Sustainable Communities and Green Lifestyles

Tendai Chitewere is Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, USA.

• Introduction Community, Environmentalism, Consumption A Day in the Life of an Ecovillage Making Community Green Emerging Green Lifestyles Conclusion

"The main argument of the book is that residents in EVI have primarily engaged in a green lifestyle that prioritises green consumption and personal benefits, over tackling structural or collective environmental injustices. As a result at various points in the book EVI is classified as a green-gated community, a themed idealised space, ageographic, an exclusive commodified space of experiences, an elitist place with exclusionary boundaries, an enclosure and a form of green flight. Far from being a model of sustainable living which all can enjoy, Chitewere details the many forms of exclusion, from the high costs of house purchase, to the time and energy demanded of residents to actively participate in communities and work teams, assumptions about the need for homogeneity for effective communal decision making, resistance to EVI being an educational space, and to how the green space EVI protects is actually “private-public space” (89) only accessible to members. As a result only those “with both the economic and social capital” (140), who have money but only work part-time or from home, basically who are upper-middle class and white, can join EVI."- Jenny Pickerill, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK