Introduction: Seeding change – the importance of small sustainable projects and activities

Abstract

Sustainability is a much used and abused term. Sustainability is cool, and sustainability sells. Real estate developers advertise sustainable apartments and neighborhoods, travel agents offer sustainable tours, and retailers offer numerous sustainable products. Beyond this lucrative market for sustainable products and services (including some greenwashing), there exists a vast and growing but less visible landscape of small-scale sustainable practices and efforts where ordinary people address concrete ecological and social issues in their everyday practices, local initiatives, and projects. They act because they care for people and the environment and always did. They develop creative new practices and initiatives to address climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Many small efforts do not focus on the provision of singular sustainable products or outcomes, but seek to transform communities, empower local constituencies, and address multi-layered social and ecological issues. Across the world, people reuse things, mend clothes and appliances, upcycle and repurpose things, experiment with organic farming and urban agriculture, or organize fair cooperatives. Every day, ordinary people are seeding change, tending to their projects, and caring for people and nature around them. Some of their practices and initiatives catch the attention of others and can seed more change beyond their initial realm. Others stay small and local. Yet others might fail. This special issue presents ethnographic accounts of small-scale sustainable and social justice practices, activities, and projects on three continents. In their unique contexts and