-called ‘prophets of doom’ helped formulate a language of ‘the environment’radically different from previous concerns over nature, where the environ-mental threat came to be regarded as of global proportions and as linked todominant values of modernisation and technological progress (McCormick,1995).

Through the 1970s and early 1980s there was a general broadening of theenvironmental agenda, guided by resourceful, radicalised and effective NGO activity seeking to demonstrate that there was more or less a single‘global’ environment that needed protection. In the UK a succession of‘issues’ was put onto the political agenda, including the proliferation of chemicals in the 1960s, resource and energy scarcity in the early 1970s,nuclear power and motorways in the late 1970s, agriculture and countrysideissues in the early 1980s, and more recently acid rain, ozone depletion, biodi-versity and global warming (Grove-White, 1991; Hajer, 1995). Chris Rosedescribes the environment movement in this period as involved in a ‘strugglefor proof’, progressively raising the stakes of diagnosis to show critical damagenot just locally, but nationally, internationally, and finally ‘globally’ (1993:287).

What emerged from such processes was a dominant storyline of the ‘fragileearth’ under stress from human action and in need of care and protection froman imagined global community. Wolfgang Sachs calls this discourse of theglobal environment as environmentalism framed through the ‘astronaut’s per-spective’; of the environment perceived as a physical body maintained by avariety of biogeochemical processes rather than as a collection of states andcultures (1999). What remains central to this perspective is the belief that weshare the same global environment, that it comprises a set stock of issues, andthat these are all symptoms of the same malaise, namely human society’s over-exploitation and abuse of the natural world. The storyline of the fragile andvulnerable one earth has remained dominant in contemporary institutionalframings of environmental policy and can be identified across a huge array ofsustainable development discourses emanating from the mass media, envi-ronmental organisations, government bodies and corporations.

In the next section I question the enduring robustness of the storyline of‘the environment’ in the light of recent theoretical debates on contemporarysocial and cultural transformation. Might such debates provide fresh insighton the ways in which people are likely to identify with environmental issuesin the context of changing patterns of social life in late modernity?

Embodying the environment

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2003 65

Globalisation, individualisation and the environment

In an influential Fabian Society pamphlet Michael Jacobs argues that in crucialways, the desires and values associated with contemporary environmentalismpay little regard to dynamic and on-going processes of societal and economictransformation (1999). Following the political project articulated in ‘The ThirdWay’ (Giddens, 1998) and subsequently adopted by Tony Blair (1999), heargues that a closer understanding of key dynamics of social change providea more appropriate contemporary framework in which to reformulate thepolitical project of the environment. He explains:

One of the striking features of environmentalism – and this is true as muchof the discourse of sustainable development as of its utopian forebears – isits value-driven nature. Environmental literature tends to start with ananalysis of present and predicted environmental degradation; but the nextmove is nearly always to a normative – that is to say, value-based – descrip-tion of what the world should instead be like. We should care more aboutfuture generations; we should live in harmony with other species; we shouldconsume less; we should share resources more fairly with other nations;we should produce more efficiently. There is of course nothing wrong withsuch expressions of idealism; but what frequently seems to be missing isthe sense of movement which might take us from the present world to thedesired better one. This is not because environmentalists have no policiesto get us from here to there. The sustainable development literature is fullof them. But they do not seem very closely connected to what is happen-ing in the world. Modern societies are going through a period of rapid socialand economic change – through globalisation, the growth of informationtechnologies, increasing individualism in society, rising inequalities and soon. Much of the time governments and individual businesses are rather des-perately trying to cope in the face of these trends. But the environmentmovement’s prescriptions rarely seem to recognise them at all. (1999: 14,original emphasis)

This analysis suggests that ‘the environment’ has developed as a set of idealsthat are largely exclusive and independent from wider influences in society.Thus, environmental organisations appear to have felt little need to be explicitabout their underlying beliefs, to relate environmental priorities to wider col-lective hopes and aspirations, or indeed, to become involved in genuine dia-logue with the wider public. This is not to say that environmental organisationshave not been hugely successful as a social movement in terms of mobilisingpeople, ideas, values and practices. Rather, this suggests that such organisa-tions have tended to remain somewhat unreflexive as to the conditions nec-essary for advancing mobilisation in the light of recent and on-goingeconomic, social and cultural change. While Jacobs uses his analysis to set outa prescriptive new policy agenda, the interest of this paper concerns how such

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contemporary debates on globalisation and individualisation can provide aframework in which to rethink the relationship between environmental con-cerns and everyday life.

Globalisation has been usefully defined as the ‘intensification of worldwidesocial relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happen-ings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and visa versa’(Giddens, 1990: 64). As this process has intensified in late modernity, ques-tions of personal agency and of trust between publics and a wide variety ofinstitutions become of growing significance. This dynamic is illustrated in theenhanced role played by both the mass media and expert systems in people’sperceptions of environmental risks.

