This book explores and explains unsustainable mass consumption in affluent contexts by stressing the social nature of consumption.

The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption draws on a variety of theories and research to contribute to our understanding of unsustainable mass consumption. It addresses the role of identities, social relations, interactions, belonging, and status comparison, and how perceived time scarcity is both a cause and an effect of consumption. It examines the power of consumer norms and how overconsumption is normalized and shows how consumption is embedded in the time-space arrangements of everyday life. Magnus Boström contextualizes such drivers within the larger institutional and infrastructural forces underlying mass consumption, including the economy, growth politics, and the problematic promises of consumer culture. Boström further draws on lessons from lived experiments of consuming less and discuss how insights about the flaws of consumer culture can help shape a growing critique and countermovement – a collective detox from consumerism.

Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation demonstrates how sociological theory and research are critical for understanding the social drivers of global environmental destruction and the conditions for transformative change. Written by two professors of sociology who are deeply involved in the international community of environmental sociology, Magnus Boström and Rolf Lidskog argue that we need to better understand society as well as the fundamentally social nature of environmental problems and how they can be addressed. The authors provide answers to why so many unsustainable practices are maintained and supported by institutions and actors despite widespread knowledge of their negative consequences. Employing a pluralistic sociological approach to the study of social transformations, the book is divided into five key themes: Causes, Distributions, Understandings, Barriers, and Transformation. Overall, the book offers an integrative and comprehensive understanding of the social dimension of (un)sustainability, societal inertia, and conditions for transformative change. It provides the reader with references from classic and contemporary sociology and uses pedagogical features including boxes and questions for discussion to help embed learning. Arguing that a broad and deep social transformation is needed to avoid a global civilization crisis, Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation will be a great resource for students and scholars who are exploring current environmental challenges and the societal conditions for meeting them.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.

As the global climate crisis and biodiversity loss deepen their impact and gain pace, Making Nature Social: Towards a Relationship with Nature provides core insights into what it means to understand our relationship to nature. This relationship is illustrated through interviews with people working in different nature practices, including engaging with nature, non-human animals, place, advocacy, and with work organization values. Rembrandt Zegers argues that since non-humans do not use human language, meaning is conducted through the senses, giving rise to a knowing that manifests itself through the body first before finding its way socially in human language. Through these senses the relation to non-human others and nature can become a conversation; in other words, a relationship built on reciprocity. The book illustrates how these meanings occur and how these conversations happen, how crucial they are, and how they are connected. It dives deep into the essence of the lived experience of our relationship to nature and in doing so acknowledges how important the lived experience is for the purpose of a relationship with nature.

In Earth Polyphony, Suhasini Vincent analyzes the theory of ecocriticism in its entirety, and its existence in the global paradigm of climate change. Vincent shows how a polyphony of voices can affect law and decision making in the era of the Anthropocene, and aptly shows how voices can coexist as in Bakhtinian polyphony where multiple perspectives coexist despite contradictions and differences. Vincent argues that both material and non-material worlds are endowed with storied forms of knowledge that prompt ecocritical writers to engage in new experimental modes of expression. She explores the ‘material turn’, the ‘animal turn’ and the ‘narrative turn’ to highlight how law meets literature, prompts eco-activism, and how these crisscrossing narratives influence each other to spark judicial activism in forums around the planet.

Car Troubles central premise is that the car as the dominant mode of travel needs to be problematized. It examines a wide range of issues that are central to automobility by situating it within social, economic, and political contexts, and by combining social theory, specific case studies and policy-oriented analysis. With an international team of contributors the book provides a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the global phenomenon of automobility from the Anglo world to the cases in China and Chile and all the elements that relate to it.