On the grid

Partway through my interview with Heather—a nurse, doula, lactation consultant, multilevel marketing essential oils saleswoman, and White mother of three young children—she excused herself for a moment to check on the placenta that she was processing in an electric fruit dehydrator. Dehydrating, grinding up, and then encapsulating placentas into pill form for easier postpartum ingestion is just one of Heather’s many side hustles related to natural living. By this point in my interviews with ecologically conscious parents in and around Portland, Oregon, in the Northwestern United States, I had learned to maintain a neutral demeanor when confronted with unusual practices and comments that made me feel uncomfortable or with which I disagreed. But the essential oil diffuser gently misting the air in Heather’s immaculately clean home took on a different meaning knowing that a human placenta was cooking in the next room. I felt immediately queasy, but I did my best to act like this was the most normal thing in the world. Great, no problem. I channeled the neutral “brisk nurse” affect I was taught to use as an interviewer for a lesbian health study years earlier but had mostly refrained from using in this study in favor of the warmer affect I hoped would generate good rapport with my eco-conscious informants. As soon as I got back into my car after the interview, I pulled out my phone and googled: “is eating placenta cannibalism?”

Heather told me, “My husband tells me that I can’t do it all, and I understand that, but we can make little steps and those will all be helpful. Anything we can make and be away from consumerism and capitalism.” In contrast to her own difficult childhood, Heather has deliberately arranged her life to devote as much time as possible to her children, and she works hard to protect her children from harm. She has been breastfeeding continuously for the past seven years, nursing each of her older children until they were at least four years old. During our interview, she was breastfeeding and bargaining with her youngest child—a two-year-old—to please eat her lunch instead of nursing more. Heather researches health choices for her family extensively, and she is very skeptical of conventional medicine and cleaning products, both of which she generally avoids. When it comes to her interest in sustainability and natural health and parenting, Heather believes that balance is key. She doesn’t want to live what she calls an “Into the Wild” off-the-grid lifestyle with children who are constantly naked and covered in mud. Heather prefers to integrate natural living into a more moderate, contemporary way of life.

Heather said to me very earnestly, “It was so easy to have you over because this is something that I’m so passionate about. It’s our life.” I think her sentiment captures the reason that 37 parents of young children were willing to take time out of their busy schedules to speak with me for an hour or two about how they get things done in everyday life. These parents are doing their best to bring their hectic everyday lives into alignment with their pro-environmental values and concerns while still remaining “on the grid,” and I left nearly every interview feeling deep admiration and respect for my informants. However, as my discomfort with Heather’s dehydrating placenta might imply, the purpose of this book is not to promote these activities and interventions—even if that is what my informants thought or hoped I would be doing as I studied the production of everyday life in their households.

Background

Over the past half-century, environmental problems involving atmospheric emissions, resource depletion, toxic releases, and ecosystem degradation have become increasingly serious and seemingly intractable (Brown 2003; Rosa & Dietz 2003). The sources of these problems are often attributed to large global social forces such as capitalism (Schnaiberg & Gould 1994; Foster 2002), industrialization (Malm 2015), or affluence (Ehrlich & Ehrlich 1974; Dietz & Rosa 1997). Attribution has focused on particular industries, such as fossil fuel extraction and refining, electric utilities, internal combustion transportation, and mechanized agriculture. But these systems and their associated environmental harms exist only by virtue of the fact that they are involved in the production of goods and services destined for consumption by persons and social groups, regardless of the mode of production involved in their transformation and distribution. So, a careless, clueless, or contemptuous consumer is also increasingly portrayed as the root cause of environmental decline on a hitherto unimaginable scale (Jorgenson 2003; Wilk 2016).

In the United States, recent national policy has included initiatives urging citizens to “do their part” and take personal responsibility for the environment and climate change mitigation (The White House 2015; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2016; NASA 2017). With the presidency recently held by a man who claimed global warming is a conspiracy “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (Trump 2012) and a Supreme Court decision that curbs the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to limit emissions (Liptak 2022), local governments and environmentally minded people are finding it more important than ever to take environmental protection into their own hands (Bondar 2017; Bromley-Trujillo 2017; Gannon 2017). Families are worried about their health and safety in the face of a federal government that is seemingly unconcerned with their well-being (Levin 2017).

