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Environmental Communication

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Political Participation and Pleasure in GreenLifestyle Journalism

Geoffrey Craig

To cite this article: Geoffrey Craig (2016) Political Participation and Pleasure in Green LifestyleJournalism, Environmental Communication, 10:1, 122-141, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2014.991412

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.991412

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Political Participation and Pleasure inGreen Lifestyle JournalismGeoffrey Craig

This article examines the reportage of green lifestyle practices across the online sites ofmajor British newspapers. The articulation of “green lifestyle journalism” in the studyis suggestive of its complex identity, given its implication in existing orders ofconsumption while also expressive of emerging everyday practices that potentiallyand variously challenge those orders of consumption. The study enquires into whethersuch green lifestyle journalism stories are, in fact, reported across different online sites,and if so, in which publications and how such stories are classified within onlinemenus. It also examines the range of reported environmental lifestyle practices and howthey are attributed with meaning, including their engagement with the concept ofpleasure and its association with political participation. The study reveals that thepleasures associated with sustainable living are often marginalized, and instead anethical consumer is commonly posited who is variously cognitively deficient, worriedabout the environmental consequences of their everyday behavior, or concerned abouttheir inability to realize their desires to engage in sustainable lifestyle practices. Thearticle also examines those instances when the pleasures of a more sustainable lifestyleare represented as deriving from the implementation of environmental practices andtechnologies in everyday, domestic contexts, and also when they are illustrated as theproduct of civic and political engagements with issues of sustainability.

Keywords: pleasure; political participation; environment; lifestyle; journalism

Introduction—Green Lifestyle Journalism

The roles and statuses of individuals, households, and neighborhoods in respondingto climate change and other environmental dilemmas is a fraught and complex issue,incorporating evaluations of political agency, class, consumption, lifestyle, everyday

Geoffrey Craig is a director of research in the Centre for Journalism, University of Kent, UK.Correspondence to: Geoffrey Craig, Centre for Journalism, University of Kent, Gillingham Building, ChathamMaritime, Kent ME4 4AG, UK. Email: g.a.craig@kent.ac.uk

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

Environmental Communication, 2016Vol. 10, No. 1, 122–141, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.991412

life, and the site of the home. Much has been said, with differing evaluations, aboutthe growing popularity of forms of ethical consumption, such as Fairtrade, thatattempt to address environmental and global economic equity concerns (Adams &Raisborough, 2010; Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, & Malpass, 2005; Goodman, 2004;Johnston, 2002; Lewis & Potter, 2011). Equally, popular television programs thatexplore more environmentally friendly lifestyles have attracted considerable andvariable academic judgments (Bell & Hollows, 2011; Craig, 2010; Hollows & Jones,2010; Lewis, 2008). Scrutiny of environmental stewardship in the private sphere andat the local community level is not only important because of these behavioral andmedia developments but also because governmental policies on climate change arenow targeting such domains (Gibson, Head, Gill, & Waitt, 2010; Peters, Sinclair, &Fudge, 2012; Reid, Sutton, & Hunter, 2010; Waitt et al., 2012). The household hasbeen identified as a significant site of pro-environmental behavior and thearticulations between the domestic sphere, industry and government have beenincorporated in research on household sustainability that attempts to move beyondthe binary of approaches that privilege either the macro-level or micro/meso-levels ofanalysis (Gibson et al., 2010).

Research into journalistic reportage of climate change and the challenges ofsustainability has tended to adopt a macro-level of analysis (Antilla, 2005; Bacon &Nash, 2012; Boykoff, 2011; Boykoff & Boykoff, 2007; Carvalho, 2005, 2007;Grundmann, 2007; Weingart, Engels, & Pansegrau, 2000). Such research hasinvestigated how climate change is represented in public discourse, examiningreportage of national and international policy developments, and the selection andlanguage use of elite sources, such as politicians and scientists. Studies have alsoanalyzed the journalistic treatment of the facts of climate change, including questionsof balance, journalistic norms, and charting the treatment of climate change skeptics.Much of the research into the print media reportage of climate change has focused onbroadsheet newspapers, given that such “quality” publications are more likely toprovide coverage of the political and policy contexts of climate change. Some studies,however, have also explored the very different treatment of climate change in tabloidnewspapers (Boykoff, 2008; Boykoff & Mansfield, 2008). Interestingly, such studieshave revealed that tabloid newspapers—which more customarily trawl the privatesphere for extraordinary stories of ordinary individuals—framed climate changeprimarily through weather events and “charismatic megafauna,” and that headlinesoften promoted fear and the prospects of doom, sometimes with a defensive andironic orientation. Largely missing from both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers,then, are accounts of individual, household, and local community attempts to engagein a more sustainable existence.

The increasing social visibility and importance of lifestyles have been accompan-ied by the growth of forms of lifestyle journalism, which has been described as “thepart of journalism that primarily focuses on audiences as consumers, providing themwith factual information and advice, often in entertaining ways, about goods andservices they can use in their daily lives” (Hanusch, 2012, p. 2). It is commonly

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associated with consumerism pertaining to subjects such as food and wine, travel, realestate, fashion, health and well-being, gardening, leisure, and also extending todomains of arts and culture, such as music and entertainment. Fürsich (2012)identifies three dimensions of lifestyle journalism as: providing advice, offeringreviews, and a commercialization and promotion that derives from the marketorientation of the fields. The articulation in the subject of “green lifestyle journalism”here in this study is suggestive of its complex identity, given its implication in existingorders of consumption while also expressive of emerging everyday practices thatpotentially and variously challenge those orders of consumption.

