Habits and their creatures

Abstract

Much of the consumption that matters for environmental sustainability is habitual, recurrent and ordinary. Like it or not, strategies designed to steer behaviour in proenvironmental directions have to grapple with this habitual aspect. Most attempts to do so treat habit as an obstacle to change, and as a type of behaviour that is automatic, frequent and set within a stable context. In analyses like these habits are behaviours that people pick up, have and occasionally lose. In this paper I explore the relevance and value of turning this topic around and of approaching it from the habit’s point of view. If we persist with this way of thinking, and if we assume that rather than acquiring habits we are acquired by them, familiar questions appear in a very different light and new ones arise. How do habits locate suitable carriers? How do habits, viewed as practices that require recurrent, consistent reproduction, relate to other less demanding pursuits? How is the rhythm of society defined by the sum total of habits? Can policy makers do anything to help sustainable habits capture large swathes of the population and edge other more damaging habits out of the way? In this paper I push such questions to the limit. From the vantage point afforded by this thought experiment I comment on the policy implications of conventional and practice-centric methods of conceptualising habit.