Studies of the “end users” of energy, water, food, and other products are not well developed (Stern et al 1997; OECD 2008). Except for the areas of recycling and energy conservation, public policies and interventions aimed at reining in expectations and demands or changing lifestyles have been fairly rare since they are not compatible with the overarching U.S. celebration of growth and affluence. Energy conservation is an exception because of periodic crises and the clear economic advantage of doing more with less energy. But even in the energy-efficiency movement, there has been reluctance to touch the “third rail” of lifestyle change (Lutzenhiser & Gossard 2000), and well-funded interventions in the most innovative geographies like California have closely adhered to a model that encourages modest energy savings from “cost-effective” technology upgrades (Lutzenhiser et al 2009).

Some research on “green consumerism” has been undertaken, but most often from a marketing or advertising perspective, with aims related to identifying and selling products to consumers with environmental interests. Usually these types of studies include little reference, beyond individual psychology and descriptive demographics, to social science theories or scholarly empirical literatures (Diamantopoulosa et al 2003; Rex & Baumann 2007; Nath et al 2013; Chekimaa et al 2016).

Where studies of consumption have taken place, they often draw upon narrow data sources and surveys that collect limited information about attitudes and actions across large populations. Drawing upon work by Shove et al (1998) and Wilhite et al (2001), Lutzenhiser (2002, 345) considered the prospects of “greening the economy from the bottom-up” and identifies a number of difficulties faced by households with the strongest environmental attitudes and the best intentions, including family dynamics, lack of resources, social pressures, and institutional constraints. Little work has been done to examine those dynamics and factors, or to empirically apply theories that might shed light on them.

If households and their demands for goods and services are even partially implicated in ecological decline, it is important that the dynamics of demand be better understood. However, this is easier said than done. Knight (1944, 289) notes that “The treatment of demand is the branch of economic theory in which methodological problems are most important and most difficult. This is because it is here that behavior facts are most inseparably bound up with motivation and that objective data call most imperatively for interpretation by subjective facts and meanings.” While there is appropriate social science theory, it is scattered across disciplines and seems to be incomplete in some cases and contradictory in others.

Household production and sustainability

If changes at the household level are desirable for environmental protection, then the need for better knowledge is obvious. For example, it would be important to understand the differences in the understandings, practices, and impacts of “high-demand,” “average,” and “low-demand” households, as well as differences in practices and beliefs of different socioeconomic demographic groups. Shove (2003, 10) notes that, “In real life, escalators do not run backward. Neither do the escalators of demand in economic theory” in research that outlines the expectations, infrastructures, and social meanings that alter social practices over time in ways that increase the demand for resources. But what does it look like when demand does decline?

Because little of this work has been done, and the focus of a book must be manageably narrow, I have chosen to investigate the lives and habits of a group of self-described sustainable households with young children, focusing on the intentional actions the members of these households take to reduce environmental harm. What these households do, why they do these things, how they think about them, and how they evaluate the results all shed important light on how environmental concern can be translated into pro-environmental action under the best circumstances. So, from these households, perhaps we can learn what changes might be possible, what the limits are to their effectiveness, what the unintended consequences of widely promoting these household-level pro-environmental practices might be, and, ultimately, if household-level efforts to mitigate environmental problems are effective or even desirable.

Lutzenhiser (2002, 4) found that “pro-conservation attitudes rarely resulted in action.” In response to this challenge, I recruited a sample of action-oriented households who have made fairly major changes to conventional ways of getting things done in everyday life to bring their practices into alignment with their sustainability values. The households I spoke with over the course of this research are not green anarcho-primitivists living off the land in a yurt, raising unwashed feral children, and making their own clothes out of roadkill squirrel pelts—and no disrespect is meant to such households. I have known and cared for many people who live this way. This book just isn’t about them. Rather, I deliberately sought out a set of very much on-the-grid households in a metropolitan area living in ways that remain fully engaged with civilization and modernity. Furthermore, I have focused on a portion of the lifecycle when the time and finances of households are under particularly heavy strains, concentrating on adults with young children.

