This conversation is a recurring feature of the Consumers and Consumption website: the “Scholars’ Conversations” series, where consumption scholars (broadly defined) talk to other scholars in the field about recent publications and their approach to all things consumption. You can participate too! Graduate students, this can be an excellent opportunity to connect with someone whose work you like. Faculty and postdocs, this is a way to highlight your recent work and establish connections with future colleagues.

To learn more or to participate in the series, please email Jordan Foster (jordann.foster@mail.utoronto.ca) or click here.

Scholar’s Conversations: Eco-Types, the Environment and the Affect of Polarization

by Jordan Foster

Recently, I had the chance to interview Emily Huddart Kennedy, Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, about her new book Eco-Types (Princeton University Press, 2022) and her experience working at the intersection of the environment and consumption. We also caught up on Dr. Huddart Kennedy’s recent work on affective polarization in the Canadian context.

Jordan: Emily, could you start by telling us a little bit about your book project, Eco-Types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment.

Emily: In terms of its academic roots, I see Eco-Types as being this conversation between environmental sociology and the sociology of consumption. In this book, I’m really trying to understand the place of the environment in people’s lives and that’s because I wanted to understand the diversity of what I call, “eco-social relationships” that exist. And, also to understand how different orientations to the environment have become associated with differing degrees of moral worth and cultural capital, which, I argue means that relationships to the environment are starting to coalesce into a status hierarchy. How, for example, the purchase and display of a tote bag or an emphasis on the local provenance of food has come to signal status, capital, and moral worth.  

Jordan: What sparked your interest in this project?

Emily Kennedy: I mean, in some ways I have been wanting to write this book forever. My own background in environmental activist circles, and then also, my experience living and working in resource-dependent towns introduced me to two very different relationships to the environment that, nonetheless, had this common foundation of a deep respect for the natural world.

So, I have long been very interested in how it is that we so easily overlook common ground. And then I moved to the United States for my first academic job, and I really wanted to understand why the environment was so politically polarizing at a time when there was actually a fair bit of bipartisan consensus on specific topics like renewable energy and the status associated with green consumer goods. I was interested in understanding the roots of that enduring polarization.

Jordan Foster: Interesting, okay! What are some key takeaways you hope readers will leave with?

Emily: I hope that readers will understand that everybody’s relationship to the environment makes sense to them. I think that in the environmental movement we often have this propensity to believe that if we could encourage people to think like we do and behave like we do, then we would be able to protect the planet. But that doesn’t seem to be working.

So, I would hope that environmental activists are able to read the book and take away from it a sense that really, we have so much in common in terms of a deep respect for the environment and that this is a more productive starting place for approaching sustainability than say, looking at differences in people’s consumption choices. What I have found is that this idea that individuals’ most significant task is lowering their ecological footprint through consumption activities is not a sensibility that’s held across all of the ecotypes that I identified.

If by any chance, someone who fit a more politically conservative eco-type picked up my book and read it, I would want them to notice that they are essentially asking for and wanting the same outcome as the more liberal eco-types. Their anger and resentment toward liberal environmentalists is ultimately so futile in terms of the goal of environmental protection. It’s kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Jordan: It sounds like there’s a lot of common ground which I wouldn’t have thought of myself. Emily, can you tell us a little bit about the process of going about taking this idea and interest of yours and developing that into a research question, and then ultimately into a book?

Emily Kennedy: I applied for a grant to collect this data in 2015. At that point I was interested in understanding political differences in environmental concern and climate concern. I started doing my interviews in 4 different communities in Washington State. I deliberately sampled for class because past literature, like Lindsey Carfagna et al.’s work on the eco-habitus, has shown that class shapes the way that we relate to the environment. In the course of my data collection, I became very fascinated by the way that political ideology and class intersect to shape not only what people’s relationship to the environment is but what it was like for them to have their environmental identities judged by others.

I ended up making it a book as opposed to articles because I was struggling to integrate the political ideology analysis with the class analysis in a way that did justice to my data. I happened to be writing up all of the data in the pandemic and I would go for long walks, and voice-memo my thoughts about data analysis. As I was doing that, I thought, this just reads better as a book. So that is how it became a book project.

Jordan: Do you have any suggestions for aspiring authors and early career academics who are developing their own book or journal article? And do you have any suggestions for how to go about distinguishing what makes for a journal article versus a book project?

Emily Huddart Kennedy:  Because this is my first book, I don’t have a wealth of experience to draw on, but I think that feeling of panic—that this is never going to fit into an article—is one good indicator that a book might be a good way to go.  I found myself looking at the article length arguments I was putting forward, and feeling really unsatisfied with those; they really just captured such a small part of the story.

And then I also think that the extent to which a topic can relate to and sustain people’s interest is also going to help you and publishers too, see a book project as a good venture.

Jordan: Can you tell us more about what consumption means in the context of your present project?

Emily Kennedy: Consumption turned out to be central to how many people make sense of and measure their relationship with the environment. Following Robert Bocock’s definition, I understand consumption as opposed to say, consumerism to be about the act of using up. That could mean using air, water, energy, food, clothing, or vehicles and so on. I understand consumption from a practice theory perspective, which draws my attention to the parts of a person’s life that they evaluate as being “good” or “bad” in terms of the environmental impacts of their consumption.

Almost all of us in North America wake up and unwittingly consume a vast amount of resources. But I doubt you wake up in the morning and think, ‘I really want to burn some carbon dioxide today.’ But you do think, ‘I want to get to school or work and I want to get there efficiently. I want to have some privacy.’ So, as scholars like Elizabeth Shove have shown, there are all of these constellations of practices that end up consuming resources.

I was ultimately surprised at the centrality of consumption for my participants partly because it seems to decenter the environment in so many ways. That people’s conception of their relationship to the environment was so mediated by the market was a really big surprise for me! That is, when people thought about consumption, they thought about things like recycling or going to a farmers’ market or buying organic products. Many participants’ sense of “nature” was grounded in human inventions as opposed to, say, forests, oceans, or a non-human species.

Jordan Foster: That is so true, it seems a lot of our environmental thinking has become wrapped up in what we consume or choose not to consume. Continuing in that vein, what articles or books have been meaningful to you with respect to how you think about consumption?

Emily Huddart Kennedy: I would say the 2 biggest influences for this project were Michele Lamont’s Money, Morals, and Manners and Bourdieu’s Distinction. That is because I came away from my data with a sense that there was a great deal of boundary work happening between people who felt like their relationship to the environment was a good one and, they defined good in terms of culturally dominant understandings of green consumption.

In practice, this meant that even if someone thought that they were not themselves a good green consumer, they evaluated their own relationship to the environment by that standard, and so Money, Morals and Manners and also Distinction helped me see the way in which class and consumption really start to feel natural to people. They start to feel like these green consumer thresholds that they compared themselves to were some objective standard, even when that comparison didn’t really serve them well.

Jordan: I’m wondering Emily, what are you working on next? And, what is presently inspiring you?

Emily Huddart Kennedy: Well, I am happy to be back in Canada, and I’m trying to take this Eco-Types framework and apply it to the Canadian context to understand polarization in a much more fine-grained way. I’m interested in looking at affective polarization. That is, the emotional intensity of polarization that we see when we ask people the extent to which they like and trust those like themselves and those unlike themselves. Rather than looking at the more common distinction of political left and political right, I want to examine polarization between people who support and oppose decarbonization.

In many ways, this focus is moving beyond the domain of green consumerism and into the domain of civil society, meaning society as a whole and our collective production of carbon dioxide.