God and the Green Divide

Baugh, Amanda J.

doi:10.1525/california/9780520291164.001.0001

Cited by 12 publications

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“…It necessarily involves the recruitment of lesser privileged individuals. As a consequence, more and more movements and policymakers are currently engaging with the task of fostering sustainable behaviours among disadvantaged communities (Baugh provides an example among the African American community in the United States). This greening of other people’s lifestyle can be analysed as a ‘conduct of conducts’ by drawing on the later works of Michel Foucault, in which he revisits governmentality as ‘the government of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others’ (Foucault : 88).…”

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confidence: 99%

Greening the poor: the trap of moralization

Malier

2019

British Journal of Sociology

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This article uses ethnographic data to engage a critical reflection on the tension between individual responsibility for the environment and inequality. While research has shown that the majority of sustainable consumers are middle and upper class, educated and white individuals, the study explores how the ethical injunction to ecological sustainability is being introduced to lower‐income neighbourhoods in France. It draws on the observation of a national programme which aims at supporting inhabitants of public housing estates in the process of greening their lifestyle in order to fight climate change and fuel poverty. The paper analyses how environmental responsibilization is specific in that it calls upon a responsibility towards others, towards the common good. Using the Foucauldian concept of ‘subjectivation’, it describes and analyses the moral work implied by such behaviour change programmes. It demonstrates that a negative representation of poor households and a moral framing of the responsibility for the environment lead to a moralization of their lifestyle under the heading of ‘eco‐friendly behaviours’. A paradoxical result of such endeavours is that the social group with the least impactful lifestyle on the environment is the one which is moralized in the most intrusive and resolute manner. The article shows, however, that the tenants manage to resist the normalizing discourse on sustainable living, for reasons which are not anti‐environmentalist. This piece thus provides interesting results for sustainability studies as well as for the sociology of the regulation of underprivileged neighbourhoods.

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confidence: 99%

Greening the poor: the trap of moralization

Malier

2019

British Journal of Sociology

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“…122 Amanda Baugh thus identifies "religious environmentalism's academic roots," noting that "academics and religious leaders reacted to White in the ensuing decades, returning to the roots of religious traditions in search of resources that could support an environmental ethic." 123 As Robert Booth Fowler observed, this preoccupation often occurred through near-annual adoption of environmental resolutions at national denominational conventions with little organizational follow-up at the congregational level. 124 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement was undergoing a period of dramatic expansion in both goals and membership, leading to a period of constant negotiation over its direction and emphases.…”

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“The world food crisis is not a fad”: TheMore-with-LessCookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality

Rose¹

2019

Religion and Am. Culture

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This article examines the spirituality reflected in the 1976 cookbook More-with-Less. Written by a former Mennonite missionary hoping to provide religious households with a practical way to respond to world hunger, the cookbook's message of a simple diet that could transform users' influence on the world is an early example of the religious environmentalism that has grown increasingly popular among middle-class American Protestants in the last several decades. By examining its historical context, narrating its genesis, and critically assessing the spirituality it recommended, this article argues that the cookbook provides a useful window into Protestant environmental spirituality, its version of which allowed practitioners to maintain traditional institutional relationships and conceptions of the divine while cultivating the individuated religiosity increasingly sought after in modern culture. Emerging in the institutional overlap of traditional religious organizations and the putatively secular formations of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture, the cookbook leveraged the incipient emphasis on lifestyle choices within consumer culture to craft an individuated response to a vision of the world in permanent crisis. More-with-Less and the Protestant environmental spirituality it represents shed light on current scholarly debates about the form religion takes within modern contexts of secularity, especially when religious practitioners seek adaptations that can maintain traditional theological and organizational commitments.

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“…Ross 21 suggests that question 1 above sets up a 'false dichotomy between social justice and environmental conservation' (see also Haffajee 37,38 the relative ranking of concerns about social justice and environmentalism and on how this plays out in the activist domain in a red/green divide. [90][91][92][93][94][95][96] Theories of sustainable development and ecosystem services approaches have sought to reconcile development and conservation objectives, yet in practice and in the presence of budget constraints, the problem of relative ranking of projects and in allocating particular parcels of land for development or conservation purposes persists. [97][98][99] The debate over whether 'half the earth' should be set aside for protected nature reserves and what that means for human livelihoods and biodiversity 100-102 is a contemporary manifestation of the red/green divide.…”

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In defence of exploratory research: A reply to critics

Nattrass¹

2020

S. Afr. J. Sci.

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My Commentary 'Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?' (S Afr J Sci. 2020;116(5/6)) has been criticised on a variety of grounds. Many of these involve misrepresentations or misunderstandings of my research. Some appear to be rooted in hostility towards quantitative social science paradigms. Many condemn what they see as racist assumptions and interpretations. I defend my explicitly exploratory research, showing that the research design was in line with standards for such research and was rooted in well-established existing literatures. I dispute that my research was in any way racist or entailed racial essentialism. Rather, it emphasized that attitudes and beliefs were better predictors of study and career choices than self-identified racial identities per se. I defend the analysis of the 'red-green divide', materialism, attitudes to wildlife and experience of pets and attitudes on other issues. I acknowledge some useful suggestions for further and fuller research to enhance an evidence-based understanding of the challenges of transformation facing the University of Cape Town and the conservation sector more broadly.

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God and the Green Divide

Cited by 12 publications

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Greening the poor: the trap of moralization

Greening the poor: the trap of moralization

“The world food crisis is not a fad”: TheMore-with-LessCookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality

In defence of exploratory research: A reply to critics

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