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In this paper, I explore how environmental movements and lifestyles, like all forms of human action, produce their own characteristic kinds of time. During this exploration, I introduce a number of concepts which I suggest are useful in understanding these temporalities—chronological and kairological time; linear and cyclic time; segmentation and plot; orientation and synchronisation. Whereas the environment as described by the natural sciences is one dominated by chronological, linear time, human time is also kairological, suffused with meaning and intention. The varieties of human action also produce their own distinctive temporalities—some linear, some cyclic, some oriented to external goals, some self-sufficient. The logic of kairological time also requires that we understand individual events and actions as ‘figures’ against a temporal ‘ground’—one that is characteristically organised into an overarching narrative, or broken up into distinctive time segments. Furthermore, human experience is not just situated in time, but orients itself within time—it faces ‘backwards’ into the past, ‘forwards’ into the future, or commits itself to the present. Finally, lived time is also sometimes synchronised with other times—with that of proximate or distant others, or with historical narratives of progress or decline.

This paper is concerned with whether a ‘culture of cosmopolitanism’ is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging ‘global’ processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the ‘world as a whole’, and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a ‘banal globalism’, from focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the ‘global’ but that this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded, and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a culture of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a ‘publicly screened’ cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orchestrate much of social and political life in future decades.The need for a constantly changing market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere … the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market give a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … The individual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1952: 46–7; emphasis added)

Social scientists have noted how radical social movements operate largely in terms of symbol and meaning, both at the level of everyday life and at that of public protest. Using examples from contemporary environmental protest, I argue that this insight can be further elucidated through applying the notion of ritualization. I argue that ritual action is used in environmental protest for a number of different reasons. First, ritual is used to link particular cases to universal meanings and values. Second, ritual is used to set up particular relationships between what is and what could be the case. Third, ritual is used because of the effects of operating through symbol, association and connotation. Fourth, ritual is used to mark out the protest community and its actions from its wider social milieu. Fifth and finally, ritual is used to carve out a 'practical environment' - a segment of space and time made suitable for certain kinds of action and experience.

This is a PDF version of an article published in Studies in Christian Ethics© 2001. The definitive version is available at http://sce.sagepub.com/

In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging ‘social constitution’ of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: that the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institutions; that SRM will act at the planetary level and necessitate autocratic governance; that the motivations for SRM will always be plural and unstable; and that SRM will become conditioned by economic forces. Keywords: solar radiation management, geoengineering, governance, politics, democracy, social constitution of technology

This paper will explore some of the implications of attending to the performative aspects of language for the sociological understanding of issues of risk and trust among lay communities. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have alerted us to the way that in late or reflexive modernity trust in authority cannot be taken for granted, but increasingly has to be actively earned and actively invested. For his part, Brian Wynne has pointed out that lay judgements are relational and hermeneutic, including as they do judgements about the behaviour of relevant expert institutions, and about the risk to one's self-identity incurred by being caught up in relationships of dependency. Wynne has also argued that public avowals of trust can often mask deep private distrust, and thus be expressions more of fatalistic acceptance than of genuine trust. However, all of these analyses work from a basic model of 'trust' as being the result of a cognitive process - as a judgement as to the trustworthiness of others. Yet trust is frequently 'active' in an even stronger sense than this. To take a posture of trust towards another can often be best understood not just as a cognitive judgement but as an attempt to bind the 'trusted' into a relationship and attitude of responsibility - and thus perhaps to alter their behaviour - through the taking up of a position in a social ritual. Speech act theory can help us be sensitive to this sort of use of the language of 'trust', by reminding us that language can perform a number of different functions - not just that of describing the world, or of acting out ascribed roles and identities, but also that of trying to change the world. The analysis of public discourse about risk, trust and mistrust must thus be sensitive to the range of things that people might be attempting to do when they are saying things if it is to avoid drawing misleading conclusions about public attitudes to risk.

The idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such beliefs embodied in their lives? An attention to the theological or cosmological level can only take us so far in understanding the dynamics of culture; we need also to attend to questions of practice, ritual, community and relationship, for it is through such elements that more abstract ideas about humanity's place in the universe are given both support and expression. It is in this spirit of inquiry that this paper proceeds, arguing that religious forms of action and corporateness characteristic of monastic, sectarian, churchly, and folk religiosity have shaped the way that contemporary environmental values are embodied in the practices and experience of everyday life.

Solar radiation management techniques are a class of geoengineering methods designed to reflect some of the inbound sunlight back into space with the intended effect of arresting further warming of the planet and thus counteracting global warming. In this article we examine current debates on solar radiation management governance, clarifying a number of assumptions that persist and why these require further scrutiny. Building on existing research we articulate a more critical role that the social sciences should be playing in public engagement with solar radiation management. We develop a deliberative focus group methodology that aims to open up deliberation on the technology, focusing explicitly on the kinds of world that its deployment would bring into being. Our findings, based on an analysis of public discourse, suggest that solar radiation management would be publicly acceptable only under very specific, and highly contingent, conditions. Given the sensed implausibility of these conditions being realised in the real world, we set out the implications for solar radiation management governance. We explain why solar radiation management was perceived as likely to create a particular kind of world, one with an increased probability of geopolitical conflict, a new condition of global experimentality, and major threats to democratic governance. How to bring these issues into solar radiation management governance entails an important but challenging role for the social sciences.

We live in an age when a combination of technological change and global economic restructuring means that environmental risks-especially those associated with ionising radiation, toxic pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions-are increasingly exceeding society’s capacity to predict, control, geographically locate and causally attribute (Beck 1992a). At the same time, the growing reach of communications technology seems to be offering the possibility of a global civil society, a public space for debate, concern and action in relation to environmental and humanitarian issues of global scale or global distance (see, for example, Keane 1991:135 ff.). The widespread, mediated awareness of global environmental risks, and the capacity for environmental groups to organise and communicate at the global level, has laid the grounds for a cultural ‘remoralisation’ in which individuals think and act in relation to global categories and values (Beck 1998b:75; Albrow 1996:83-4). A global civil society thus seems to be emerging as a conscious reaction and antidote to the growth of global corporate capitalism and environmental destruction.

There is growing recognition that humans are faced with a critical and narrowing window of opportunity to halt or reverse some of the key indicators involved in the environmental crisis. Given human activities' scale and impact, as well as the overly narrow perspectives of environmental research's dominant natural sciences, a major effort is necessary to place the perspectives and insights of the humanities' and social sciences' perspectives and insights at the forefront. Such effort will require developing integrated approaches, projects, and institutions that truly do so. This article's goal is to help mobilize the social sciences and the humanities on the topic of sustainability transitions, but also call for a meaningful research agenda to acknowledge the profound implications of the advent of the Anthropocene epoch. We formulate the need for an innovative research agenda based on a careful consideration of the changing human condition as linked to global environmental change. The humanities and social sciences will need to change and adapt to this pressing, historic task.

In recent years, diverse organizations and actors in and around cities have been articulating visions of a more sustainable and democratic urban agri-food system. By utilizing or supporting alternative methods of production, distribution and consumption, a range of municipal, charitable and grass-roots initiatives have experimented with new relationships between producers and consumers, and between people, food and soil. This article provides an analysis of ‘civic food networks’ in the city of Manchester using the idea of the ‘moral economy’ and its various conceptualizations, both within and beyond agri-food studies. We argue that contemporary alternative agri-food economic practices constitute a moral economy organized around relations of solidarity and justice with proximate and distant others, and ethical concern for land and for the global environment. We explore the particular characteristics of the moral economy of these networks. We focus in particular on the complex character of moral sentiments in modern life, in which face-to-face and mediated relations are experienced in terms of different styles of morality and solidarity. We thus suggest a reconceptualization of civic food networks as a moral economy, explore the way it is conditioned by the character of morality in modern societies, and explore its potential to contribute to a wider societal transformation of the agri-food system, The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, Vol. 19 No. 3 (2012): Special Issue: Civic Food Networks

