What does it mean to live sustainably? : Lessons from ecovillages on how to facilitate sustainable living
2023
ILIESCU, DOINA
As climate change worsens by the year, environmental issues are only intensifying at an ever-increasing rate. While the Brundtland Report was released in 1987, there has been very little progress since 35 years ago, when the world first agreed that something must be done. This work explores a cultural approach to environmental issues to offer a counterpoint to more common techno-centric and economic solutions to environmental issues. To do so, the thesis investigates how to facilitate sustainable living through an ethnography of the residents of three ecovillages: Ecovillage at Ithaca (New York, USA), Sirius Community (Massachusetts, USA), and Charlottendal (Stockholm, Sweden) – who have found their own durable ways of living more sustainably. Key topic areas covered include (1) perceptions of sustainable living, (2) how sustainable living is experienced in the everyday, and (3) key facilitators and hinderances to living sustainably as depicted by ecovillage residents. Findings of the thesis include that sustainable living is a human-centric socio-cultural construct whose meaning and embodiment varies by person and environment but is overall experienced in the everyday as an attempt to bridge the nature-culture divide and can be facilitated, in particular, by improving the motivation for and conveniency of living sustainably.
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