In particular, the global media are of major importance to how peopleunderstand and make sense of environmental issues. This role has been onenot only of communicating and disseminating environmental information tothe public, but also of actively constructing and even constituting the con-temporary environmental agenda, partly in conjunction with environmentalNGOs. This includes the complex interplay of narratives, storylines, images,icons and metaphors through which environmental issues and events gainmeaning. Recent research suggests that the media are now an integral part ofthe cultural process by which environmental meanings are created, circulatedand consumed (see Anderson, 1997; Burgess, 1990; Hansen, 1993; Wilson,1992; Yearley, 1992).

Indeed, throughout especially the 1980s and 1990s environmental NGOsbecame increasingly adept at packaging powerful images for the national andinternational media. Reflexive to media requirement for novelty, drama andhuman interest, pressure groups and par excellence Greenpeace, brought the‘global’ environment ‘up close’. Specifically, Ross describes a dominant ‘genreof meaning’ in which the media have tended to frame environmental issues:

In recent years we have become accustomed to seeing images of a dyingplanet, variously exhibited in grisly poses of ecological depletion and cir-culated by all sectors of genocidal atrocities. The clichés of the standardenvironmental movement are well known to all of us: on the one hand,belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge, fish floatingbelly up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and clear-cut forests;on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of pastoral imagery, pristine,green, and unspoiled by human habitation, crowned by the ultimate globalspectacle, the fragile, vulnerable ball of spaceship earth (1994: 171).

Ross argues that current media forms reinforce a popular understanding of aparticular culture of nature, that of nature as non-human. However, researchshows that people are becoming familiar with such media forms, and that inresponse they are developing a more reflexive relationship to the media andinstitutional framings of environmental stories (Myers and Macnaghten, 1998;Szerszynski and Toogood, 1999). Indeed, often the meaning of an environ-



mental story is itself a matter of controversy with different actors seeking topromote opposing framings of a proposed development, a protest, an actionand so on. A crucial question then concerns the texture of people’s relation-ships with, and dependency on, those expert institutions that are construct-ing, framing, disseminating, contesting and responding to environmental risksbut to which most people have only mediated access. Hence, a neglecteddimension of research on public perceptions concerns the very basis of trust:‘Who to believe?’ and ‘How to decide who to believe?’

So far I have argued that public trust and confidence in the media and inofficial institutions is a central ingredient in understanding how people makesense of environmental issues. But across many western democracies the rela-tionship between institutions and their publics has become increasinglyfraught because of the apparent growing sense of public disaffection with, andmistrust in, formal politics and mainstream institutions. Clearly tied to such adynamic is the alleged erosion of tradition and custom in everyday life andthe pursuit of more individualised lifestyles (Giddens, 1994). The rise of anethic of individual self-fulfilment has emerged in an age in which the socialorder of the nation state, class, ethnicity and the traditional family is thoughtto be in decline (Beck and Beck-Gernstein, 2002).

Theories of individualisation and globalisation pose considerable chal-lenges for policy and politics. Above all, they point to the need to engage moreclosely with everyday life struggles and realities as the starting point for anyfuture collective action. Yet, the question as to how environmental concernsare tied up with the emergence of this apparently more individualised andglobalised society has received little attention. Jacobs makes a convincingargument that in an individualised society environmental concerns are likelyto be felt most acutely when they impinge on the body, typically in relationto questions of food and health (1999). He argues that powerful institutionaldiscourses on ‘choice’ and ‘personal autonomy’ have led people to take moreinterest in their own health and well-being. As globalisation makes an almostinfinite variety of foods, therapies, medicines, lifestyles, diets and so on avail-able, people feel compulsion to make choices about what they eat and howthey live. The spectre of a new and apparently expanding array of ‘invisible’environmental risks, out there, impinging more and more directly on the body,engenders additional forms of insecurity and anxiety (Adam, 1998; Beck,1992; Dunant and Porter, 1996; Franklin, 1998).

This raises the possibility that life in the ‘risk society’ may itself be trans-forming how people are experiencing nature and the environment. In a moreindividualised society, the experience of environmental risk may be becom-ing less about ‘saving the planet’ and the plight of distant others such as therainforest, the whale, the tiger. Rather, the environment becomes acutely sig-nificant in terms of how it confronts the individual, when it meets ‘me’, ‘headon’, ‘in here’.

Yet, if the encounter with the environment is becoming more personalised,another set of representations of ‘what nature is’ may be becoming more sig-

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nificant. The storyline of a ‘global nature under threat from humanity’ is radi-cally distinct from how nature tends is encountered ‘as an expressive realm ofpurity and moral power’ (Szerszynski, 1993). An emergent sociology of theenvironment has begun to provide insight on the embodied character ofhuman experience of the environment especially when located within thecontext of specific bodily practices (Bhatti and Church, 2001; Cloke and Jones,2001; Franklin, 2001; Macnaghten and Urry, 2001a). This research suggeststhat people tend to value their personal environments, not as part of univer-sal and generalised abstractions, but when connected to particular everydaypractices and leisure pursuits such as gardening, therapy, walking, fishing,climbing, boating, even motoring.

