Everyday life and environmental change

Abstract

This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Dayto-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it.Much recent work has challenged the ontological separation of the human and non-human, yet approaches to examining environment-everyday connections have, to date, been largely unidirectional, focusing on either how the environment impacts on human practices or is impacted by them. Using the notion of the everyday, this paper explores how "impacting on" and "impacted by" are entangled, ongoing cyclical processes that unfold daily. It draws on a series of innovative methodologies conducted with island-base communities to examine three key changes in the physical environment that are taking place in the context of the recent and rapid development of tourism on inhabited islands: sand excavation and erosion, the appearance and removal of rubbish and debris, and the expansion of the built environment. The paper reveals the significance of these day-to-day changes and the ways in which they are accommodated by, and incorporated into, the spatial and temporal dimensions of people's daily practices. It concludes by suggesting that an appreciation of the everyday can contribute to new understandings of human/non-human entanglements. K E Y W O R D S building construction, everyday life, Maldives, sand erosion, visual ethnographies, waste management ---

Local climate change cultures: climate-relevant discursive practices in three emerging economies

“…With reference to speaker identities bound up in such accounts, narratives typically intoned themes of disempowerment and lack of capacity in terms of responding to climate-relevant issues, with reference to both uncontrollable forces of nature and social and political forces. Wider tacit assumptions positioned speakers in ways that constrained responses to environmental problems, underlining the everyday as a politically contested space reproduced through discursive practice and not simply the backdrop to mundane, repetitive practices (Kothari and Arnall 2019). This opens up the potential for the reconfiguration of problematic climaterelevant communicative practices and their cultural referents, going beyond the raising of awareness of climate change, which look likely to secure only marginal gains in shifting existing patterns of everyday life in more environmentally sustainable directions.…”

“…A cultural perspective on climate views both culture and climate as mutually constitutive and cyclic, whereby natural phenomena both impacts on culture and is impacted upon by culture (Kothari and Arnall 2019). At a fundamental level, culture is constituted by ideas, practices and objects that create networks of shared meaning in time and space (Hulme 2016).…”

“…Contrary to its repetitious, settled nature, Fiske (1992) notes the epistemic volatility and ephemerality of everyday life. Meanwhile, Kothari and Arnall (2019) suggest that as a hyper-cultural space, the everyday implicitly brackets out nature and marginalises the non-human. In addition, the everyday is preoccupied with the hereand-now, rather than being future-oriented in ways commensurate with environmental issues (cf.…”

“…People may also know climate in other ways, including the media (Boykoff et al 2009;Boykoff and Boykoff 2007), formal education (Muttarak and Lutz 2014), climate politics (Whitmarsh and Capstick 2018) and through everyday practices. For example, daily mobility decisions (for example, transport modes, travel times and routes) are affected by meteorological parameters, thereby facilitating and constraining daily routines and influencing climate understandings (Kothari and Arnall 2019).…”

“…We then proceed by considering the slippery concept of culture, and discuss the context of 'everyday life'. We argue that the everyday is not merely the backdrop to repeated mundane forms of practice, but as a space in which the cultural phenomenon of climate change both constitutes and is constituted by tacit everyday realities, identities and practices in cyclic relationship (Kothari and Arnall 2019). We then introduce an interview study of everyday accounts of climate change and other environmental issues voiced by citizens in Brazil, South Africa and China.…”