Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America

By Chelsea Schelly

Most Americans take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling. In Dwelling in Resistance, Chelsea Schelly examines four alternative U.S. communities—“The Farm,” “Twin Oaks,” “Dancing Rabbit,” and “Earthships”—where electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation practices differ markedly from those of the vast majority of Americans.
 
Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813586526

Book preview

Dwelling in Resistance

Nature, Society, and Culture

Scott Frickel, Series Editor

A sophisticated and wide-ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-society-culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.

The series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and investigating the pressing socio-environmental questions of our time—from environmental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization and war making, and beyond.

Available titles in the Nature, Society, and Culture series:

Diane C. Bates, Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore

Cody Ferguson, This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century

Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

Stephanie A. Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice

Chelsea Schelly, Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America

Diane Sicotte, From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman, Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health

Dwelling in Resistance

Living with Alternative Technologies in America

CHELSEA SCHELLY

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

978–0-8135–8650–2

978–0-8135–8651–9

978–0-8135–8652–6

978–0-8135–8653–3

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by Chelsea Schelly

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For Avery, always

Contents

1. What Does It Mean to Dwell in Resistance?

2. What Normal Dwelling Looks Like: The History of Home Technologies

3. Custodians of the Earth, Witnesses to Transition: The Story of The Farm

4. The Abundance of the Commons: Twin Oaks and the Plenitude Ethic

5. Individualism and Symbiosis: The Dance at Dancing Rabbit

6. Self-Sufficiency as Social Justice: The Case of Earthship Biotecture

7. Dwelling in Resistance

Appendix: Reflections on Method

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Dwelling in Resistance

1

What Does It Mean to Dwell in Resistance?

Residential houses come in all shapes and sizes and are located in communities both large and small. Yet modern residential dwellings largely share a set of common technological systems—electricity, water, waste removal—and these technologies involve common sets of practice, unthinking habits that we engage in throughout the day, every day. These shared practices are the little active rituals of residential life. Most Americans largely take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling.¹ There is often very little reason to question whether the lights will turn on when we flip the appropriate switch, hot water will be delivered momentarily after turning the appropriate valve, and the garbage man will come on Tuesday. In many parts of America, life is almost impossible without a personal vehicle, and we rarely question why a family may own more than one.

Residential dwelling in America involves almost constant interaction with technological systems that we hardly ever even contemplate. We learn how to interact with these systems through our bodily practices, flipping light switches and opening garage doors and flushing toilets and cooking for families of four with ingredients from the grocery store. Dwelling involves bodily rituals that take place in concurrence with the material systems around us.

Technologies that support daily life in the American home enroll us in both techniques of the body² and particular patterns of thought regarding the material and social world. The systems of electricity, domestic heat, water provision, waste removal and treatment, transportation, and food production are just some of the massive material infrastructures that provide for the needs and comforts of modern human dwellers. Yet technologies are not merely material; they are at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination.³ Technologies are not static material systems; they are a social process in which technics proper (that is, the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, communication) is but a partial factor.⁴ Material systems shape how we act, and think, in our dwelling lives.

This study involves conscious attention to the ways the dominant technological systems that support residential dwelling in America shape social thought and practice. I draw on classical thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, and Lewis Mumford to suggest that material systems operate to shape both action and thought. These insights inform a more recent body of scholarship on theories of practice,⁵ and this book explicitly pays attention to how the sociotechnical networks that support residential dwelling encourage particular forms of practice, rendering most options for alternative forms of technology and practice invisible.⁶

The technologies that meet the needs and comforts of modern residential dwellers are based on a scaffold of political structures (like building codes and zoning regulations), economic institutions (like utility companies that demand monthly payments for their services), and scientific ideals (about the safety and suitability of various technologies). These technologies are also based on a particular conception of what normal residential life is and should be, involving monthly utility bills and an unending source of electric power, weekly trash service and immediate wastewater removal, and the largely unthinking reliance on infrastructures, bureaucracies, and individualized economies to meet our needs and comforts. Residential dwelling, then, involves the interplay of political, economic, material, and cultural structures that shape conceptualizations of normal and acceptable ways of living, and the rituals of social practice, the intersection of norms and action where individuals habitually enact shared patterns of daily life.