Research approach and method

So far I have suggested that wider societal trends – especially those arisingfrom processes of globalisation and individualisation – are impacting onpeople’s identities as political subjects. People’s experience of globalisation issimultaneously making people feel more interconnected with the world andmore vulnerable to global forces increasingly perceived as beyond theircontrol. Individualisation is increasing personal choice and autonomy while atthe same time contributing to new levels of insecurity and anxiety. These trans-formations raise provocative questions on the changing structure of environ-mental concerns, values and political beliefs:

• From a concern with societal issues ‘out there’ (eg global warming, ozonedepletion, rainforest destruction) towards privatised issues ‘in here’ (egrisks such as GM foods and synthetic chemicals that are pervasive, globaland which threaten the health of the body);

• From a residual model of trust in expert institutions towards a model ofradical scepticism in the truthfulness, goodwill and integrity of mediat-ing expert institutions reportedly responsible for the management ofenvironmental risks;

• From a concern with the environment as needing to be ‘saved’ towardsan embracing of an environment that ‘saves us’ from the pressures andinsecurities of modern living;

• From a political engagement through formal civic structures and net-works towards a more restricted political engagement based on personalidentity often expressed in lifestyle bodily practices.

These questions provided a theoretical underpinning for an empirical researchstudy, for and with Greenpeace, designed to explore shifts in the ways in whichmany people are feeling about the environment, given their experience ofpolitics, nature and everyday life in contemporary Britain. The aim of theproject was to explore the potential for reaching new supporter groups in the UK population, including those who express some concern or care for the



environment but who remain outside the nexus of established supporters. Inother words, given that a fairly substantial majority of the population arechoosing not to join environmental organisations or to become activelyinvolved in public expressions of environmental activism, the questionremains as to how to engage them. Indeed, what, if anything, animates peopletoday about ‘the environment’?

The research discussed in this paper rests upon the analysis of five struc-tured focus group discussions involving a selection of population groups inthe UK, supplemented by a number of in-depth interviews with key politicalcommentators to aid interpretation. The discussions were held in Februaryand March 2000 in the North-West of England. The design of the discussionguide was set out to clarify how people are responding to global environ-mental issues in the context of their identities as political subjects. The dis-cussions centred on three lines of questioning.

1. What kinds of narratives, storylines, images, icons and metaphors of ‘theenvironment’ tend to engage people?

2. How do people understand the institutional and personal conditions forinvolvement in environmental issues?

3. What are the everyday practices in which people encounter nature andthe environment and what is the significance of these embodied prac-tices as points of connection to wider, global environmental issues?

A number of concept boards, composed largely of iconic images and head-lines, were designed to capture particular aspects of the research and to stim-ulate responses. From these responses, and through reflection on how theycompared to empirical research conducted previously, a set of guidelines wereproposed aimed at helping Greenpeace develop ways of talking about theenvironment that may inspire and mobilise new constituencies of support.

Five focus groups of eight participants were recruited across the north ofEngland by a professional recruiter. The groups were designed to have char-acteristics from a range of social categories including gender, age, socio-economic status, urban or rural residence, children at home or not. Eachgroup met once, for three hours and followed the same topic guide. The dis-cussions were recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts analysed by theresearch team. Each of the groups was set up to include people who shareda common form of engagement or connection with ‘the environment’, eitherdirectly and ‘hands on’ through hobbies and ‘enthusiasms’, indirectly or moretangentially through the media and leisure activities, or ‘vicariously’ throughconcern for their children’s well-being and ‘the future’. Although participantswithin each group bonded through particular shared practices and interests,the research was designed to ensure that the spread of groups reflected abroad cross-section of society. The participants were not members or sup-porters of environmental organisations and were not connected to any formof environmental politics. The rationale for the selection of the groups was to

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explore the significance, if any, between apparently apolitical leisure pursuitsand practices as points of connections for some form of political involvementin wider, global environmental issues.

The first group was of ‘anglers and beekeepers’, all men, aged 50–65, everyone a keen gardener. The group bonded through practices involving sensuousand embodied relations with the natural world: from the passive pursuit ofbeekeeping, to the ordering and working with nature involved in gardening,to the active encounter with nature in angling. The second group was of‘outdoor sports enthusiasts’, all women, aged 25–30. The group shared anactive involvement in pursuits such as snow boarding, scuba diving, surfing,adventure holidays, or mountain biking. The third group was of ‘countrysideenthusiasts’, all men, aged 35–50, and fathers of teenage children. The groupshared an interest in enjoying family-oriented leisure pursuits in rural settings:from walking and camping to heritage sites and nature reserves. The fourthgroup was of ‘local community involvers’, all women aged 30–40, and mothersof pre-teen children. They were all actively involved in their local community,engaged in voluntary activities that ranged from school and the Guides, to thecitizens advice bureau, the local church and helping the homeless. The fifthgroup was of ‘international involvers’, a mix of men and women, aged 30–45.They were all supporters of an international aid or education-oriented charityor pressure group.

