The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating Ecological Habitus

1. The Practice of Environmentalism:Creating Ecological Habitus Randolph Haluza-DeLay The King’s University College Edmonton, Alberta (American Sociology Association August 11, 2006)

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. The Practice of Environmentalism…. Can environmental social movement organizations “teach” an alternate “logic of practice” sufficient for socio-ecological change?

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

6. 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).

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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).

10. ….Creating an Ecological Habitus • Bourdieu’s 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

11. ….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.

12. 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.”

13. 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.

14. The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating an Ecological Habitus • What is an Ecological Habitus? • Cue Bourdieu’s 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.

15. The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating an Ecological Habitus It will not be easy.

16. The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating an Ecological Habitus It will not be easy.

17. 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. • Bourdieu’s theory of practice does advance social movement theory. • Environmental SMs are engaged in a struggle for ecological praxis.

18. The Practice of Environmentalism: Creating an Ecological Habitus