Reimagining Sustainability
Sustainable Supermarket Staples: Unpacking, Spatializing, and Re-imagining a Sustainable Basket of Goods
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emma Campbell
With ninety-six percent of food purchased in the UK passing through aisles in a basket or trolley, it is clear that supermarkets are the dominant interface between consumers and the food they buy. Supermarkets also dominate their supply chains, determining how their food is produced, processed, and moved. Competition between the UK’s leading supermarket chains has established a standard condition and expectation for low prices and year round choice on their shelves. This has driven supply chains further from the source of consumption and has led to over-consumption of non-renewable resources, increased production of C02 and greenhouse gases as well as issues of food insecurity and waste. Orchestrating the transportation of thousands of different food items across the world so that they all arrive in the supermarket delivery yard on time and in perfect condition is an incomprehensible feat. Most shoppers are oblivious to the hidden network of farms, container ports, distribution centres and climate controlled conveyance required to ensure that their favourite sliced white loaf and carton of semi-skimmed milk is waiting for them on a shelf every day, all year round. This paper identifies and unpacks a sample from a staple basket of goods to uncover the inter-modality of their physical and intangible spaces and flows. Through a process of measuring, mapping and drawing, the research asks how a particular food reaches the supermarket shelf and the environmental implications of it being there. In this visual unpacking, propositions for achieving a more sustainable basket are imagined.
Winning Against the Odds - from Sustainability to Social Change: Best Practices in Alleviating Energy Poverty
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aparna Gopal
The aim of this research is to examine real-world solutions implemented to overcome energy poverty in low income communities. It serves as a foundation in which to base future intervention strategies – adopting the bench to community approach in transporting sustainability to social change. The paper is a series of reviews analyzing best case practices in energy efficient, cheap, sustainable energy resources and resource delivery to low-income communities. The methodology includes reviewing and analyzing studies conducted from a wide range of organizations- universities, research centres and institutes, non-for-profit organizations, private energy firms, architectural-planning-design organizations, to name a few. This cross-sectional analysis will provide a knowledge base of various approaches that can be taken from various perspectives and levels of organization and expertise to solve the same issue. Hence, it serves as a balance to understand needs between individuals seeking sustainability translating to social change. This approach driven context also focuses on local cultural and social factors, which forms an interesting juxtaposition to understand the local challenges that were overcome to ameliorate energy poverty. These solutions are being examined as probable solutions to alleviate energy poverty for low income Indigenous communities in Brisbane, Australia as part of a larger research project. This study offers real life solutions to real life problems and creates a template of guidelines that can be utilized by and for other low income, marginalized communities in any geographical location around the world in creating solutions for energy poverty and social change.
Living Happily Ever After? : Degrowth Charities and Their Stories for the Future
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Ascough
In this paper, I explore the notion of living “happily ever after” as it relates to a degrowth context. Living happily ever after is an appealing trope, associated with wealth, opportunities, and infinite growth. Yet this is a problematic framing of the future in light of the already irreversible effects of climate change directly associated with the “infinite” growth of neoliberal capitalism. It also contradicts the radically altered society which degrowth envisions – that of green living and social transformation. I look at whether or not it is possible for degrowth-based charities to imagine a new “happily ever after” future in line with degrowth’s radical tenets. I do so by examining the widely popularized “happily ever after” endings in Disney princess films over time, noting how these endings gradually came to reflect neoliberal changes to capitalism and philanthropy in the West. I then turn to WildLands, a South African degrowth-based charity, to examine the kind of “happily ever after” it sells to its donors through its advertising. WildLands’ language and projects both contradict its overarching goals of achieving sustainable societies, instead reinforcing capitalist ideologies to present a neoliberalized “happily ever after” future to its donors. Such analysis is important to understanding climate change mitigation strategies because the discourse that frames the future reflects internalized ideas of what constitutes living “happily ever after”. It is essential not only to achieving a “greener” world, but also to understanding the external and internal barriers environmental charities face in trying to achieve radical change.