Research findings

Global icons of the natural environment

It was argued above that the idioms, issue-framings and general communica-tive body language in which governments, business and NGOs are conduct-ing environmental debates tend to deploy a storyline of a ‘global nature’ underthreat (Sachs, 1999). It was further argued that such a global nature has cometo be produced by many apparently separate activities now regarded as com-ponents of a global crisis of the natural world. This has resulted from thefusion of a wide variety of diverse social practices, central to which are assem-blages of repeatedly familiar media images of threatened iconic environments,such as images of the blue earth as seen from space, nuclear power stations,deforestation, smoke stacks, dramatic environmental protests, the Amazonrainforest, whales, tigers and elephants, and so on. Together these practicescan be seen as performing a ‘global nature’, a nature that appears to be under-going irreversible change that needs to be vigorously resisted by a globalimagined community (Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000; Urry, 2002).

The research examined how people in fact responded when they were pre-sented with a variety of global icons of ‘the natural environment’ on a conceptboard. Images included a number of physical threats such as deforestation,oil pollution, and dolphins caught in drift nets, juxtaposed with images of



‘pristine’ and ‘independent’ nature including those of whales, tigers and bears‘in the wild’. At the bottom of the board was a further set of images of theglobe with captions including, ‘It’s in our hands’ and ‘Handle with care and itwill last for ever’. To what extent were such images able to perform a globalnature in which people could unite as a shared imagined global community?To what extent did people feel part of the same global environment? Indeed,how did people respond when presented with such icons?

People were initially asked to describe their feelings to these images. Whatwas found was striking. Global icons of ‘the natural environment’ had initialemotive appeal but tended to remain distant and abstract. People recognisedsuch iconic images and their implied relationship to global threats – such asglobal warming, ozone depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, andresource depletion, and so on – but tended to perceive such threats as aproblem ‘out there’, detached from everyday life, making it easy for them toturn off. The following sequence is illustrative of responses to the board, andin particular to an image of ‘the globe’ with the caption ‘It’s in our hands’:

Mod So what do you feel when you see these images all together?F That’s my world.F It actually makes me feel guilty . . .F That they care.F That the world is wonderful and it’s worth protecting.F It’s in our hands, it’s like saying ‘it’s your responsibility’ and it makes

you feel more responsible. When you look at it, it makes you feel moreresponsible on a global scale. It’s that ‘in your hands’ one especially.It’s in our hands, it makes you think ‘oh yes, it is really isn’t it’. It’ssomething that you don’t really think about in everyday life when yougo through your treadmill. It makes you think . . . I don’t know, whenI’m confronted with it, I think yes, yes, I want to do something, andyes, it’s important. And then you get back on the treadmill of your lifeand then what’s more around you . . .

F Yes, more practicalF . . . that sort of thing. We feel we should be doing it and then . . . It’s

like for me, when I watch something like Comic Relief and I givemoney and I’m like ‘yes, right, we should be doing something’ andthen 3 months down the line I’m back where I was before . . .

Mod So it’s quite hard to reach this world, is that what you’re saying?All Yes.

(Local community involvers)

This sequence captures some of the texture of public responses to the globaliconography of ‘the natural environment’. It reflects how people tended bothto recognise and to endorse such images as part of a familiar ‘performance’in which they were being called upon to act – as part of a global imaginedcommunity – on behalf of a common ‘global nature’. In particular, it reveals

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the visceral power of such a performance and how this had a tendency toinduce a sense of ‘guilt’. However, at the same time, the sequence illustratesthe limitations of such ‘non-human’ iconography: its fundamental dislocationand ‘otherness’, its ability to invoke only fleeting guilt, and its ‘lack of reach’to permeate into the sinews of everyday life.

The reported difficulty of connecting with the ‘global’ dimensions of envi-ronmental threats as physical and non-human points to the need to explorealternative ways in which people might more genuinely feel part of the sameglobal environment. Three aspects are discussed below. First, I assess thepotential for a different iconography of ‘the global environment’ – set out interms of its human dimensions – to engage people. Then I explore differentactivities and leisure practices in the course of which people encounter thevalues and benefits of nature and the environment. And finally, I examinepeople’s perception of various mediating expert institutions reportedlyresponsible for the management of environmental risks.

From a nature ‘out there’ to a nature ‘in here’

A scenario was outlined earlier that public engagement with environmentalproblems may be shifting from distant threats ‘out there’ to more proximatethreats ‘in here’ (Jacobs 1999). Thus, issues such as whales, the Amazon andacid rain, that were prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, may be migratingtowards issues which impinge more directly and more immediately on ‘me’,my body, my family and my future – such as allergies, traffic, BSE and geneti-cally modified foods.

