Reconfiguring Everyday Practices for a Post-carbon World

by Thomas Roberts (Editor), Catherine Butler (Editor), Tom Hargreaves (Editor)

This edited collection aims to move the narrative about energy intensive social practices forward, from one dominated by discussions about their dynamics and how they have emerged and evolved over time and focus on how they can be re-configured to be less energy intensive in the future. The book is divided into three 1. 'Maps, models and scenario's within post carbon transitions' focuses on exploring the possibilities and potential offered by a range of different approaches to support practice theory inspired transitions to a post-carbon world; 2. 'Making post-carbon futures in the present', analyses a number of case studies in which attempts have been made to intervene in practices, highlighting the practical difficulties of achieving such a transition and in opening up questions about the nature of the practices such a future could be populated by; 3. 'The future of governance for a post carbon world', examines the ways that forms of governing shape and shift practices and discusses what this means for cultivating governance processes that could steer practice toward a post-carbon future.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Tom (T.A.) Roberts entered the adult world as a Harvard graduate in cultural anthropology and near eastern languages, in which pursuit he lived in North African villages and on the coast of Arabia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drafted into the Vietnam-era Army, he served as an Arabic linguist in the military intelligence establishment.

In the mid-seventies he’d had enough of the human condition and earned a Master’s degree in Wildlife Biology at the University of Massachusetts. Leaving his farm in the Berkshires to join the U.S. Forest Service in 1978, he spent the next ten years fighting wildfires, counting deer and leading the life of a ranger, on horseback, and pounding down logging roads in a battered federal pickup truck. His current day job as a consulting ecologist has taken him far and wide in California, with projects ranging from salmon recovery in the Klamath region, to the high Sierra meadows and to desert tortoise burrows in the Southland. He is also an avid wooden boat sailor who lives in the Bay Area.