Shove (2003, 9) writes that “studies of eco-villagers or investigations into the beliefs of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases global, swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice.” The households I spoke with over the course of this research have thought carefully about these routinized practices, and have made changes to their expectations, demands, and how they think about needs in ways that still allow them to remain connected to contemporary society. These households provide a reasonable window into an alternate reality where demand escalators really do run backwards.

Sixteen years in Portlandia

I moved to Portland, Oregon, in the Northwestern United States in the spring of 2001 on a Greyhound bus with everything I owned. A few months prior, I had mailed a “room wanted” flyer I’d made at a copy shop to a few health food stores and schools in the area for their community bulletin boards. My future roommates sent me a Polaroid picture of the house in the mail, and I sent back a money order for my $200 monthly rent, crossing my fingers that it would work. It did work, and before too long I was wearing holes in my secondhand shoes exploring my new city and riding a rickety clunker of a vintage bicycle around town. I marveled at how great it was to live in a place that made it so easy to do the kinds of things I wanted to do—living without a car, eating great vegan food, showering infrequently, and participating in a vibrant radical DIY community of punks and activists. Here, the interests and practices that raised eyebrows in the suburb where I grew up were actually encouraged and celebrated. I moved away a couple times over the years, but Portland kept drawing me back, even as the city became an increasingly expensive caricature of itself, parodied in the 2011–2018 sketch comedy show Portlandia—a Disney World playground for professional progressive environmentally concerned adults. Portland is the “greenest city in America,” and the whitest one, too. Portland is Stuff White People Like, and I had been quietly observing the city and its residents for 16 years—on and off—by the time I began conducting the interviews with eco-conscious parents of young children that form the basis of this book in the spring of 2017.

My personal connection to many of the ideas and practices presented in this book go back to my childhood. Like so many children of the 1980s, I was terrified of acid rain and “the greenhouse effect” that I learned about in science class when I was six, and I was angry that adults weren’t doing more to protect the environment. In school, we sang songs about recycling and not wasting food, we kissed banana slugs, and were taught by environmental educators to say, “Thank you, plant!” whenever we picked a flower. I wrote letters to President George H. W. Bush demanding that he protect the pandas, and I picketed my elementary school alone when I was eight years old over a proposal to build a stadium on the habitat of endangered burrowing owls. I listened to bird sounds cassettes in my Walkman instead of New Kids on the Block, and I was banned from bringing pH test strips to my elementary school, where I had been trying to test the water fountains for evidence of acid rain. Even as a young child, I refused to eat at McDonalds out of my concerns for rainforest beef and Styrofoam, dabbled in vegetarianism, and became a vegan at 15. During a severe drought in California, I was taught by my parents not to flush the toilet after urinating, and I shared bathwater with my siblings. My mother, a first-generation Czech immigrant, did not generally put clothes in the tumble dryer, a rarity among our neighbors even in a sunny mild climate. She tried to limit our sugar intake, and, if I begged enough, would occasionally buy me Rainforest Crisp breakfast cereal (produced by Bob Weir and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead). I read the book 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth and tried to implement as many of the suggested changes as I could. Like my informant Eric, seeing images of wounded animals choking on litter inspired me to cut up six-pack rings into what Eric described poignantly as “the smallest pieces in the world.”

Today, I share many practices that my informants might consider “eco-conscious”—for example, I exclusively line-dry my laundry, my household is mostly vegetarian, I avoid the bottled water that is ubiquitous where I live, I have deliberately reduced my air travel, I’m a selective flusher, and I keep my home relatively cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I love to pick up free stuff off the side of the road. I have picked through the recycling in my own household and workplaces to correct others’ recycling errors. I was vegan for around a decade, and I bike commuted year-round for many years, including through several freezing Chicago winters. In the past, I regularly took discarded food and other items out of store dumpsters, and I occasionally stole organic food from chain grocery store self-checkouts. One year, I tried to buy nothing from a store with more than one location. Today, I do not see these activities as morally good or my lifestyle as “environmentally friendly.” At this point, I participate in many of these purportedly pro-environmental practices without even thinking about it. There are many pro-environmental practices that I know are pointless, counterproductive, or likely not worth the time and effort, but they have become deeply engrained habits over the years.

The critical perspective that I bring to thinking about these practices also goes back decades. During the course of this research, I’ve returned frequently to memories of living as a teenager in a large Southeast Portland vegetarian eco-cooperative house with my friend and bandmate Mason Weiss and five older environmental hippy types. My roommates did things for work like organizing permaculture events and building mud and hay structures in less-gentrified parts of town to encourage community dialogue and gathering. Two punk teenagers in a house of older hippies sounds like a perfect fish-out-of-water sitcom plot, and it is true—our band may have played a raucous mocking cover of the charity single “We Are the World” at an important permaculture and “placemaking” event we’d been invited to by a roommate. My tenure in the house ended a bit dramatically after we very rudely drowned out a folk music session happening in the living room with our own semi-screamed rendition of “Kumbaya.” The culture clash of the house also inspired thoughtful conversations between Mason and I about the potential hypocrisy and limits to the efficacy of pro-environmental practices that inform my thinking and have stuck with me to this day. Our roommates were sweet, well-meaning people and we shared many of their values and goals, but, upon closer inspection, we found their worldviews to be deeply misguided.

At the same time as the hippies-versus-punks culture clash was brewing in my home, another clash that informs this book was developing—I was immersed in studying neoclassical economics, my undergraduate major at an elite liberal arts college. I wore penny loafers and a moth-eaten little boy’s tweed blazer I’d found at a thrift store, and I carried around a briefcase that I’d found in a dumpster as some sort of very, very inside joke. When my band was playing a rent money fundraiser at a friend’s house, an attendee caught a glimpse of a magazine inside my dumpstered briefcase that I’d left near the door and exclaimed, “Who the fuck is reading The Economist here?” Indeed! Who brought The Economist to the punk show? I have received a fair amount of negative feedback for my insistence on critically adapting the theory of household production from arch-neoliberal/neoclassical economist Gary Becker (1981) to a Marxist-feminist analysis (see Chapter 2 of this book for the full model). I agree that these theories may seem incompatible and the use of Becker (1981) completely heretical, but I am a contradictory person living in a contradictory and insane world.

Methodological overview

In this book, I am not the main character, but I am present as the narrator whose perspective and subjective interpretations undoubtedly influence the story that is being told. A major difference between my informants and myself is that I have no children and do not ever expect to have any. While I was conducting the interviews for this book, I participated in some afterschool pickups and babysat young children from an eco-conscious family. I wanted to do my best to understand the personal worlds of my informants. Ultimately, this research was generated in collaboration with my informants, and the presentation here embodies the “coproduction of ethnographic knowledge, created and represented in the only way it can be, within an interactive Self/Other dialogue” (Tedlock 1991, 82).

If the household can be thought of as a small factory that produces everyday life, then the research I conducted is a factory visit in the tradition of Smith (2003 [1776]) and Marshall (1919) or a worker’s inquiry in the tradition of Marx (Marx 1938 [1880]). I spoke with informants from 23 households living in the Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro metro area in 60- to 90-minute ethnographic interviews about their everyday lives. During these conversations, I asked my informants to explain how their sustainability priorities influence their practices—or how they get things done—with respect to household waste, comfort, cleanliness, food, transportation, and childcare. My informants get everyday tasks done just like everyone else—by focusing on the things that are most important to them, making use of the resources available to them, and subject to the constraints that limit their options. Their sustainability priorities mean that the practices and precise combinations of inputs involved in the production of their everyday lives are different from conventional U.S. households. This led me to examine the consequences, intended and unintended, of these sustainability-oriented ways of getting things done.

Spradley (1979) argues that the ethnographer achieves this goal of collaborative research by being taught by their research subjects, not by collecting data on them. To learn from my informants, I first had to attempt to assume a “conscious attitude of almost complete ignorance” (Spradley 1979, 4) of the world of pro-environmental practices and sustainability-oriented families. I frequently encountered confused and disturbed looks from the people I was interviewing when I asked them questions like, “Why do you recycle?” I followed up these questions by asking the informants to pretend that I’m from outer space and that I want them to explain normal, seemingly obvious things to me. It wasn’t that I was some kind of monster who didn’t share their fundamental concern for the environment, a conclusion they might draw about someone who is opposed to recycling or doesn’t understand its appeal,¹ but that I wanted to understand their perspective in their own words. I asked my informants to suspend disbelief and to assume I didn’t know anything.