The question then becomes—and this question shapes the empirical investigations of the case studies presented in this book—how do some Americans come to adopt alternative forms of residential dwelling technologies? I do not ask why people choose to adopt alternative technologies because, like other sociologists, I recognize that the conceptualization of and language used to describe motivation may be more cognitively, socially, and temporally complicated than the simple formulaic that yesterday’s motivation leads to today’s action.⁷ While I, like other sociologists, am often tempted to ask why, here I attempt to focus on how—how the people I’ve met who dwell differently than the average American understand their own dwelling choices, how their practices differ from other dwellers, how they understand the choices (and compromises) they’ve made to dwell in resistance.

The chapters in this book present four diverse cases of alternative technology adoption at the residential scale through a theoretical lens that focuses on how alternative material systems involve alternative forms of social organization and social practice. The cases are: (1) an intentional community largely centered on alternative education and alternative birthing options in Tennessee (The Farm, chapter 3); (2) an intentional community based on communal labor and income sharing in Virginia (Twin Oaks, chapter 4); (3) a third intentional community, located in rural Missouri, that blends shared resource use with private economic systems (Dancing Rabbit, chapter 5); and (4) the case of Earthships, radically efficient off-grid homes made out of tires (in New Mexico, chapter 6). Three of these cases involve communal dwelling, where people are living in formally identified intentional communities.⁸ The Earthship community is not formally an intentional community, but is similar in that the people who live in the neighborhoods of Earthships around Taos, New Mexico, and the people who come to work for and volunteer with the company that builds these homes, are all there with a shared purpose—to pursue radically alternative and sustainable dwelling through Earthships.

This introductory chapter, which reviews the intellectual history, scholarly questions, and academic insights that frame my approach to studying these four diverse case studies, is intended to examine how technological systems act to maintain and secure existing understandings and enactments of so-called normal life. In this, I hope to make myself clear straight away: it is my view that power in the modern world is not held but exercised—it acts, and in doing so, it actively shapes the actions of individuals and groups and societies writ large.⁹ Technological systems—like electricity; transportation; water and wastewater collection, distribution, and treatment; modern home heating; modern food systems; modern reproductive technologies; educational systems; and so on—shape and are shaped by relationships of power, through the political, economic, and cultural structures under which we dwell. As elements of active power, technologies shape the very ways we humans think and act within these structures.

Historical examination helps to demonstrate this, and chapter 2 examines the history of technological development to define and clarify the technologies that support normal contemporary residential life. Yet American history also provides examples of alternatives, attempts to utilize technological systems that involve different understandings of normal life as well as different forms of residential practice. This book traces this history forward to the present, examining some of the many possible ways that individuals are choosing to pursue technological alternatives in their residential lives and how these alternative technological systems are related to alternative ways of living, knowing, and being.

Technologies as Strategies: Power, Action, and Thought

Lewis Mumford, an infamous critic of modern technology, once wrote, The brute fact of the matter is that our civilization is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments, because the opportunities for commercial production and for the exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical paraphernalia are treated as negligible.¹⁰ Technological systems act as modes of political and social organization and as discursive constitutions regarding normal, acceptable, or appropriate ways of life and living. In other words, modern technological systems work to reinforce existing relations of power.

The work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu helps us make sense of the role of technology in perpetuating particular power dynamics, forms of social organization, and mental conceptions. Foucault recognized that power is not held; instead, power is a verb, it is active, and it is exercised incessantly. In modern societies, power works through procedures which allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and ‘individualized’ throughout the entire social body.¹¹ Thus, power can be seen as diffuse and constantly exercised. Power is no longer held in the hands of a centralized state administration (this is what Foucault meant when he quipped that it was time to ‘cut off the king’s head’).¹² Power does not sit in Washington, DC, or on Wall Street, but flows throughout and constantly within society.¹³

Furthermore, this power is exercised through individual bodies. Foucault terms this biopower. Biopower is that which is exercised on people as both a general category of population (nation, social groups of one sort or another) and individual bodies (people in their roles as individual citizens, wives, farmers, etc.).¹⁴ Biopolitics serve to categorize, classify, and contain; they construct and articulate groups and individuals through modes of power internalized through daily practice.

The technological systems that support residential dwelling and dwelling practice are strategies for deploying this kind of power. Technologies contribute to the "ceaseless temporal and spatial interweaving of . . . physical components . . . individual inhabitants, and the concrete practices of . . . families."¹⁵ Technological systems, as strategies of power, help define what is normal and abnormal in our daily practices, from where we get our water to how we use it in our homes to where our water goes when we’re done with it.¹⁶ Technologies govern individual practice and social organization. The technologies that support residential dwelling are sustained by the constant maintenance of the boundaries between technologies considered acceptable for use and legitimated through dominant practices, and technologies considered alternative, unusual, or unacceptable.