To explore this scenario a second concept board was introduced composedof images depicting a range of environmental threats and issues in terms oftheir ‘human’ and ‘personal’ connections. Images included pictures of peoplein smog and traffic jams, workers spraying pesticides, animals in factoryfarming, vegetables depicted in radically novel shapes, juxtaposed with imagesof solar energy, people cycling, clean forests and recycling. The storyline wasof the human impacts of global environmental issues and of the possibility ofa ‘greener’ and more humane future. While people’s responses tended to beless immediate and visceral than the ‘non-human’ global iconography set outabove, the images tended to be seen as more credible, more thought provok-ing and, at times, more connected to their ‘lived-in world’:

F I think this one, you immediately think of choices we make whereasthe other one wasn’t, didn’t seem to be anything to do with the choiceswe make, but that one is like, do we choose to walk or cycle or do we take the car? Do we choose to buy farm, you know, battery fedhens or do we choose to buy free-range hens when we go to the supermarket?

M Yes, it’s much more personal . . . It’s more . . . the connection to youis more obvious. The connection is there on the bottom board but you



have to think about it a lot more. It’s one step or two steps removedfrom where you are.(International involvers)

F It’s more people orientated isn’t it. We’ve already said about theanimals haven’t we, that we’re more for people and children andfuture. Although, you know, we feel sorry for the animals, we feel weshould do something, but we’re more likely to do something becauseof the top board.

F It brings it closer to home doesn’t it.F It would force you more into action.F It’s more shocking as well isn’t it.Mod Is it?F Because that’s the society we’re living in and what in the world is it

doing to us.(Local community involvers)

These images appeared to contribute to a more enduring sense of a shared ‘global imaginary’ but one where people’s moral sensitivity tended to be at its highest when they are able to establish empathetic connectionswith others that suffer on a person-to-person basis. Images of ‘the environ-ment’ were experienced most intensely when they were connected to the ‘personal’ realm of everyday life. Direct connections to the local and personalenvironment tended to ‘hit home’ and matter more. Indeed, it is often throughpersonal, rather than abstract and mediated encounters, that people saw themselves as most likely to become involved in environmental matters:

F Yes. Well it’s like what we said before, a lot of what we’re involved inhas become out of personal situations hasn’t it, more than anything.Whereas something like this, with it being such a global [thing], it’ssort of how we get actually involved in it. I think we all know it’ssomething that we should be aware of but . . .(Local community involvers)

Such findings have implications for the development of effective communi-cation strategies. Certainly, if the environment is experienced most intenselywhen it connects to the personal domain of everyday life, this points to a needto use people’s concern for themselves, their families and localities as pointsof connection for the wider, ‘global’ environmental issues. Just what these con-cerns are, and what their ‘environmental content’ is, needs to be more fullyunderstood if effective strategies are to be devised. Therefore it is essential toexplore the various kinds of everyday encounter in the course of which peoplecome into contact and engagement with the environment.

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Everyday encounters with nature

At the start of each focus group people discussed a common form of engage-ment or connection with ‘the environment’. As predicted, people do not tendto think in terms of ‘one big environment’ that was the same for everyone(Cooper, 1992). Rather, there are many different ‘environments’, each con-nected to people’s particular concerns, priorities, social relationships andresponsibilities. Three different kinds of encounter are set out below.

For many people ‘the environment’ was perceived as a source of pleasureand transcendence from the burdens and stresses of everyday life. Activitiesof walking in the countryside, outdoor swimming, mountain biking, rockclimbing, gardening, bee-keeping and fishing were discussed as ways of ‘being in the environment’, in proximity to nature, removed from modernity.Below is one such discussion of a young woman describing her passion forscubadiving:

F It’s the tranquillity kind of thing, you know, all you’re concentratingon is breathing or not with snorkling. And what’s around you. It’s liketaking your life right back to basics, you know, you’re alive, you’rebreathing and you’re floating around and then there’s the sort of thinglike you’re in other world . . . it’s just removes all the complicationsof modern life I suppose. For me that’s why I go on holiday and spendmost of the time under water. And it’s so beautiful. The sort of crimeand living in the city gets to me and that’s one thing that is so com-pletely the opposite that it’s like, you know, some sort of therapy. Itis like meditation, you’re just concentrating on swimming or lookingand just transported to another sort of level. It’s so philosophical butyou know what I mean.(Outdoor sports enthusiasts)

Here, the expressive purity and moral power of nature arises from a practicein which one can experience a nature that is fundamentally ‘other’ to thatfamiliar in industrial modernity. Such an experience can be seen as emblem-atic of what Nigel Thrift terms ‘immersive’ practices, often encountered incontemplative and mystical developments, which constitute a ‘background’within which nature is encountered as a means of gathering stillness, bothinside and outside the body (2001). A central component lies in the tempo-rality of the practice, in this case focussing on the rhythmic beating of thebreath and the connection between the life-providing qualities of the breathand the witnessing of life unfolding in the ocean.

What many people desired was accessibility to spaces that they see as free from signs of human interference and control, in which they experiencea profound engagement with oneself or others through a ‘raw’ and unmedi-ated nature. For many, such practices enabled a more profound form of



social intimacy and bonding born out of common experience and of facing together shared challenges. The countryside enthusiasts, in particular,tended to see the environment as providing a context for the development ofgood parenting. Walking in the outdoors was seen as contributing to cohesivefamily life, as morally improving and as a necessary antidote to the ‘false’ and ‘corrupting’ pleasures of the amusement arcade and a life of computergames.