Green lifestyle journalism is located within both a general news hierarchy and alsoa hierarchy within environmental journalism. As a form of so-called “soft news,” it isoften allied with trends in infotainment and implicated in a hierarchy that sees suchoutput as distractions from “quality” journalism that focuses on the moreconventional domains of public life such as politics, the economy, and internationalaffairs. The obvious synthesis between the content of lifestyle journalism and itsappeal for advertisers—along with subsequent possible ethical concerns or dilemmas—also contributes to a lesser regard for this kind of journalism. Green lifestylejournalism is also, of course, a subset of environmental journalism where the primaryfocus is so-called “hard news” topics, such as climate change policy, pollution, energyproduction and consumption, environmental protests, and the environmentaldamage caused by primary industries. While it generally operates within this kindof hierarchy, its relationship with other forms of environmental journalism, as weshall see in the following analysis, is not consistent or fixed, and it is suggested thatthis is indicative of the ways that green lifestyle journalism both encapsulates a broadrange of story types and how it can also unsettle conventional understandings ofpolitical participation and individual identity.

Green lifestyle journalism raises questions about the role of journalism incapturing and making sense of emerging negotiations of sustainable living. It canbe also incorporated into a broader understanding of what has been termed “servicejournalism” (Eide & Knight, 1999). Eide and Knight argue that the more problematicstatus of everyday life in modernity has required the furnishing of a diverse andconstant supply of knowledge, advice, and information through forms of servicejournalism. Service journalism addresses and informs a “hybrid social identity—partcitizen, part consumer, part client” and it “is oriented to resolving the problems ofeveryday life in ways that can combine individualistic and collective, political forms ofresponse” (Eide & Knight, 1999, p. 527). Some journalism scholars (Deuze, 2009;Hartley, 1996) have suggested that the broader contemporary crisis of journalism canbe partially traced to its stubborn reproduction of a limited vision of modernity,linked to traditional institutions and value systems. It has been noted morespecifically how climate change “breaches some of journalism’s established foci anddemarcations” (Bødker & Neverla, 2012, p. 152). A culture of environmental riskrenders traditional journalistic techniques—objectivity, neutrality, and factual accur-acy based upon the expertise of authoritative sources—increasingly problematic

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(Allan, Adam, & Carter, 2000; Cottle, 1998; Howarth, 2012). In response, Howarthhas argued for a more active, participatory media in environmental reportage,“widening engagement and highlighting issues of everyday relevance and disempo-werment” (2012, p. 216). The task of making sense of emerging practices ofsustainability and highlighting their increasing relevance as responses to climatechange would no doubt benefit from a journalism that adopts a more active,interventionist approach although even here the understanding of “public participa-tion” would need to be broadened beyond forms of consumer boycotts andconventional forms of political protest.

This study builds on such understandings of lifestyle journalism and addresses thedearth of research that investigates journalistic reportage of lifestyle engagement withissues of climate change and sustainability. Initially, I will outline my understandingof the concepts of political participation, lifestyles, and pleasure. These concepts arecentral to the study, and the analysis of green lifestyle journalism that is offered hereinvolves working against what are perhaps dominant understandings of these terms. Iargue that green lifestyle practices and their reportage should be informed by anunderstanding of the politicization of lifestyles, the more complex and pervasivemanifestations of political and civic participation, and a reclamation of the concept ofpleasure that emphasizes its more prosaic and everyday character, grounded inengagements with the rhythms and spaces of quotidian life. The following sectionenquires into whether such “green lifestyle journalism” stories are, in fact, reportedacross the online sites of major British newspapers, and if so, in which publicationsand how such stories are classified within the menus of the online sites. In this sectionof the analysis, I examine the online sites of the tabloid newspapers, The Sun, TheMirror, The Daily Mail, and The London Evening Standard, as well as the online sitesof the broadsheet newspapers, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

In addition, the analysis examines the range of reported environmental lifestylepractices and how they are attributed with meaning, including their engagement withthe concept of pleasure and its association with political participation. In this sectionof the analysis, articles will be drawn from 1 October 2011 until 31 May 2013 fromthe online sites of The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/), The Independent(http://www.independent.co.uk/), and The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).The articles are not systematically sampled but instead selected articles are subject toa critical reading to amplify the arguments raised in the article. The survey revealsdiversity in the classification of green lifestyle journalism as it is sometimes alignedwith more “political” environmental news, and sometimes it is associated with otherlifestyle sections. The critical reading of the articles from The Guardian, TheIndependent, and The Telegraph identifies that the pleasures associated withsustainable living are often marginalized, and instead an ethical consumer iscommonly posited who is variously cognitively deficient, worried about theenvironmental consequences of their everyday behavior, or concerned about theinability to realize their desires to engage in sustainable lifestyle practices. None-theless, the analysis also examines those instances when the pleasures of a more

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sustainable lifestyle are represented in the articles. Such pleasures are sometimesrepresented as deriving from the implementation of environmental practices andtechnologies in everyday, domestic contexts, and sometimes such pleasures areillustrated as the product of civic and political engagements with issues ofsustainability.

