Juliet Schor's Reading List

"Bourdieu is very much foundational in terms of understanding consumer culture. In contrast to many accounts that focus on advertising and marketing as somehow beaming desire into people, Bourdieu shows how the patterns of consumption that dominate in a society come out of structures of social inequality. He groups the consumer realm with the economic. I think that is very important because the ideology of consumption in the second half of the 20th century was that consumption is individualised and natural. Your taste is just who you are and it represents you as a person. That we would consider a sort of crude status model which comes from Thorstein Veblen, who argued that the pattern of consumption is based on people’s economic resources so it is how wealthy you are that determines what you consume and everyone wants to consume the same thing. It is just that some people don’t have enough money for it. But what Bourdieu shows is that there is a whole other structure at work, in addition to economic capital, which he calls cultural capital. Foodie culture is a great example. This is a kind of cultural capital that people develop, even if they don’t have a lot of money, and they develop tastes which go along with it. Cultural producers, for example, have very finely honed tastes. They often set taste patterns for others to follow and yet they may not be particularly wealthy. And so it is a second dimension for understanding consumer culture, which is related in many ways to economic capital but in other ways operates in opposite ways. One of the things that we have to understand is that certain types of ideas about what is sustainable have got caught in that net of culture and class in complicated ways. So it was thought that to be green you needed the latest generation solar house or you needed a greywater system or you needed an expensive hybrid car. The high cultural capital folks were a group taking up green consumption and sustainability. Exactly."

"Econned is a great book, which deconstructs economics. It is kind of an “Occupy economics” text that looks at what is wrong with the mainstream economists’ views. It is much more sympathetic to Keynesian economics. It looks at how we have gone wrong in our economic thinking and I think that is an important corrective. My PhD was in economics and I think that for people who are interested in understanding the run-up to the financial collapse, and what’s happened since, this is a great book. Part of the way it relates to the issues of consumption and environment is that I don’t think we are going to be able to solve the ecological issues without also solving the economic problems that we face. Mostly these conversations are separate but we need to put them together. We need to think about new economic models that would allow us to move forward with new structures of production and consumption. There are really interesting social models that show the ways in which social behaviour spreads from person to person through social networks. This could be things like eating, drinking, smoking or sustainable green behaviour. In the standard economic model one person’s consumption is not allowed to affect another person’s. That’s a crazy idea, I know. Those are the assumptions that get us to things like the idea that it is bad for a government to intervene in consumer markets, which by the way, has been the dominant ideology for the last 30 years. Yes, we need to think about the impacts of how we structure consumption, not just on the individual but on the whole system and on the whole planet."

"The End of the Long Summer is a superb book that puts both climate change and other environmental issues into a long-term perspective. A lot of it is about scientists and the way they have conceptualised the relationship between humans and nature. This book forces us to rethink the idea that we can control nature. That idea is central both to the mainstream economic models that we were just talking about, which really see humans as able to control not just the economy but their larger environment, as well as the whole ideology of consumption in the way that it fails to take into account unintended consequences. Dumanoski finds that scientists are changing their metaphors. The metaphor of control might be the pilot steering the plane and that is the one she uses. The new metaphor is the idea of nature potentially as an angry powerful beast that humans are taunting. And the idea that we have unleashed forces that we cannot control is gaining currency among scientists and it leads us to have a much less arrogant and more humble relationship to nature. So, for example, it leads us away from thinking that we can solve the climate crisis by geoengineering the planet. And it leads us to the idea of needing to radically downsize our impact on the planet. If you take the UK, the issue is that the government has failed to do its part. It passed a climate legislation bill for carbon reduction and then it proceeded to take a stand on economics which was completely incompatible with meeting those targets. It took the view that “we can’t stop growing and that is our priority”. I think expecting individuals to take huge steps such as no longer driving in places where there isn’t a lot of public transport is unrealistic. So this is a situation where the government is patently failing to follow its own rhetoric, be that the Labour government or a Conservative/Liberal one. And it is asking too much to expect the public to do it on its own. That is not the way social change happens. You really need the leading institutions – governments, NGOs, corporations and so forth – to be sincere in their commitments and I think that individual households will come along. In fact we can say that households have done a lot, given how little government has been willing to actually put itself on the line. It is difficult and that is why I think you need a lot more of a citizens’ movement to press those institutions."

"This is a movement for sustainability and a movement for the planet and for social justice. It is very small scale, which is why for the most part it is largely unseen. Of course there are larger groups that are involved in these kinds of actions. Hawken is one of the liveliest, most admired and inspirational leaders of the worldwide sustainability movement. And what he noticed, as he travelled around the world speaking and interacting with groups that are working on these issues, is how many hundreds of thousands of organisations had recently sprung up to heal the planet and the people on it. He likened it to a kind of immune system response to an ill body. It is a different kind of political movement than we would have thought about decades ago. In those days movements were much larger and more centralised. This is the case if we think of the most powerful movements of the 20th century, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Labour Movement. Absolutely, and his argument is that they will begin to converge almost as a kind of collective intelligence. So it is a sort of Internet moment. I do think that the old-style movement model is not working and that is one of the reasons why I find his account so interesting."

"In some ways this book is a good answer to your comments about us knowing what needs to be done but not actually doing anything to change the situation. That is the question that Norgaard addresses. She did ethnographic research in a Norwegian village for about a year and a half. Norway is a country with very high literacy and high formal awareness of climate change. The climate there is already changing dramatically. She was in a skiing village where there was no snow and she lived through an abnormally warm winter, and yet the villagers were all pretty much in denial about it. They didn’t talk about it or do anything about it or press their government to do anything about it. So Norgaard examines the ways in which nothing happens. There was the idea that “Norway is a small country so there is nothing we can do”. Or they would excuse themselves by saying they were a green people who were close to nature. There were a variety of rationalisations that they used to try to continue along the same path. Absolutely – people are very much habituated to ways of life and don’t have imagination for something different. And the kind of change we are talking about is deep and profound. The Norwegians were stuck in ways that many of us in other wealthy countries are stuck in as well. Her book is not necessarily an answer but, by analysing why we are stuck, it points to some of the ways in which we might move forward. I do think the younger generation is much more attuned to these things and will live in different ways but they are also going to be faced with far more difficult impacts from climate change. So they are going to have fewer opportunities to live in the ways that other generations have lived in. They are going to live with much more resource scarcity and materially they are going to have to devote many more resources to protecting themselves from that angry beast that Dumanoski is talking about. Some people still believe there is a way to land that jet plane fairly gradually. Dumanoski is saying, prepare yourself for a lot of harsh unpredictable scary stuff. I am not sure we know. One of the things that we are learning year by year is how much more quickly climate is changing than anyone predicted."