Waste and ‘Everyday Environmentalism’ in Modern Britain

• Main Author: Timothy Cooper
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2017-07-01
• Series: Open Library of Humanities
• Online Access: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4444/

Following recent work by social historians and geographers on the concept of ‘everyday life’, I argue that current historical uses of the term are problematic, at least for environmental historians, in that they lack a sufficiently disciplined or coherent conceptual basis. Henri Lefebvre’s approach to everyday life offers one productive way of rethinking the significance of the environment for social history. Through an empirical study of the politics of urban waste disposal in 20th-century Britain, I deploy some of the key categories of Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ to rethinking the social history of environmentalism. I seek to explore what Alex Loftus has called an ‘everyday environmentalism’, arguing that the concept of ‘everyday environmentalism’, with its attention to dialectics, antinomy and contradiction, can transform the ways in which we study the social history of the human relation to nature, which has too often been viewed through reified notions of environmental change. The article concludes that the history of environmental politics should focus far more on environmentalism as a concrete social phenomenon emerging from lived experience.