Political Participation, Lifestyles, and Pleasure

Environmental stewardship not only has many manifestations but it occurs across,and undermines, traditional distinctions between the public domain and the privaterealm. Indeed, one could argue environmentalism cannot be easily mapped onto, orcontained within, historical delineations between the public and the private, and thatthe pervasive character of environmentalism demands not only a public politics butalso an individual ethics that has both a public and a private orientation. As somehave noted (Craig, 2004; Dahlgren, 1995), we need to broaden our understanding ofthe public sphere as a strictly political domain and theorize its various implicationswith the state, market relations and activities traditionally delineated as part of theprivate sphere. The contexts of mediated public life have also facilitated greaterlinkages between the grounded, immediate domain of everyday life and more distantevents. Thompson (1995, p. 251) has described how this has entailed a “democrat-ization of responsibility,” whereby individuals feel connected to, and implicated with,“distant others.” This globally oriented, self-reflexive subject, who must negotiate themore explicit interconnections between local and global practices and contexts,informs accounts of second modernity and risk society (Beck, 1992, 1995, 2000) andglobalization (Bauman, 1998; Giddens, 1994).

This more interconnected political and social landscape in turn complicates ourunderstandings of public subjectivity and, as such, conventional distinctions betweenthe status of citizens and consumers are harder to sustain (Schudson, 2006).Citizenship is now understood as a more plural and mutable form of identity thatinvolves a sense of social engagement and cultural belonging (Hudson & Kane, 2000;Plummer, 2003; Young, 1989). Equally, the rise of forms of political consumerismhave re-orientated understandings of consumption as mere passive, end-points acts inthe production process (Lewis & Potter, 2011; Micheletti, 2003; Miller, 1995; Soper,Ryle, & Thomas, 2009). Acts of ethical consumption can moralize economic markets,generate knowledge about socio-economic and ecological relations of production, andre-connect producers and consumers. Equally, of course, there are deleterious effectsassociated with political consumerism such as the individualization of structuralproblems, the encouragement of overconsumption by privileged western subjects, andthe risk of green washing by corporate interests.

The ways that people live their everyday lives, their lifestyle choices and patterns,is, then, a legitimate site of struggle and contestation for an environmental politics.The term “lifestyle” is often cast as beyond redemption for an environmental politics:it is inextricably linked to a particular class position, glossy and popular media, andan individualistic mind-set that runs contrary to the kinds of collective responses that

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are required to bring about greater global sustainability. The everyday lifestyleconstraints on people engaging in more sustainable living practices have beenexplored (Phillips, 2000) and other research has demonstrated how effectiveresponses to climate change are undermined by discourses of a “lifestyle mainten-ance” in accord with modern liberal consumerism (Kurz, Augoustinos, & Crabb,2010). While there is a dominant understanding of the individual, aesthetic, andconsumption-oriented nature of lifestyles—a form of “stylistic self-consciousness”(Featherstone, 1987, p. 55)—the politicization of lifestyles also embodies positivepolitical potential. The exercise of a “lifestyle” can refer to the social significance ofindividual rights, desires, and actions that include, but also extend beyond, practicesof consumption. As Chaney (1996, p. 86) notes, lifestyles can be characterized as“existential projects” with normative and political implications. The idea of “lifepolitics,” as a politics of the personal and of everyday life, expresses the reflexiveproject of the self in contexts of globalization (Giddens, 1991). Life politics, accordingto Giddens, is distinguished from, but still articulated with, conventional emancip-atory politics, but its primary task is the development of an ethics of “how we shouldlive now” in a post-traditional order. Connolly (1999) has also sought to account forthe “arts of the self” that are ethical strategies that can be mobilized in the“micropolitics” of everyday life. Such theorizations speak to the ethical and politicalpotential of lifestyle practices.

This context of a broader understanding of public life, the changing dynamics ofpublic subjectivity, and the politicization of lifestyles cumulatively enable us to re-conceptualize our understandings of political participation. Bennett offers data tosuggest that older forms of political and civic involvement are giving way to newerforms of lifestyle engagement, concluding: “… the erosion of confidence in nationalinstitutions is due less to passive withdrawal into private lives than to activecalculations about how best to promote personal ‘lifestyle’ agendas of political andeconomic interests” (1998, p. 758). More recently, it has been argued that a binarybetween the politics of social movements and the individualistic concerns of lifestyleshas created a “scholarly blind spot” that needs to be supplemented with an account of“lifestyle movements” (Haenfler, Johnson, & Jones, 2012, p. 2). Such entities are“loosely bound collectivities in which participants advocate lifestyle change as aprimary means to social change, politicizing daily life while pursuing morallycoherent ‘authentic’ identities” (Haenfler, Johnson, & Jones, 2012, p. 14). Lifestylemovements range from the Christian-oriented promise keepers and the virginitypledgers through to the environmental identities of Locavores, Voluntary Simplicity,and Slow Food.