In contrast to practices premised on a non-intrusive encounter with naturewere those dependent on a more active mode of participation in nature, suchas angling, beekeeping and gardening. Again such practices tended to be warranted as contributing to a lifeworld in which people could transcend thepressures of contemporary life through a more intimate and interactive rela-tionship with nature. Below are anglers describing the experience of fly-fishingand of the need to ‘tune in’ to the changing affordances of the river environ-ment (see Gibson 1979).

M You start to even analyse nature if you like, and the way that natureperforms. Because, you know, your eyes are now tuned into it . . .

M No, it’s not a relaxing sport, a lot of people think it’s relaxing. Flyfishing isn’t relaxing, it’s hard work, I’m thinking all the time . . .You’re changing flies, you’re changing lines, you’re changing posi-tions, you’re changing everything . . . You’ve got to keep changing,that’s how you catch.

M You’re aware of where the wind is, the sun, when the clouds arecoming over. The ripple on the water, you’re watching your line. Any-thing that moves, a bird or an animal, you spot it.

M And the other thing is, I mean it all begins with entomology, that’swhat fly fishing is about, you’re imitating creatures that are either, wellin the main grow up in the water, grow up underwater before theybecome flies.(Anglers and beekeepers)

Above are accounts of how people directly encounter nature and the envi-ronment through various outdoor bodily activities. For other people the envi-ronment was encountered more indirectly, as a set of problems, such aspollution, food safety and personal health, whose putative effects had to betacked as part of people’s evolving responsibilities as mothers and parents.This was especially the case in the group of local community involvers, wherethe experience of the environment was mediated through their identity asmothers and as carers. The environment was very much an issue in relationto its known or unknown effects on oneself or one’s family. Health and foodissues were particularly prominent and many of the women were familiar andconcerned over an apparently unending succession of food-health scares inrecent years: from Salmonella in eggs to BSE to pesticide residues to GMfoods.

Phil Macnaghten


To summarise, three different ways in which people encounter the valuesand benefits of nature and the environment in everyday life have been high-lighted: nature as a source of pleasure and transcendence from the burdensand stresses of everyday life; nature as a setting for maintaining importantsocial ties and bonds; and nature as a set of problems whose effects had to betacked as part of people’s evolving responsibilities as mothers and parents. Inow assess the possible points of connection between such encounters ofnature in daily life and wider, global environmental issues through focusingon issues of trust and personal agency. Issues of personal agency are centralto this inquiry since an account of the things people feel they have a degreeof influence over, and their wider sense of trust (or mistrust) of expert insti-tutions, appear a potentially critical factor in determining how people arelikely to respond to a global environmental agenda.

Searching for agency

Even though the reality of global environmental issues has become almost acommonplace, there was little expressed sense in the group discussions thatmuch could be achieved – either at the level of the individual or through exist-ing avenues for collective action – to mitigate such threats. This perception ofa fundamental lack of agency in the face of global environmental threats per-meated all the group discussions. Individual action was seen as largely inef-fective, both due to the global scale of the problems and to the perception of powerful commercial interests intractably embedded in systems of self-interest antithetical to global sustainability. Indeed, this whole domain ofthinking about the environment was clouded in gloom and despondency, afinding that parallels previous public perceptions research on the environment(see Macnaghten et al., 1995; Macnaghten and Jacobs, 1997).

However, what appeared distinctive in these discussions were the strategiesadopted. In different ways people were now choosing not to choose to dwellon global environmental threats, as a pragmatic response to apparentlyintractable problems, and in order to maintain a positive outlook on life. Bothpassages below follow from discussions of global environmental issues in thecontext of people’s hopes and fears towards ‘the future’:

Mod OK. So when is it that you feel particularly good about the future?M When we’re fishing.M When your mind is in neutral and you’re not reminded of it. Because

if you’re living a decent life yourself you think well, you’re notcausing any bother to anybody else, so they can get on with whatthey’re doing and you stay happy the way you are . . .

M Yes, it [life] is what you make of it isn’t it, it’s how you view things. Icould be as miserable as sin but there’s no point in being miserableso you make the best with what you’ve got, whatever that is . . .(Anglers and beekeepers)



F Oh I think you’d end up on Prozac or something. Because people doget like that and people, you know, they can’t think of anything posi-tive. You know. There’s a lot of depressed people about.

F That’s what I mean.F There’s that many things, if you thought about it you’d just . . .F Go loopyF Yes, you would.Mod So what are you saying? That it’s good not to think too much then?F Yes, well if you do think about the negative things, there is, if you

really get into a deep conversation you could say like there’s this,there’s this, you know, and you can go on. I don’t know, you just looktowards the good things don’t you.

F Well I think you’ve only got one life, you’re only here for . . . so Imean at the end of the day you’ve got to make the most of it . . .

