Abstract

What is sustainable – and who gets to decide what sustainability is – remains a central question for political ecologists. Scholars have explained and critiqued specific iterations, as well as proposed versions of what they believe sustainability ought to be. In practice, environmentalism is made up of a panoply of emerging, concurrent and conflicting views that continue to change over time and are emplaced and enacted differently. This article contributes to making sense of not only of how environmentalisms are constructed, but how they interact with each other, perhaps complementing, perhaps displacing each other. This article draws on data from a four-month immersion into rural Franconian Switzerland (FS) in Germany alongside twelve semi-structured interviews to gain insight into a grounded example of the interplay of perspectives, practices and sustainability. Using food as an example to anchor our discussion, we found that participants' explanations of sustainability were entangled with rooted knowledge and an emphasis on locality. They highlighted that frugality and self-sufficiency underpin sustainability and exemplify interconnectedness, enabling ecological balance and sustainable livelihoods. Participants were also asked their opinions on the sustainability of two practices present in hegemonic European notions of environmentalism: bio/organic production and vegetarianism. These practices were largely rejected for a range of reasons, raising important questions about the interaction between different sets of environmental beliefs. Here, our intention is not to reconcile this conflict, nor to define what is really sustainable, but instead to highlight how the environmentalism of the participants is both challenged and expanded through the contestation of its ideological boundaries.

Keywords: Environmentalism, Political Ecology, Food, Self-sufficiency, Frugality, Counter-Hegemonies, Germany, organic agriculture

How to Cite:

Koch, Y. E. & Lawhon, M., (2025) “"That's how we live sustainably"! Conflicting environmentalisms in Franconian Switzerland ”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5722