While ethnography and field research can frequently mean sustained periods of participant observation lasting months or even years, the ethnographic interview is a method that allows the researcher to make inferences based on what informants say about their beliefs, practices, and artifacts during a shorter study period. Ethnographic interviews are a useful way to study sustainability practices and their meanings in households because “notions of materialism, belief, perception, and values are at the core of the sustainability vision” (Murphy & McDonagh 2016, xiv). The semi-structured ethnographic interview allowed my informants to teach me the meanings of their practices and to guide me to understand what they deem to be important in the environmental realm, without demanding too much of their limited time.

Intimacy, friendship, and feminist research

Some feminist researchers, such as Stacey (1988, 22), suggest that ethnography is particularly well suited to feminist research because the qualities that make for good ethnography—“empathy, connection, and concern”—are also “women’s special strengths.” However, I am both a woman and a highly experienced quantitative researcher, so I hardly believe that quantitative, positivist approaches to research are inherently male, masculine, or oppressive, and qualitative research methods are inherently female, feminine, and anti-oppressive. Additionally, I reject the notions that women are by nature more nurturing and intuitive or that women possess a natural inclination toward empathy, care, and human connection (Rich 1986, 42).

That being said, over the course of our conversations it was impossible to avoid caring about many of the people who were sharing so much about their everyday lives with me. There is an intimacy involved in sitting in people’s homes in conversation, seeing how they live, meeting their children, and holding their babies. I was deeply disturbed by one informant who shared concerns that are linked to notions of “White replacement”—mentioning what he views as the erasure of “European Christian values” due to multiculturalism and low birthrates among White Americans and Europeans—but this interview stands out as uniquely alarming and disquieting. The remaining interviews were pleasant conversations with lovely people who I genuinely grew to like over the brief time we spent together. My informants weren’t paid for their time, though I did bring each household a box of organic herbal tea that I purchased at a local food co-op—this is the kind of hostess gift that I would bring to any friend or acquaintance who invited me into their home. Following the interview, each household for whom I had a mailing address received a handwritten thank-you card in the mail, also a personal habit of mine.

The research here is based on respondent-driven open-ended ethnographic interviews, generally volunteered for on the basis of a belief that the informant’s views are important and they are contributing to a cause they believe in—sustainability, whatever that term means to the informant. But part of this willingness to share information with me was based on an assumption by many of my informants that I was “one of them” and was producing a piece of research-advocacy that would champion their lifestyles and practices. Stacey (1988) suggests that the intimacy and friendships forged during feminist ethnographic research leaves participants vulnerable to exploitation by the researcher. In this sense, I was indeed exploiting the desire of many of my informants to have their views and practices validated and promoted. As a critical social researcher, however, I did not approach this project from a sustainability advocacy perspective but rather with the goals of critical fact-finding and theory-building in mind.

This is not to say that there are no political motivations underlying this research—this is research on sustainability-oriented households and the everyday lives of the people who comprise them, but it is research for households and people, too (Stanley & Wise 1990, 21). Like Marshall and Marx, my ultimate concern is with the conditions of people’s lives and how those lives and conditions might be improved to promote human flourishing. To these concerns I add a contemporary one—avoiding environmental devastation. While I was humbled and encouraged by major interventions in everyday life that my informants were making in order to bring their practices in line with their values, I remain highly skeptical of the efficacy of individual-level changes in the face of environmental crises. In fact, after listening to my informants’ struggles to balance everyday tasks with frequently costly and time-consuming sustainability practices, I emerged from this research even more convinced that the household is the incorrect site for these pro-environmental interventions. This may not be the conclusion some of my informants hoped I would draw from our conversations, but I think they would agree that we are hoping for the same things—healthy people and a healthy planet.

A note on deception

In this case, Dayna asserted herself as the expert on laundry soap, David balked, and Dayna reasserted herself and “won” the dispute.