Concern about the ability of individual political agency to contribute to any kindof collective and comprehensive environmental change is not a new phenomenon(Christie & Jarvis, 2001; Macnaghten, Grove-White, Jacobs, & Wynne, 1995) andthere continues to be evolving attempts to negotiate such a dilemma. The complexityof global environmental risk in contexts of “individualization” (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) means that “people are also meeting ‘the environment’ on a

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more intimate level, not as part of universal and generalized abstractions, but asconnected to their daily practices, leisure pursuits and identities” (Macnaghten, 2006,p. 137). Macnaghten’s (2003) research has indicated that singular understandings ofthe environment are giving way to more pluralized conceptions that facilitate a rangeof individual environmental engagements that mesh with the concerns of everydaylife, whether it be to preserve spaces of refuge from a busy life, to establish andmaintain social connections and bonds, or to enable good parenting and the health ofone’s family. As such, “the environment becomes meaningful when it engages withsocial life, inhibiting or facilitating the development of ongoing human relationships,whether in the context of the family, friends or communities of interest”(Macnaghten, 2006, p. 141).

An acknowledgment of the importance of the “politics of the personal” to greaterenvironmental sustainability still begs the question of how we might conceptualizethe pleasures associated with such everyday practices. Pleasure in contemporarywestern culture is a deeply problematic phenomenon: the promise of it is ubiquitousin everyday mediated culture and yet it also seems increasingly elusive in a frenetic,work-obsessed, and economically precarious existence. If we are to receive pleasure itis as an escape from such exigencies, as a reward, or as some kind of guiltyindulgence. Equally, environmentalism is in a general sense driven by an ethic ofconservation that is often portrayed as at odds with the exuberances associated withpleasure. Acts of ethical consumption are often informed by a sense of moralism andthe virtues associated with a refusal of the individual pleasures that are articulatedwith conventional consumption. It could be argued that missing from both theconventional western consumer subjectivity and the subjectivity of the environmentaladvocate is an appreciation of mundane, quotidian pleasures.

How, then, to reclaim pleasures in everyday life in way that is consonant withenvironmental sustainability? This task is not to adorn environmental sustainabilitywith a sense of superfluous “fun,” as a kind of marketing exercise, but to “reground”pleasure in our social relations and our engagements with our everyday environmentsin a way that will energize the “environmental agency” of individuals. Parkins andCraig (2006) attempt such a task in their account of “slow living.” Through ananalysis of the “eco-gastronomy” of the international Slow Food movement, Parkinsand Craig argue that slow living brings together the pleasures of everyday life,manifested particularly in the production and consumption of food, with an ethicalorientation that is grounded in environmental sustainability. Slow living does notrepresent a romanticized disengagement from the dynamics of globalization but is, infact, a necessary feature of the “global everyday” where we negotiate the complexitiesof engaging with different temporalities and spaces. The pleasures of slow living areinformed by a care and mindfulness that addresses and articulates, for example, boththe sensory pleasures associated with the consumption of food and the pleasuresassociated with the knowledge of the production and preparation of that food. Thiscare and mindfulness that is at the heart of the pleasures of slow living also gives riseto an ethics of living that operate centrifugally from the shared table to a critique of the

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destruction of community networks by the operations of the global agri-food industry.Similarly, Soper has sought to give expression to a rethinking of the “good life” throughher concept of an “alternative hedonism.” Soper (2008, p. 572) notes that decisions totake part in more environmentally friendly actions, such as walking or cycling, are notjust taken because of the obligations of an environmental politics not to create furthercarbon pollution or congestion but also because there is a sensual pleasure that isassociated with consuming differently: “An anti-consumerist ethic and politics shouldtherefore appeal not only to altruistic compassion and environmental concern but alsoto the more self-regarding gratifications of consuming differently: to a new erotics ofconsumption or hedonist ‘imaginary’” (Soper, 2008, p. 571).

Such attempts to articulate the importance and functions of quotidian pleasure inpractices of environmental sustainability also need to incorporate consideration of thebroader contexts of “ecological modernization” (Hajer, 1995) within which suchpractices often occur, and they also need to be sensitive to the differential access tosuch pleasures across lines of ethnicity, gender, and class. Both Parkins and Craig(2006, 2009) and Soper (2007, 2008) engage with these issues that are crucial toevaluations of alternative green lifestyle practices and their ensuing pleasures.Emergent practices of sustainability are often difficult to evaluate precisely becausethe burgeoning significance of ecological, moral, and aesthetic values must beassessed with appropriate acknowledgment of macro-political forces and issues ofeconomic exchange. On the one hand, it is readily apparent that green lifestylepractices often generate symbolic and cultural capital for middle-class practitionersand that much of the presentation of green lifestyle practices, extolling for examplethe virtues of green technologies, is informed by the logic of ecological modernizationwhich “assumes that existing political, economic, and social institutions caninternalize the care for the environment” (Hajer, 1995, p. 25). On the other hand,we cannot simply read off the political value of practices from the ethnicity, gender,or class membership of practitioners (Bagguley, 1992), and it follows that we wouldbe well served to be open to the possibilities of “new economic becomings” (Gibson-Graham, 2006) and new social formations. The phenomenon of emerging sustainablelifestyle practices and the pleasures associated with such activities encapsulate a rangeof forms of behavior by individuals, households, and local communities, across avariety of domestic and community sites. I now turn to the issue of how journalismreports on such practices, behavior, and pleasures, and what meanings are assignedto them.