For example, electricity is a strategy of power because its source (the fuel source used and the forms of generation) and use (including who uses it, how and how much) help define and shape a population of members, either as community members or citizens. It is common, shared knowledge that modern American citizens largely rely on fossil fuels for their electricity, that each home demands a practically endless supply of electricity, and that this power is provided by a large utility company. This example of electricity demonstrates how relations of power are embedded in and maintained by the technologies used in a given society. With this insight, residential dwellers are arguably enacting embedded relations of power with every turn of the faucet and every flip of the light switch.

What are the consequences of this view of power? When thinking about power, it is difficult to escape the categories of thought produced by power. Pierre Bourdieu, in characteristically convoluted language, put it this way: To endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, i.e., of applying to the state categories of thought produced and guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognize its most profound truth.¹⁷ Foucault argued that these categories of thought are produced through our disciplined daily practices, including our use of dominant technologies. Randall Collins similarly claims that these cognitive categories are shaped through ritual practices.¹⁸ Karl Marx suggested that ways of thinking are shaped by technologies themselves.¹⁹

Thinking this way, there is no one actor or group of actors we can point to in a quest to overturn relations of power; instead, we have to grapple with the way active, capillary, and materially embedded flows of power shape even our own thoughts about normal or acceptable ways of acting and being and knowing. Turning to Bourdieu again can add yet another layer of depth to our understanding of how technologies shape cognition and thus contribute to thinking like the state (in other words, using categories of thought created by relations of power). Bourdieu writes, "By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural."²⁰ Thus, power is exercised through the shaping of our categories of perception and thought. The instituted institution (the incessantly active and productive forms of power that flow throughout society to produce the categories of thought used by members of society) does this through the naturalization of what are actually instituted (constructed) institutions.

Technology is one such institution. The technologies we use, which are by no means socially or technologically determined, come to be seen as natural, inevitable, and normal through our very use of these technologies and the categories of thought we come to associate with this use. Through our everyday use of the material systems that support residential life, power is actively involved in daily practices and the categories of thought that correspond with daily practices. Technology operates as a strategy of power through its active involvement in shaping both practice and constructions of normal practice. Power is thus exercised through us as individuals, rendering a particular constellation of dwelling practices normal, while alternatives are rendered invisible.

Studying Alternative Technology Adoption

Viewing technological systems as strategies of power that support particular kinds of practice and ideas about that practice while rendering alternatives invisible is congruent with the approach I take to understanding motivations to change the relationships individuals and communities have to the dominant forms of technologies that support residential life in modern America. Through this conceptual lens, I can ask, if the use of technological systems is a form of power such that we are blinded to the social construction of these systems and see them instead as totally natural and normal, how can we understand the choice to live with alternative kinds of residential dwelling technologies? Understanding power as actively and incessantly enrolling us as individuals in particular concepts of normal living through our very rituals of daily life brings attention to rituals of social practice and the ideas offered by theories of social practice, and understandings of both power and of practice are central to understanding motivations to adopt alternatives through the framework of orientations as developed throughout this book.

Theories of practice focus on how patterns of consumption, including the kinds of consumption involved in using the technologies that support residential life, involve largely unthinking, habitual action, standardized through internalized ideas about socially acceptable patterns of activity.²¹ Instead of seeing the social world as organized by variables and attributes, this emergent line of scholarship sees constellations of practice as the essential unit of analysis.²² This work largely focuses on how practices become normalized and stable, such that people don’t see their consumption choices as choices at all. It also draws attention to how stability in practices is supported by infrastructures and policies that encourage certain kinds of consumption habits while making alternatives difficult, impossible, or invisible.²³ Further, this body of work is based on eliminating the dualism between action and thought, recognizing that what we do as individuals and social groups is an enactment of what we think about the kinds of things we do—like flushing toilets, taking daily showers, or paying monthly bills in exchange for sociotechnical systems to support the import and removal of the things that sustain residential life.²⁴

The scholarship associated with the diverse body of work in practice theory is consistent with the conceptualization of power outlined above. Power works by shaping what we do with our bodies, actively enforcing use of particular kinds of material systems that are perceived as normal and inevitable, and in using these dominant technologies we engage in particular patterns of practice. The question becomes, if modern residential dwellers are unthinkingly playing out patterns of practice that simultaneously support and are supported by particular constellations of power involving technological, economic, political, spatial, and social relationships, how can we understand the individuals and groups who are stepping outside these dominant sociotechnical systems and the associated practices to engage in alternative forms of residential dwelling?

