ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand environmental orientation as embedded in different kinds of context. The question of what can incite people to act in the interests of the environment in their everyday practice is central to research into methods of achieving ecological sustainability. One important consideration is how respect for the environment is incorporated, or embedded, into the practice and meaning of everyday life. The embeddedness of environmental concern in different everyday life contexts, including different meaning contexts, can be a reason for why many traditional explanatory variables have yielded so little. Gender order, meaning the historically constructed patterns of relations between women and men and the cultural beliefs about these patterns, is a fundamental element of everyday life context. Household culture has an important bearing on variations in the degree of recycling activity. The household culture of the individualist is flexible in its attitude towards resources and needs, although efforts are made to increase both.