In several interviews, I was able to visually observe that the home’s thermostat was set to a heating temperature higher than the temperature my informants reported. For example, walking into Scott and Sarah’s home on a chilly April day, I passed the thermostat on my way to their living room and saw it was set to 72 degrees (Fahrenheit, or 22.2 degrees Celsius). All of the members of the household, including the children, were wearing short-sleeved tops. However, they reported their winter thermostat setting to me as 70 degrees (Fahrenheit, or 21.1 degrees Celsius) during the interview. It could be that Scott and Sarah were purposefully deceiving me, but based on their demeanor I do not believe that any deception was deliberate. Perhaps 70 degrees is the temperature they’ve programmed their thermostat to, and they increase the temperature manually when they feel too cold. Or perhaps they were telling me a temperature they thought was a correct or ecologically righteous one—the temperature they believe is the maximum ethical heating setting.

However, if my informants were indeed giving misleading answers about their winter thermostat settings, that too provides important information about social norms and the values of my informants (Rubin & Rubin 2012, 66–67). It is possible that some of the practices and habits described by the informants may not be the way they live their lives 100 percent of the time, but their descriptions may represent the way they believe they ought to be living their lives or what they believe to be norms for people who share their values. In any case, this is valuable information.

Recruiting my informants

The sampling frame for this study was adults in households in the greater Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro metro area in the Northwestern United States with children under age ten who consider their lifestyles eco-conscious or sustainable. My choice to include only families with children under ten was not an arbitrary one—this allowed me to see how households balance sustainability and other priorities at a point in the lifecycle where resources like time and money are particularly constrained. The Portland metro area is a convenient place to conduct this research, since it is where I was living at the time of the fieldwork, but it is also an ideal place to recruit highly eco-conscious households. The proportion of adults who report being worried about climate change in Multnomah County ranks in the highest 0.01 percent among U.S. counties (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication 2015) at 66 percent. Portland residents routinely rank among the “greenest” in the United States thanks to high rates of non-car transport, renewable energy, and recycling (Svoboda et al 2008; Rogers 2011; Bernardo 2016). This is a useful setting for investigating the practices and the cultural knowledge (symbols, categories, competence, and language) of households who see themselves as particularly sustainable or eco-friendly.

While there are well-documented damaging effects of the ideologies of family and motherhood in capitalism, this is not to say that the benefits, affective or otherwise, that people perceive to flow out of families or the parental role are illusory—rather, “like every proper ideology, the family too was more than a mere lie” (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 1972, 138). The informants I spoke with for this research love their children and value their families—in fact, for many of my informants, their children and families are the primary motivation for their sustainability practices. However, I have chosen to talk about households rather than families for several reasons. The nuclear family household is a modern concept that has been held up politically as an ideal form (Barrett 1980, 199–213; Munro 2021). The arrangement of biologically related people into shared dwellings in a “family-household”—the combination of “kinship and co-residence”—is a relatively modern social arrangement (Barrett 1980, 199–213) that is not universal across time or cultures (Netting et al 1984). Indeed, the two-parent heterosexual nuclear family household is not universal in the sample of households I interviewed for this research, as several of my informants live with unrelated persons as roommates, in multigenerational households, in cohousing, or in intentional community (see Table 3.1 for a full list of household configurations). While 13 of the households I spoke with for this research live together in a nuclear family with two parents in a heterosexual relationship, the remaining ten do not. They include single fathers, single mothers, multigenerational and multifamily households, a couple in a lesbian relationship, and transgender/gender nonbinary parents.

To recruit my final sample of 23 households, I began by sending an email with a brief description of the study, an image of my recruitment flyer, and a link to a screener questionnaire website to over 150 local professional and personal contacts, asking them to forward my request for participants to people they knew who might qualify. While none of my own contacts or acquaintances participated in the study, several of my informants were one or two steps removed from people I know. I also posted the announcement on the social networks LinkedIn and Switchboard. Informants outside my own social and professional networks were recruited through the online social platforms Facebook and Meetup.org, where I posted recruitment information in large groups for environmentally minded parents, corresponded directly with group organizers, and learned about events. I attended several Meetup.org events for ecologically minded and LGBTQ parents to distribute flyers and tell attendees about my study. The illustration for the flyer was created by my friend Michelle Lamanet, an artist and sustainability-minded parent of two children.

