ABSTRACT

Throughout this book there is an emphasis on what individuals can do to respond to big global sustainability challenges and the personal benefits that may come from participating actively in the global movement for sustainable living. This orientation is facilitated by the Social Ecology model for sustainability, which brings the ‘personal’ dimension into play. The challenge to live more sustainably confronts every person on Planet Earth. It is not something we can leave to ‘experts’ or governments or society at large. Clearly there is a critical role for expert knowledge and for policies and systems that encourage, enable, and enhance individual action. However, in suggesting, rather provocatively, that society as we have known it is dead, Nikolas Rose (1996) has argued that it has become critically important for individuals to create the communities that can give each of us a sense of belonging and purpose and this suggests that the construction of society begins with individuals rather than the reverse. At the same time, every individual has a personal relationship with the non-human, ecological, systems that make life possible. The Social Ecology model encourages us to examine the categories of ‘environmental’ and ‘social’ from the perspective of individual responsibility and action. The danger in bringing everything back to individual responsibility and action is that individuals can feel overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the big global challenges discussed in earlier chapters. This is where the

‘death of society’ argument – that has come from political conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher as well as political radicals like Nikolas Rose – has gone too far. Possibilities for personal action on sustainable living have already been raised in earlier chapters and this will be the specific focus of Chapter 11. The key aim of this chapter is to consider how individuals can create the kinds of communities and societies that can rise to the challenges we face globally. As discussed in Chapters 4, 5, 7 and 9, we need to start by rethinking our prevailing cultural beliefs and attitudes on living with risk and uncertainty and this chapter begins with a discussion of personal resilience introduced in Chapter 7. However, ‘resilience’ is often perceived as being a rather passive capacity to withstand change so this chapter begins a discussion on taking and sustaining action that will be taken further in Chapter 11. At the same time, it is important to understand the limits to individual action and a starting point for this is the pioneering work of English sociologist Anthony Giddens on ‘structure and agency’, which notes that individual beliefs, attitudes and practices are largely shaped by those of the societies into which those individuals are born. The sociology of structure and agency notes that prevailing cultures tend to resist change because beliefs and practices are upheld by a wide range of social institutions, such as those established to educate the young, teach people how to do their jobs or perform their designated roles, or introduce people to systems of religious or secular beliefs. However, Giddens is among those sociologists who have noted that the increasing global movement of people, goods, information and ideas is undermining the influence of local or even national institutions. Increasingly, Giddens has noted (1994), we live in ‘post-traditional’ societies that do less to socialise individuals into particular ways of thinking and acting which is both rather scary and exciting in regard to the possibilities for individual and collective action. The process of ‘individualisation’ – which was discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to the perception that we can all consume our way individually towards health and happiness – has undermined traditional modes of social action but increasing global flows of people, goods, information and ideas has opened up new possibilities for taking action on a wider scale. New communication technologies have made it easier for individuals to join non-local communities, some of which can be described as ‘communities of practice’. The weakening of traditional social institutions makes it harder for individuals to make sense of their own lives and Richard Sennett (2006) is prominent among sociologists who have suggested that more and more people are trying to make sense of their diverse lived experiences by trying to weave them into a coherent life narrative or autobiography. The author’s own research on the ‘well-being’ of local communities in Australia has noted a growing interest in storytelling and this helps to explain the interest shown in the use of new communication technologies to create and share stories in the practice referred to as ‘digital storytelling’ (Mulligan and Smith 2011). This chapter will explore some of the opportunities for taking action that have been facilitated by new digital communication technologies before it returns to the suggestion raised in Chapter 1: that we all need to learn how to ‘travel hopefully’ in a world of growing risk and uncertainty. The chapter aims to give substance to the last two of the nine RMIT Sustainability principles, namely

1 Move from consumerism to quality of life goals. 2 Learn how to travel hopefully in a world of uncertainty.