British Online Green Lifestyle Reportage

The analysis here seeks to explore whether and how the outlined issues of politicalparticipation and pleasure are manifested in reportage of green lifestyles in the onlinesites of major British newspapers. The problematic status of green lifestyle journalismis highlighted initially when we consider which online sites have sections devoted togreen lifestyle journalism and how green lifestyle journalism is configured in thosenews sites that do feature such journalism. Secondly, I analyze individual stories in

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The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph to examine the range of theportrayal of green lifestyles, from the consumption of household goods through toforms of local community activism, and also to highlight how the identity of greenlifestyle practitioners is represented, including the portrayal of the pleasuresassociated with sustainable living. The three publications were selected for the secondstage of the analysis because their coverage of green living was more substantive thanother publications during the surveyed period.

Online Classification of Green Lifestyle Journalism

The overview of the classification of green lifestyle stories reveals striking differencesacross the surveyed online sites. Green lifestyle stories are sometimes located as asubset within environment news coverage and sometimes they are folded into other“lifestyle” sections, such as property, health or food and wine. The Guardian has a“Green Living” menu option as a subset of its “Environment” section, as does TheIndependent. The Telegraph also has an “Earth” section under its “News” menu but italso includes a “Green Property” option under its “Property” and “Life” menuoptions. Examining other newspaper online sites, The Times has an “Environment”section under its “News” menu and a “Life” menu that includes subsections on“Fashion,” “Health,” “Relationships,” “Gardens,” and “Food and Drink,” while theLondon Evening Standard has an “Architecture and eco-living” subsection under“Your Home & Garden” and “Homes & Property” menus. A number of online newssites simply do not have sections devoted to green lifestyle news, or evenenvironmental news in general. The Sun has a lifestyle section that focuses on storiesrelating to subjects such as health, women, motoring, and travel. Similarly, TheMirror has a lifestyle section that also includes such stories, as well as food andgardening. These latter stories do yield the occasional article that makes reference tothe environment but the environment is not foregrounded as a defining feature of thesection. The Mail Online features some environmental stories under a “Science”menu but it has no separate “Lifestyle” menu.

The categorization of green lifestyle journalism, then, in one way reflects existingdifferentiations across the spectrum of UK newspapers. Green lifestyle journalism is agenre primarily located in broadsheet news media and lifestyle issues for the tabloidnews media largely exclude any environmental applicability. Interest in green lifestyleissues is perceived to be the province of a readership that has an environmentalawareness and the ability to pay to act on that awareness. The differentiation of greenlifestyle journalism on these online news sites is partly informed by its ability toattract advertisers. The Telegraph’s “Green Property” section, for example, attractsadvertisements for real estate and property-related environmental products, such assolar panels. In addition, as we will see later in the discussion, environmentalproducts are promoted in some news stories. The presence and appeal of greenlifestyle news, then, derives from the confluence of addressing the interests of readerswith the provision of a revenue stream.

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Equally, the various placements of green lifestyle journalism across a number ofonline newspaper sites reflect the problematic status of this emerging journalisticgenre. Green lifestyle journalism has something of a hybrid identity, linked to a moretraditional news pathway through its environmental status, while also connected tothe soft news domains of lifestyle, such as property, food and drink, and travel. TheGuardian and The Independent both locate “green living” as a subsection ofenvironmental news, making an explicit linkage between lifestyles and theirenvironmental consequences. This is in accord with previous editorial directions onenvironmental reportage. The Guardian, for example, has taken an interventionistapproach to environmental change, notably through its 10:10 campaign that aimed tohave individuals, companies, and institutions cut their carbon emissions by 10%during 2010 (Katz, 2009). Alternatively, The Telegraph presents green lifestylejournalism specifically as “green property” and links it structurally to a lifestylesection. This difference in classification may be attributed to the differing politicalorientations of the respective newspapers: the more conservative Telegraph offers amore traditional structural classification of green lifestyles, whereas the framing of themore progressive publications highlight the linkage between green lifestyles and theirpublic and political contexts. Equally however, the noted prevalence of green lifestylenews stories across each of the three publications also suggests that the differences inpolitical orientation need to be balanced with an awareness of how these “quality,”broadsheet publications attract readerships that are united to some degree by incomeand education levels.