The interviews

As I conducted the interviews that form the basis of this book, it seemed like everyone around me was still reeling from the new and shocking reality of the Donald Trump presidency—protesting the election, protesting the inauguration, protesting the so-called Muslim Ban, counterprotesting against increasingly emboldened far-right White supremacist groups, and supporting jailed antifascist protesters. It was a difficult spring in Portland. A so-called alt-right march for “free speech” came within a few blocks of my home. This march was attended by a White supremacist who went on to murder two men a month later when they intervened to stop him from spewing hate speech at young women on the train, one of whom was wearing a headscarf and one of whom was Black (Wilson 2017). One of the men murdered for intervening to stop the violent White supremacist was Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, a fellow alumnus of Reed College who had also majored in economics. Namkai-Meche was murdered on the same train that I regularly took to work and school. These murders immediately brought to mind the long history of White supremacist violence in the Pacific Northwest that I learned about as a teenager from my conversations with older Portland punks and SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), including the 1988 murder of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw by Portland White supremacists affiliated with the hate groups East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance (Langer 2004).

It was all hitting very close to home—both literally and figuratively—and I was experiencing massive regret and self-doubt about my decision to study something so small—the mundane habits and everyday lives of eco-conscious households with children—when it seemed like the country was descending into fascism. I was energized by gathering in the streets and airport corridors with thousands of strangers in protest. The feelings of solidarity as we collectively expressed our shared outrage and fear helped me get through this challenging time. During this same period of frequent protests, I was being welcomed into the homes of strangers who were willing to take time out of their busy day to share with me intimate details about their everyday lives as they attempted—in small and large ways—to promote human and environmental flourishing in a world that is hostile to both. Looking back on this time following two and a half years of extreme isolation as a vulnerable population member during the COVID pandemic, the human connection and intimacy of these interviews in the homes of strangers is almost unimaginable.

During the months of April and May of 2017, I conducted 22 interviews lasting at least 60 minutes each with 37 informants representing 23 households. I interviewed Heather and Gloria, representing two different households, during a single 90-minute joint interview at Heather’s home while Gloria and her children were visiting for a playdate. My conversation with Yvonne took place over the phone while her youngest child was napping, since between recent travel and her various obligations it was difficult to find a good time to meet in person to talk. I met with Nathan and Nicole at a busy suburban brew pub in an outdoor mall, I met Leonda at a coffee shop in a strip mall in the suburbs, and I met Wendy at a coffee shop in Southeast Portland. The remaining households invited me to their homes for our interviews. I changed the names of all my informants, with a different letter assigned to each household in roughly the order in which I interviewed them. I only assigned names to informants I interviewed; in households where I spoke with only one member of a couple for scheduling reasons, I did not assign a name to the household members who were not interviewed.

The interviews were open-ended and lasted between 60 and 90 minutes, though I tried to keep our conversations as close to 60 minutes as possible. While I let my informants lead me to the topics they found the most important and interesting, I asked them a set of questions about how they get things done in everyday life in various household realms (waste, comfort, cleanliness, food, transportation, and general provisioning). I asked my informants follow-up questions to help me understand how they developed their current practices, what resources are employed in the production of these practices, what these practices mean to my informants, what their motivations for these practices are, and what they might do differently if they had more time or money. I rarely asked the questions in the exact order of the interview guide, preferring instead for the conversation to flow as naturally as possible.

Outline of the book

In this book, I will introduce you to a group of sustainability-oriented households with young children living in and near Portland, Oregon, in the Northwestern United States. I will describe how they balance their priorities and get things done in everyday life using the resources they have available to them, limited by the factors that constrain them. I will discuss how these households make choices, how these choices have evolved over time, and how they view the social and cultural meanings of these choices.

While I had initially expected to find mostly White nuclear families with relatively high incomes engaging in sustainability practices varying along a green spectrum, my sample of households told a different story. I found that sustainability is not exclusively the domain of the White and affluent. Low-income households typically substituted time-consuming sustainability practices for more costly ones, and they tended to live in ways that involved a lower overall environmental impact than many of their higher-income counterparts in my sample. Low-income households I spoke with lived in smaller dwellings, owned fewer or no cars, and generally consumed less overall—in part out of financial necessity and in part for environmental reasons. The popular conception of a sustainable household might be an affluent White nuclear family installing solar panels on their single-family home and picking up organic meat in their new hybrid vehicle from an overpriced natural foods store. Is my informant Fiona—a single mother who works part-time at a daycare and lives in a small rental apartment with no car, no space-cooling equipment, and no central heating; who goes shopping for vegetarian groceries on the bus and obtains most of what her household needs either free or purchased secondhand—more or less environmentally conscious than an affluent family with a Prius and solar panels? Perhaps it is easier to be “sustainable” when you don’t have money to buy many things in the first place.

