ABSTRACT: Developing a Compassionate Sense of Place: Environmental and Social Conscientization in Environmental Organizations
Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Ph.D. (randy.haluza-delay@kingsu.ca)

Addressing future sustainability in the face of environmental degradation will involve a transformation of our understanding of the material world and our human place. We do not lack for evidence of localized and global environmental degradation, as the natural sciences have presented comprehensive assessments in the Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Project. While “the environment” has waxed and waned somewhat in the public consciousness, it has remained as a steady sort of awareness. Recycling and awareness have increased, as have energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, urbanization, and many other environmentally deleterious factors.

Clearly, we need a more sociologically robust understanding of the sources of environmental degradation in the face of awareness, scientific knowledge, and social movement activism. This study used Bourdieu’s “theory of practice” as a sociologically robust set of tools to provide an empirical basis for re-imagining socio-ecological relations. For Bourdieu, society is composed of interlocking fields co-generated by the durable and internalised dispositions of the habitus. Habitus and field result in a “logic of practice” by which individuals operate in their various social milieux. Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus leads to the thesis that a sustainable society and an ecological habitus must co-exist for environmentally appropriate practices at either personal or collective levels to be produced.

An analytic ethnography was conducted among people active with environmental organizations in the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Despite diverse ways of living out their environmental concerns, a number of common dispositions of an environmental habitus surfaced. The participants of this study operationalized their environmental concerns in ways that were practical, performative and experiential. Despite this, a sense of place was present that transcended localities, leaving their environmental awareness unboundaried and crossing local-regional-global scales. Environmental practice attempted to extended morally considerable relations beyond social space to the entirety of "place". As the analysis developed it, such a “compassionate sense of place” gave direction to an environmentally-oriented logic of practice.

For the participants of this study, their living in a social milieu in which routinized environmental sensitivity was contrary to the dominant logic of practice was significant. Their efforts to be environmentally-active required reflexive self-awareness and social analysis. Thus, such embodied reflexivity could be linked to cognitive praxis of social movement theory. This suggests a more productive approach to developing the ecological habitus that must be part of a sustainability society. Environmental organizations could become the social space in which an ecologically more appropriate logic of practice could be acquired through such incidental learning as occurs as a result of participation with social movement organizations. Social structure and individual habitus must both be addressed for environmental sustainability.
The papers of the dissertation are available at http://csopconsulting.tripod.com.
KEYWORDS: environmentalism, Bourdieu, social movement learning, habitus, sense of place, ethnography.