F I mean we live in such a privileged country, it’s almost bound to getworse as you leave the shores, I suppose.(Outdoor sports enthusiasts)

These reflexive strategies of non-engagement with ‘the big picture’ – a term which embraced global environmental issues alongside other globalissues such as poverty, aids, debt, ‘the future’, and so on – reflect the ways in which such issues tend to be grouped together as ‘negative issues’ where personal engagement is felt as likely to be both inconsequential andpersonally damaging. Such a perceived lack of agency is exacerbated by a collective lack of faith in the effectiveness of those institutions regarded astheoretically responsible for such issues, and hence the apparent intractabil-ity of such issues in the face of what Giddens aptly calls the ‘juggernaut ofmodernity’ (1990).

Furthermore, the acknowledged complexity of solving environmentalproblems in an apparently unsympathetic institutional climate appeared to beconnected to the scepticism many people expressed towards those who advo-cate simple solutions, including certain environmental NGOs. For our partici-pants, the portrayal of environmental problems in simple black and whiteterms lacked credibility and contradicted their own acknowledged ambivalentresponses. Indeed, many felt both implicated in global environmental prob-lems and constrained by competing and more immediate demands. For manypeople there were no easy answers; there was no longer a clear ‘good guy’and ‘bad guy’, nobody to blame and no-one beyond blame. Bound by every-day pressures of work and parenting, people accepted their own partial guiltas consumers, as motorists, as employees of business, as travellers, as outdoorenthusiasts, and so on:

M Some of us are the bad guys, because we go fishing, which is relatedto field sports. But it’s not really because it’s the only field sport wherethe quarry has the choice.

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M I think there’s some good guys and there’s some bad guys and I thinkthere’s a majority in the middle that are grey.

Mod So have you got goodness and badness within you then?M Yes.M Too true.M Yes.M I’ve got goodness because I’m concerned with the water environment.

Every day I’ve badness because I use the toilet and the biggest pol-luters in this country are the water companies and most of the pollu-tion comes from domestic sewage . . .

M I feel like I’m part of the rest of the human race and we’re all thesame. We all want motor cars and we all want electricity on demand,we all want all the rest of the things that cause pollution. We all wantthem because we’ve grown up with them and we expect them. Right.It doesn’t make me feel guilty because of that, I’m just part of the restof the human race, that’s all. I mean if you could turn the clock backto when we hadn’t got all that, I’m not sure that life would be all thatmuch more marvellous.(Anglers and beekeepers)

The ambivalence and withdrawal expressed towards the global environmen-tal agenda did not correspond to a collective withdrawal from any form ofenvironmental concern and responsibility. Within the domain of everydayencounters with the environment people were developing embryonic signs ofagency and reflexive praxis linking local practices to wider environmentalagendas. The anglers were connecting local concerns about the quality ofrivers to issues of water pollution; beekeepers were concerned about theeffect of GM crops not simply on bees but on crops and agriculture; coun-tryside enthusiasts and outdoor sports enthusiasts were extending their enjoy-ment of the countryside to wider critiques of industrial patterns of life; localcommunity involvers were developing a wider sense of care and empathy fromtheir children to local suffering, and from local suffering to distant suffering;while international involvers spoke of how involvement in internationalagendas emerged out of local practices of care.

Conclusion

To summarise, I have suggested that the encounter of a threatened ‘globalnature’ in need of concerted action from an ‘imagined global community’ –one which embraces government, business and NGO actors alongside thewider public – appears distant, abstract, and even disempowering, and thatthis has the effect of dislocating and detaching people from institutionalrhetorics and initiatives on global environmental change. Such findings mayseem to endorse the thesis that social and environmental problems are beyond



the grasp of individuals, that the differentiation of society leaves little scopefor meaningful collective action, that contemporary strategies of individuali-sation are stressing the personal solution to what are structural problems, andthat this is leading to withdrawal, apathy and resignation (see especiallyBauman, 1995, 1999; Beck and Beck-Gernstein, 2002).

However, the research findings paint a more complex and potentially moreuplifting picture. They point to the potential for mobilising additional publicsupport through deploying a different iconography of ‘the global environ-ment’ set out in terms of its human dimensions; through focusing on the kindsof experience in the course of which people come into bodily contact with theenvironment; and through recognition of the texture of people’s relationshipwith those mediating expert institutions reportedly responsible for the man-agement and reporting of environmental risks. I conclude by pointing to somepossible implications arising from the research for refreshed ways of talkingabout the environment that are likely to help advance further public supportand identification.

The focus group discussions suggest that for many people concern aboutenvironmental problems begins with personal experience. The environmentis commonly experienced, not simply as a set of physical issues, but tangledup as part of social life. People come to the issues through particular thingsthat matter to them. The ‘human’ and ‘relational’ aspects of the environmentare often what are resonant. The environment becomes meaningful when itengages with social life, inhibiting or facilitating the development of ongoinghuman relationships, whether in the context of the family, friends or com-munities of interest.