Clear themes emerged as I was conducting my interviews in the spring of 2017. My informants were exhausted, frustrated, experiencing conflict in their relationships related to their sustainability practices, and often feeling genuinely hopeless about the efficacy of their pro-environmental interventions into mundane daily practices. In the words of my informant Emily: “I can’t have this on my shoulders. This can’t be all up to me. I’m just going to do the best that I can.” They described feeling like the world they live in—even in a “green” city like Portland, Oregon—was not always designed to promote the well-being of their families or the environment. It was based on these interviews and the experiences of my informants that I developed the Marxist-feminist theoretical framework that is presented in Chapter 2. This orienting perspective helped me move beyond description, to adequately make sense of the data, and to identify possible paths forward—as well as which roads to a better world within capitalism may be blocked.

While this theoretical framework was helpful for understanding my interviews, a large portion of my objective in this book is simply to describe things about the everyday lives of eco-conscious households that haven’t previously been described in this way in the social science literature, focusing on mundane practices as the unit of analysis. In Chapter 3, I will introduce you to my informants and their households in more detail—I describe who my informants are, who they live with, and their varied priorities in the sustainability realm and motivations for sustainability practices. In Chapter 4, I provide a description of the resources my informants have available to them to get things done, and a description of the factors that constrain them. In Chapters 5 and 6, I investigate specific facets of daily life and describe how these households get things done in ways that are informed by their sustainability priorities using the resources available to them and subject to the factors that constrain them. In Chapter 5, I discuss the disposal of household waste, including trash, recycling, composting, diapers, and toilet waste. In Chapter 6, I describe household practices with respect to indoor comfort temperatures, and household and bodily cleanliness. In Chapter 7, I discuss the role of “doing your own research” and acquiring know-how in the practices and lives of eco-conscious households with young children. Chapter 8 describes the conflicts that arise as a result of priorities and pro-environmental interventions in mundane practices that put my informants out of step with the mainstream. In Chapter 9, I discuss the sometimes painful trade-offs that are required to balance priorities, resources, and constraints in the everyday lives of my informants. I conclude by explaining why households are making these interventions in conventional ways of getting things done and what this might mean for policymakers and others who are considering promoting household-level pro-environmental practices.

Conclusion

Netting et al (1984, xxi) note that “Perhaps it is this mundane, repetitive, cross-culturally obvious appearance of households that has led observers to think of them as unproblematic and lacking in interest.” However, Engels (1902, 71) writes that the household represents a microcosm of all of society—within individual households the same conflicts and processes take place as do in the economy and society as a whole. Fractal-like, the household is a miniature economy within the larger economy, a miniature society within the larger society, existing within but subsumed by these larger structures and bound by their laws. Similarly, Marshall (1919) argued that the processes underlying production in the economy as a whole can be understood by examining a single factory, and that production in a single factory can be understood by first examining the economy as a whole. I will argue that this study of sustainability-oriented households and their activities reveals crucial information about society, the economy, and the state. It is these larger structures and institutions that constrain the range of possible actions of individuals and groups. But revealingly, my informants feel obligated to undertake pro-environmental tasks that are often time-consuming and costly because they can’t trust institutions to take the large-scale protective actions that they believe are needed for the environment and the health of their families. Even when these household-scale actions are revealed to be futile—or outright counterproductive—my informants continue to press on out of the conviction that their sustainability values and priorities are worthy of their efforts.

In her landmark study of household production, Reid (1934, v) points out that household production is an integral component of the economy, and unless we recognize it as such we will be unable to properly evaluate the costs and benefits associated with moving production into or out of the household. By modeling “green” households as producers of everyday life rather than consumers of environmental products, I bring into focus the additional unwaged work that eco-conscious households undertake to bring their mundane daily practices into alignment with their ecological values. In doing so, we can begin to evaluate the trade-offs inherent in these pro-environmental activities and whether or not the household is a desirable site for pro-environmental interventions.