This chapter explores the attempt to construct the European Union (EU) as a harmonised regulatory space for the governance of genetically modified crops and food, in the additional context of the EU’s expansion eastwards. It explores how this attempt was repeatedly thwarted by national GM bans by member states, and how this has resulted in a project to construct Europe as a space of coexistence between separate agrofood systems, including GM, non-GM and organic, and the rise of GM-free regions based upon quality regional food strategies. The chapter also uncovers the industrial agrofood models implied by the dominant GM technologies, and contrasts these with emerging alternative agrofood systems and technologies around local, organic and quality driven production and consumption. It uses this analysis to question the linear conceptions of technological progress that underlie the assumption that CEE countries such as Poland must inevitably embrace a globalised and industrialised agrofood system.

There are major problems in the way in which the environmental 'ethics' question is now being framed Ð problems which could lead to growing confusion and disillusionment, unless they are rapidly addressed and understood. It is on such problems that this paper focuses. We point to three dimensions of the environmental 'phenomenon' which prevailing accounts of environmental ethics are tending to overlook. We then identify several ways in which incomplete ethical models tend to be reflected in actual environmental policy discourse. Finally, we suggest three hitherto-absent ingredients which will need to be recognised if future models of the ethics question are to be able to reflect, and hence to engage adequately with, social reality.

In earlier publications based on the research discussed in this article (e.g. Szerszynski and Urry 2002), we argued that an emergent culture of cosmopolitanism, refracted into different forms amongst different social groups, was being nurtured by a widespread ‘banal globalism’ ‐ a proliferation of global symbols and narratives made available through the media and popular culture. In the current article we draw on this and other empirical research to explore the relationship between visuality, mobility and cosmopolitanism. First we describe the multiple forms of mobility that expand people’s awareness of the wider world and their capacity to compare different places. We then chart the changing role that visuality has played in citizenship throughout history, noting that citizenship also involves a transformation of vision, an absenting from particular contexts and interests. We explore one particular version of that transformation ‐ seeing the world from afar, especially in the form of images of the earth seen from space ‐ noting how such images conventionally connote both power and alienation. We then draw on another research project, on place and vision, to argue that the shift to a cosmopolitan relationship with place means that humans increasingly inhabit their world only at a distance.

Agrofood practices have been an obvious domain in which to implement sustainability. Yet, despite the fact that food carries a dense set of social meanings and functions, sustainability’s social dimension has been relatively neglected in studies of sustainable food initiatives. In this article, we draw on research carried out for the European project “Facilitating Alternative Agro-food Networks” (FAAN), and describe various ways in which alternative agrofood networks in the city of Manchester manifest aspects of social sustainability and the “moral economy,” including relations of solidarity and justice with proximate and distant others, concern for land and for the global environment, social inclusion of the disadvantaged, and the reskilling of everyday life. However, we also argue for a different way of conceiving social sustainability, which involves not simply adding another “pillar” to the dominating dyad of the economic and the environmental, but subjecting the whole notion of sustainability to a sociomaterial turn—one that questions the ontological separation of economy, environment, and society. We show how this approach involves conceiving the urban “ethical foodscape” as a “moral taskscape” in which people dwell and move, interacting with soil, food, and each other through situated practices involving skill and judgment.

In this article I critically explore the work of the social theorists Klaus Eder and Ulrich Beck, who in different ways use an account of the ‘postmodern’, plural character of contemporary ideas of nature to argue for the necessity and possibility of an ecological democracy. I argue that within such social theoretical understandings of the contemporary politics of nature is a tension between pagan and Christian understandings of difference— between an understanding of difference as fundamentally irreducible and irreconcilable, and one that sees difference as contained within an overarching harmony. I cast suspicion on an account of postmodern difference which would see it as the resurgence of a pagan polytheism which had merely suppressed by two millennia of monotheism, in favour of an alternative account in which it appears as a historical product of the contingent path taken by the development of the Western sacred. I then explore ways in which Christian thought can provide the basis for an ontology of original peace in contrast to the original violence of pagan thought, on the basis of which might be built a different, ‘gothic’ understanding of ecological democracy, in which consensus is not grounded in the suppression of polysemy but in the harmonization of generative difference.