The survey also reveals that a range of tabloid journalism outlets largely ignoreattempts to engage with more sustainable lifestyles. The conventional large circulationgap between the tabloid and broadsheet newspapers might suggest that this hassignificant ramifications for the general distribution of news about sustainable livingbut this divide is not replicated online. It is true that the Mail Online overtook TheGuardian as the UK’s most visited news site in 2008 (Kiss, 2008), and it became themost viewed news site in the world in 2011 (BBC, 2012), but overall unique visits toUK online newspaper sites reveal that broadsheet site viewing performs well incontrast to tabloid site viewing. In January 2013 for example, among the tabloid titlesthe Mail Online received 7.977 million unique browsers every day, The Mirror 1.065million unique viewings, and The Sun 1.816 million, while broadsheet title dailyviewings were 4.319 million for The Guardian, 3.130 million for The Telegraph, and1.214 million for The Independent (Durrani, 2013). It should also be noted that whilethe tabloid news sites did not have dedicated green lifestyle sections and rarelyfeatured green lifestyles in environmental stories, such publications have at timesengaged in high profile campaigns about issues of everyday sustainability, often incontrasting ways. The Mail Online, for example, has variously campaigned for theelimination of plastic bags (Poulter & Derbyshire, 2008) while also at another timeexpressing outrage that Britons were to be robbed of their right to buy traditionallight bulbs (Derbyshire, 2009). In one sense, it is of concern that the tabloidpublications rarely feature stories about the different ways that individuals are seeking

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to engage in more sustainable lifestyles. Regardless of political orientation orcommercial considerations, it is an important political and cultural issue, attractingboth governmental policy scrutiny and also popular media attention. In anothersense, the lack of reportage on green lifestyles can be viewed as in accord withprevailing political and social attitudes toward sustainable living. In the UK, the greenrhetoric of Prime Minister David Cameron is a distant memory (Cameron, 2006) anda recent report talks of an exhausted civil society in Britain that is less interested inthe challenges of climate change (Cooke, 2013).

Green Lifestyle Reportage

The observations about the structural organization of green lifestyle journalism needto be supplemented with an investigation of the kinds of stories that are offered onsuch sites and the way that green lifestyle news stories position their readers withregard to pleasure and political participation. I argue here that green lifestyle newsstories are often informed by a risk perspective that is premised upon a lack ofknowledge of individuals about problems associated with their everyday life. We seethis kind of subject formation operating in quite an explicit way in the green lifestylestories from The Guardian. In a section titled, “Ethical and green living with LucySiegle,” a number of articles are structured around the posing of questions such as:“How can I become more self-sufficient?” (Siegle, 2012a), “Should I swap my bank?”(Siegle, 2012b), “Is it right to give a dam?” (Siegle, 2012c), and “Is it OK to buy frompound shops?” (Siegle, 2012d). Such stories, then, are explicitly framed aroundvarious green lifestyle dilemmas and foster a subject position for the reader that ischaracterized by a lack of knowledge and an accompanying concern or worry. Thisorientation is not limited to the minutiae of mundane, local activities such as thepurchasing of goods from discount stores, but extends to a more global concern aboutthe building of the Belo Monte dam in Brazil. An ethical consumer is ascribed inthese articles with an anxiety derived not only from a solipsistic regard for their ownenvironmental credentials but also from the presentation of information about thenetworks that connect individual consumption practices with the global economy. Inan article on recycling in The Independent, for example, reader anxiety aboutgullibility is explicitly invoked with reference to media and interpersonal networks,along with acknowledgment of the complexity, invisibility, and apparent inevitabilityof global production and consumption systems:

Have you ever wondered what happens to your recycling? …We may have a vaguesuspicion that we’re doing some good somehow, but trees are still chopped downfor paper, oil is still drilled for plastics and ore is still mined for drinks cans andfood tins. Some sections of the media say recycling is a con and that most of it stillgoes to landfill or sails off to an environmentally unsound fate in China—and allthe while some of your best friends are telling you that you are a gullible fool. Soare you, or does recycling actually work? (Boggan, 2013)

In another article on purchasing fair trade saris, the reader is exhorted to “askquestions about the importer supply chain,” “prioritize heritage skill programs that

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reward craftsmen,” and “Above all, go for hand loomed” (Siegle, 2012e). Here, then,are examples of a dialectical understanding of globalization where not only do globalforces impact on the local but a consciousness is developed that is cognizant of howindividual consumption practices have global consequences (Beck, 2002; Giddens,1994; Young, 2003).

The desires and pleasures associated with green lifestyles are sometimes acknowl-edged in the online news stories but they are framed in a way that focuses on thedisjuncture between those desires and their implementation. An example of such astory comes from The Guardian’s ethical living series that asks: “How can I becomemore self-sufficient?” The story starts by noting the attractiveness of sustainable livingpractices while also distancing such practices from the “realities” of modern urbanexistence:

I love to flick through the 1970s green-living classic Self Sufficiency, by JohnSeymour, hero of the back-to-the-land movement. It offers all manner of low-impact processes, from combing goats to constructing a roundhouse. But let’s getreal: I’ll probably never do any of this stuff. Indeed the road to a greener life isstrewn with bucolic ideas and short courses (I’m a qualified swineherd) that can’tbe used in real-life urban environments. (Siegle, 2012a)

The establishment of such a subject position for the journalist then is followed by thetransference of such subjectivity to the reader and the offering of information aboutmore “realistic” green lifestyle options, together with an exhortation to put suchoptions into practice:

That’s why I’m enthused by a crop of smart ideas that get your hands slightly dirty,but don’t mess up your flat. Do try the following at home. (Siegle, 2012a)

Equally, sometimes news stories address existing everyday pleasures and enquireas to how those pleasures can be justified with more environmentally friendlypractices. The sari article, for example, starts with the initial declaration: “I enjoywearing a sari on special occasions, but worry about poor working conditions in thesupply chain. Is there a fair trade sari importer?” (Siegle, 2012e) In this way, pleasureis associated with existing practices of consumption and the goal for the reader isto align such pleasures of everyday life with the desire to be “environmentallyresponsible.”

