Currently, the global food system accounts for nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions, and land use for livestock production has been a devastating force of deforestation, using up 80 percent of global farmland to provide fewer than 20 percent of the calories consumed globally.

How we live our lives, how we choose to move around the world and consume, has effects: Maybe we just feel slightly better, maybe we influence change in our immediate communities, maybe that change in our communities causes local policy change and eventual regulation of deeply destructive industries.

In the United Nations’ IPCC most recent climate change mitigation report, the word “lifestyle” appears 193 times. The authors write, “The acceptability of collective social change over a longer term towards less resource intensive lifestyles, however, depends on the social mandate for change. This mandate can be built through public participation,... See more

When we say that changes only have to occur on the level of big policy and systems, we leave out the significance of public participation and the fact that how we each live our lives is part of a greater whole.

As our day-to-day lives become so encumbered by expensive necessities, housing insecurity, and looming natural disasters, the question I consistently ask is: Where is lifestyle media? It’s pondering whether burger rankings are still important; it’s accepting defeat and painting a picture of the future of food that relies on lab meat fantasies.... See more

One person in the United States’ easy pleasures are another person’s and ecosystem’s burden. This is what writers Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand have called “the imperial mode of living.” Their book of the same name breaks down “how normality is produced precisely by masking the destruction in which it is rooted,” and this sense of normality... See more

Finding a way to create joy and collective participation in new modes of living is a political responsibility, and it offers new possibilities for our lives.

While that would be fantastic, it feels more and more impossible without “collective social change”; these changes can occur through shifting norms and habits that will thus influence broader policy. “Shifts in development pathways result from both sustained political interventions and bottom-up changes in public opinion,” the report says.... See more

Chafing at the idea of personal responsibility here is understandable, but lifestyle choices have ripple effects.