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Materializing Postenvironmentalism in Living Spaces

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Postenvironmentalism

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Abstract

How does a material-semiotic postenvironmentalism actually take form in the world? This chapter presents some examples (including the Transition Network movement, the U’wa’s and the Brazilian seringueros’ struggle…) of current environmentalist practices that while confirming environmentalism is not dead at all, nonetheless show it is transforming by including nonhuman and more-than-human networks in the realm of social actors and by listening unheard voices through devices, techniques, and procedures that allow their expression in the public space. Their space of interaction is a “living space”, which is the locus for environmental issues to be pragmatically debated in forms of life. The three-step process of assembling, mobilizing, and impacting, which characterizes environmental actor networks’ agency, is finally considered.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This includes, for instance, worldwide fixers of the iFixit community fixing the world “one device at a time” (information available at https://www.ifixit.com/); the Permaculture Network of desert greeners (information available at http://permacultureglobal.org/); or the resilient community planners (information available at http://thrivingresilience.org/trcc-overview/).

  2. 2.

    Information available at http://www.spontaneousinterventions.org/ and http://www.impossibleliving.com/

  3. 3.

    Information available at http://www.everyaware.eu/; http://mappingforchange.org.uk/; http://citizencyberlab.eu/; https://openideo.com; https://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites

  4. 4.

    A repository of European initiatives has been provided by the research network on “Urban Allotment Gardens in European Cities – Future, Challenges and Lessons Learned” founded under the COST framework (http://www.urbanallotments.eu/case-studies.html); a further source of information about worldwide initiatives is the Guerrilla Gardening website, which reports actions nearly every continent (http://www.guerrillagardening.org/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

    Chiara Certomà

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  1. Chiara Certomà
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Certomà, C. (2016). Materializing Postenvironmentalism in Living Spaces. In: Postenvironmentalism. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50790-7_5

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