Other green lifestyle stories foreground the pleasures of sustainable living in amore positive and productive manner. The Telegraph, for example, featured storieswhere families had engaged in successful eco-renovations of their houses. In one storythat describes how the Jutlas family had eco-renovated their Victorian workers’terrace house in Lancashire, members of the family are photographed smiling in theirkitchen, with one of the children in the foreground showing the viewer an energymonitor display. The pleasure of the more comfortable living the family now enjoys isoutlined in the article. In particular, pleasure and knowledge are combined in thefather’s account of how the children have enthusiastically embraced the renovation:

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They really “get” the green agenda, much more than older generations do, and forthem it’s fascinating to watch the energy monitor display how many kilowatts thehouse is producing, depending on the weather. (Lonsdale, 2012a)

Another story links an eco-renovation to the UK Government’s Green Deal initiativethat encourages people to take out loans to improve home energy efficiency. Thestory is framed around the experience of Andy Batey and his family. Batey isphotographed smiling outside his home just north of Cambridge and is quoted assaying that the eco-renovation experience was “wonderful” (Lonsdale, 2012b). Suchstories are, of course, focused on the domestic arrangements of families but theycannot be characterized as a form of “cocooning” (Cullens, 1999) where individualsretreat from the outside world. Instead, they represent lifestyle practices whereconcerns about financial costs, global environmental welfare, family health, andengagements with State housing policies coalesce in ways that defy easycategorization.

The represented lifestyles in green lifestyle journalism are not limited to suchstories of family-friendly eco-renovations, or advice about the “10 best eco-cleaners”(Muston, 2012), but they also extend to stories about less conventional lifestylepractices, such as “freegans” (Cooper, 2011). This story profiles Marc Brown’s weeklyforays into the bins of five supermarkets in Leeds and West Yorkshire where hegathers enough food for the week for himself, his family, and many of his friends.Brown engages in such activity, not because of poverty, but as a form of lifestyleprotest at the waste of supermarkets, and the global food industry more generally.The profile of Brown extends to a broader account of national food waste, theregulatory problems charities face in the redistribution of food, waste at themanufacturing level, as well as the levels of food waste in homes across the country.Freegans represent an explicit politicization of lifestyle that in one way runs counterto the disciplined and socially responsible subjectivity of much green lifestylejournalism: freegans are “unruly” subjects who, using de Certeau’s (1984) typology,engage in tactical behavior, surreptitiously exploiting the spaces of institutions fortheir own gain at opportune moments. Alternatively, freegans are pre-eminentexamples of socially responsible environmental subjects, highlighting the excesses,inefficiency, and immorality of contemporary food systems and the intricate networksthat connect them with everyday consumption practices.

Some green lifestyle news stories describe the ways that people are trying torefashion local communities in a more sustainable manner, often through the use ofsocial media. One such story details the activities of residents who take part inDoNation, a not-for-profit scheme that “harnesses the power of social media to helppeople sponsor each other in adopting small, yet significant, changes to theirlifestyles” (Lonsdale, 2013). The story also details other forms of community-orientedonline environmental activism, such as Street Club and Freegle. These enterprises, inturn, are involved in a sustainability jamboree from the Prince of Wales’s StartOrganization. The story, then, highlights a range of connected environmental

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networks that are seeking to change individual lifestyles, reorganize local neighbor-hoods, and mobilize civic engagement through sustainability.

The pleasures associated with green lifestyles are also represented through formsof environmental protest. A Telegraph story, for example, recounts the activities of agroup of local Kent residents who engaged in online community mobilization to tryto prevent the destruction of an embankment of trees that are not only home to“increasingly threatened wildlife species” (Lonsdale, 2012c) but which also screen outnoise from a nearby railway line. Public mobilization had occurred through onlineand social networking sites, as well as public hall meetings, leaving one of the protestorganizers to note that the community had “been able to work together in [a]magically organic way and it’s been a blast” (Lonsdale, 2012c). Such lifestyle protestsare open to a range of evaluations, including charges of “nimbyism,” but they can alsobe understood as creative and effective examples of lifestyle engagement thatstrengthen community networks and protect the local environment.

