ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines how the materialities of domestic sustainable consumption do indeed play a crucial, but ambivalent, role in sustainable lifestyle behaviour change. In the case of the Green Homes research participants, there was certainly evidence that the materiality's that have become part and parcel of moves towards domestic sustainability likewise refused to be fixed entities. Rather there may be potential for a form of personal and domestic environmental politics wherein green materialities re-invoke moments of interruption to constitute an evolving creative grammar of praxis. The majority of participants in Australia and the United Kingdom expressed the opinion that taking part in sustainable consumption programs like Action at Home was definitely preferable to overt environmental political action. However Phil Macnaghten contends that such framings of what constitutes a sound environmental praxis rarely articulate with the broader socioeconomic and political trends in which environmental concerns are embedded.