Ecological Practice, Ecological Democracy, and Ecological Justice

This paper explores the links between everyday practices, conceptions of democracy, and the desire for justice in new environmental movements of what we call sustainable materialism. We develop a theoretical argument about material participation out of interviews with over 100 activists in food, energy, and sustainable fashion. In movements focused on the material practices around food, energy, and fashion, and on restructuring the flows and systems of their production and distribution, a very engaged, pragmatic, and ecological conception of political participation is the norm. Core motivations of these activists include this material ‘doing’, as well as resistance to power, ecological sustainability, and environmental justice. Participants in these movements see an ecological democracy practiced through the redesign of material flows of food, energy, and other ‘stuff’, rather than in more traditional political activities such as lobbying, consultation, or policymaking. For these varied movements, engagement in everyday material flows is used as a tool to resist, reshape, and/or replace top-down scalar hierarchies that act to limit participation in both material flows and traditional democratic arenas. While participants emphasise the connections between this shift in focus and the enabling of environmental justice and ecological sustainability, they also illustrate the reality of multi-faceted democratic action that addresses both everyday life and the more traditional policy realm as it relates to more sustainable material practices. And while sustainable materialist movements are primarily focused on the local and the everyday, they are often part of broad horizontal networks (or rhizomes) with a focus on different material foci (food, energy, clothing), and/or political movements (such as environmental justice or food sovereignty). Movement identity, participation, and diffusion are informed by the emphasis on material flows, the everyday, the just, and the sustainable.