Conclusion

It has been noted how climate change and issues associated with sustainability posesignificant challenges for journalism because they problematize traditional boundariesbetween public and private life, they involve different regimes of knowledge andexperience, they are informed by a diverse range of social discourses andrepresentations, and have varying manifestations of visibility and temporality. It isnot surprising that journalism—“the sense-making mechanism of modernity”(Hartley, 1996)—has struggled, and continues to struggle, with the challenge ofreporting climate change and sustainability, particularly in the current uncertaineconomic contexts in which we find ourselves. Such difficulties, however, also yieldunderstanding of the operations of journalism in the reportage of the environmentbecause “[b]y studying something that does not quite fit, established practices aremade more visible, and emergent practices may be glimpsed” (Bødker & Neverla,2012, p. 152). This is particularly so when it comes to the reportage of differentexpressions of green lifestyles which are often complexly implicated in consumerculture at the level of the individual or family, while also sometimes attempting togive shape to new ways of living, and which also involve a variety of subsequentbehavioral and attitudinal responses.

The analysis here reveals that the structural placement of green lifestyle newsstories in UK newspaper online menus in one way replicates existing differentiationsacross the broadsheet/tabloid and conservative/progressive spectrums but equally thevariable placement of such news stories attests to the problematic status of the greenlifestyle genre. The study has shown that high profile tabloid newspapers, such as TheSun and The Mirror, do not have online menu options for green lifestyle stories oreven environmental news more generally, and that they largely ignore news storiesabout the various ways that individuals are trying to live in a more sustainablemanner. Alternatively, the study has also revealed that the online sites of broadsheetnewspapers, such as The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph, all feature

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menu options for both general environmental news and green lifestyle stories. Inaddition, the study has found that green lifestyle journalism is variously classified,with the more politically progressive publications (The Guardian and The Independ-ent) explicitly linking green lifestyle issues with general environmental news throughthe online menu pathways, while the more conservative Telegraph locates greenlifestyle news as part of a general lifestyle menu option pathway, distinct from otherrelated environmental news. The split between the quality online news mediareportage of green lifestyles and the absence of such reportage in the online sites oftabloid newspapers demonstrates how significantly the issue of sustainable living isdifferentiated across different kinds of readerships. Such a split must have importantramifications for the promotion of sustainable living across society and feeds intopersistent perceptions that “the environment” is only an important issue for a certainsection of society. Equally, the different classifications of green lifestyle news, as eitherstructurally connected to broader political and economic manifestations of environ-mental change, or as a simple epiphenomenon of consumer culture, are indicative offurther divisions across the political spectrum of the news media and theirorganization of readerships.

This study has also scrutinized the variety of green lifestyle reportage thatconfronts readers of the online sites of The Guardian, The Independent, and TheTelegraph, ranging from advice about the eco-credentials of household products totales of more substantive reorganization of the lives of individuals and communities.Across the range of such stories, we see that green lifestyle journalism is actuallyinformed by linkages between individual consumption decisions and lifestylepractices, and their broader environmental contexts. The study has found that thereportage posits a range of subject positions for those individuals represented in thenews stories, informed by different levels of knowledge, practice and pleasure, anddifferent negotiations between existing and desired, future lifestyles. A substantialbody of news stories was found where the subject of the story is driven by concernsabout their lack of environmental knowledge, and their worries about how theirexisting lifestyles undermine the health of the environment. Other stories invoked thepleasures associated with sustainable living but did so in a negative fashion,highlighting the gap between the desire to change lifestyle practices and the successfulimplementation of a more sustainable existence. Alternatively, the study alsoidentified news stories where the pleasures of sustainable living were represented ina more positive manner, ranging from the pleasures associated with household eco-renovation through to the pleasures associated with the establishment of neighbor-hood and community mobilization. Pleasure in such stories is a complex phenom-enon including, but also extending beyond, the pleasures of individual materialbenefit. The pleasures associated with eco-renovations, for example, brought togethermaterial pleasures—warmer homes, healthier families, and cheaper energy bills—withthe pleasure associated with the successful implementation of an environmental valuesystem. The stories about environmental protests involved the protection ofindividual lifestyles but they also produced pleasures associated with a sense of

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communal belonging. The pleasures associated with green lifestyles, then, derive froma complex and varied product of the successful application of knowledge aboutsustainability, material benefits, and greater community connection.

This overview of green lifestyle reportage has been prompted by the belief that weneed to discover ways of energizing public engagement with the urgent crisis ofclimate change and it is suggested here that one valuable way of achieving this isthrough stories that portray successful, positive, and pleasurable practices ofsustainable living. Such an advocacy is not to ignore the extraordinary political,economic, and structural dilemmas that we face in responding to climate change but,as outlined in the introduction, climate change is a complex phenomenon thatrequires multifaceted responses and actions across different levels of society. Equally,such an advocacy is not ignorant of the responses of editors and journalists whowould maintain that green lifestyle practices do not warrant substantial levels ofreportage given there is not sufficient public alarm over climate change that isresulting in widespread changes to lifestyles. In response, it could be argued—following the disastrous UK floods of the winter of 2014, the release of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, and the recent front-page elevation of the issue of western lifestyles as the cause of climate change(Mendick, 2014)—that journalism has the responsibility to respond to the facts ofclimate change by not only asking tough questions of political leaders but also byengaging with its readers on this crucial issue.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Communication and theEnvironment in Uppsala, Sweden in June 2013. The author wishes to thank the conferenceattendees for their comments on that presentation. He also thanks the anonymous reviewers of thisarticle and the journal editors for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of the article. Asalways, any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author.

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