These responses can be read as part of an ongoing trend toward the ‘per-sonalisation’ of environmental concerns. Nevertheless, this does not imply astraightforward move from mediated to unmediated encounters with the envi-ronment. The personal dimension to environmental risk is often itself moreor less completely indebted to mediation. Rather, it suggests a move towardsa media situation in which concerns for the ‘distant other’ connect to every-day proximate concerns (Boltanski, 1999). People may want to be a small partof the imagined community concerned about the plight of the Amazonianrainforest, international whaling, the burning of fossil fuels, and so on, butsuch concern appears fleeting and short-lived if it remains dislocated fromeveryday life concerns.

This implies that those outside traditional communities of supporters arelikely to become involved in ‘the environment’ only when their lifeworld istouched. Hence, rather than talking about ‘one environment’, it may be moreappropriate to talk according to the versions of the environment that aremeaningful for different groups of people (see also Burningham and O’Brien,1994; Cooper, 1992). In many ways this reverses the traditional storyline of a‘global nature’ under threat and in need of protection from a global imaginedcommunity. By contrast, institutional strategies need to start from people’sconcern for themselves, their families and localities as points of connection

Phil Macnaghten


for the wider, ‘global’ environmental issues. For example, universals such asdeforestation, biodiversity, global warming, pollution, and so on, are morelikely to resonate when they are expressed through lived particulars in their(non-universal) local terms. An angler is likely to become politically involvedin pollution issues when this is connected to the state of the Atlantic salmon;bee keepers are likely to be stirred by the threats posed by genetically modified agriculture when expressed in terms of the likely effects of cross-pollination; mothers are likely to become actively involved in local environ-mental initiatives when a direct link is made between such activities and thefuture health of the locality.

Tim Ingold has argued that the discourse of global environmental changeunwittingly fails in its attempt to integrate humanity to the world (1993).Indeed, he argues that such a discourse signals the culmination of a processof separation, detaching us from the domain of lived experience or what heterms the ‘lived-in world’. The findings reported above support much ofIngold’s analysis. They suggest that in many ways the depiction of ‘the envi-ronment’ as a set of issues, global in scope and physical in origin, is a con-figuration that remains detached and abstracted from everyday life.

The above findings further support the proposition that wider societaltrends of globalisation and individualisation are impacting on how people are responding to global environmental issues in the context of their iden-tities as political subjects. For example, there was tentative evidence to indi-cate that the texture of the relationship between individuals and expert institutions may be shifting with implications for how people sense, under-stand, live with and respond to environmental risks. The results here are sug-gestive and exploratory but point towards a heightened form of reflexivity.On the one hand people clearly remain detached from ‘expert’ rhetorics onthe environment and remain sceptical of the motives of both government andbusiness in this regard. Moreover, people feel similarly ambivalent to thoseproposing simple solutions, including some environmental NGOs includingGreenpeace, an orientation compounded by the fact that people themselvesfeel implicated in contributing towards global environmental problems. Suchreflexivity has extended further into daily life as people self-consciously arechoosing not to choose to reflect on global environmental issues. Yet, at thesame time, people do not appear to have fully rejected the possibility of sharedand collective action. Partly, people are seeking credible solutions, ‘in bitesized chunks’, where the material effects of individual action become visibleand enduring. And partly, people are seeking relationships with institutionsthat enable them to feel part of a genuine partnership, individually and col-lectively ‘doing the right thing’. The lack of such a sense of partnership mayfurther explain the move away from ‘public’ and collective forms of actiontowards ‘private’ environmental behaviour such as recycling (Christie andJarvis, 2001).

The embodiment of environmental concerns and values requires a revi-sioning of environmental policies, campaigns and initiatives that connect to



the ‘felt’ dimensions of nature in everyday life, and to how they are mediatedby relational processes, particularly the real and imagined interaction withother individuals (Bhatti and Church, 2001, Macnaghten and Urry, 2001b). Inthe research there were many indications of the appeal of a nature that wasembraced as a source of intense pleasure and transcendence from the burdensand stresses of everyday life. Through a wide variety of embodied practicesand leisure activities nature clearly had the role of ‘saving us’ from the pres-sures and insecurities of modernity (Szerszynski, 1996). However, again, thisdoes not imply that the ability to develop widespread participative strategiesaimed at global environmental betterment has receded. Rather, it implies theclear need to engage with people in their own terms, as responsible andcapable individuals, resonating with different lifeworlds through lived partic-ulars. This is the contribution made by this empirical research project to thesociology of the body: that by focusing on embodied practice one can iden-tify how identity is articulated with the natural world, the ways in which thisleads to reflexive praxis by social actors, and how this could cultivate anempowered politics of the environment.

Lancaster University Received 16 May 2002Finally accepted 14 October 2002

Note

1 I am especially grateful for the comments of John Urry, Robin Grove-White, Greg Myers, EevaMacnaghten and two anonymous reviewers on earlier drafts of this article. The researchreported here was funded by Greenpeace and took place in 2000. I would particularly like tothank my fellow researchers Majid Yar and Robin Grove-White.

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