Understanding Motivations

I began this research wanting to understand what motivates adoption of alternative, renewable energy technologies for residential use. Recognizing that many of these technologies—like solar electric technology, solar thermal technology, rainwater collection and filtration for use, home-scale treatment of waste, home-scale gardening and animal husbandry, and electric vehicles, to name a few—are still relatively unfamiliar to most, I first thought that previous research on the adoption and diffusion of innovations could offer some insight.²⁵ This research suggests that networks, neighbors and other methods of getting the information out there help to educate people, and that early adopters of new technology are often motivated by perceptions of themselves as innovative or cutting edge. Based on the widely held perception that renewable energy technology adoption is motivated by environmental values, I also thought that people who live with alternative technologies in their residential lives would likely be motivated by environmental concerns. However, a lot of researchers have spent a lot of time studying how environmental values influence behavior, and the results are pretty ambiguous.²⁶ Often, abstract concerns don’t change specific behaviors.²⁷ So I wondered, are there specific environmental values shared by alterative technology adopters that help to motivate their decision to adopt?

Yet my sociological training has taught me to be skeptical of our ability to understand motivations from the outside in, with a direct connection between the past and the present.²⁸ Motivation for behavior is often explored based on the dualistic understanding of means and ends, the incessant separation of thought from action, that underlies much conventional economic thinking. As economist Juliet Schor writes:

One of the hallmarks of the standard economic model, which hails from the nineteenth century, is that people are considered relatively unchanging. Basic preferences, likes and dislikes, are assumed to be stable, and don’t adjust as a result of the choices people make or the circumstances in which they find themselves. People alter their behavior in response to changes in prices and incomes, to be sure, and sometimes rapidly. But there are no feedback loops from today’s choices to tomorrow’s desires. This accords with an old formulation of human nature as fixed, and this view still dominates the policy conversation.²⁹

Human action is simply more contextually, temporally, cognitively, and socially complicated than this understanding suggests. As C. Wright Mills, one of sociology’s founding fathers, wrote long ago, A man may begin an act for one motive. In the course of it, he may adopt an ancillary motive. . . . The vocalized expectation of an act, its ‘reason,’ is not only a mediating condition of the act but it is a proximate and controlling condition for which the term ‘cause’ is not appropriate.³⁰ He went on to claim, Motives are of no value apart from the delimited societal situations for which they are the appropriate vocabularies. They must be situated.³¹ In other words, We can change, too. This has profound implications for our ability to shift from one way of living to another, and to be better off in the process.³² How, then, can we move beyond the dominating means-ends schema that economists and policy makers use to understand motivation³³ to best understand the processes of human decision making that lead individuals and groups to pursue change in residential life through changed technologies and changed practices?

Pierre Bourdieu is helpful for understanding material technologies as cultural forms of power, but his perspective on agency, (perhaps the dominant one in contemporary American sociology) sees human agency as habitual, repetitive, and taken for granted.³⁴ Michel Foucault’s perspective of power as productive, as a creative force in the construction of the individual, leaves little room for understanding choice. Similarly, theories of practice often focus on the stabilization of practices, and there is currently little theorizing on how practices change.³⁵ For intellectual assistance here, I turn to understandings of action based on the theory of pragmatism and its sociological heritage in the Chicago School.³⁶

Pragmatism as a theory of action recognizes the inherent connections among thought, action, and social context. Simply put, the human ability to think and act develops within a social environment.³⁷ Further, means are not stagnant precursors to ends. Sometimes, we only discover potential goals in the context of action after recognizing available means that we did not see before. Actors develop their deliberative capacities as they confront emergent situations.³⁸ Thus, there is a constant interaction between goals and their realization; ends and means develop coterminously within contexts that are themselves ever changing and thus always subject to reevaluation and reconstruction.³⁹

Spatial context, temporal context, bodily habits, and social relationships are all part of understanding the social conditioning of thought and action, which are really two aspects of the same process. The foundational premises of pragmatism provide one way to sidestep many of the conundrums that dominate sociological thought and to lay the foundations for a theory of action that analyzes the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the evaluative, experimental, and constructive dimensions of perception and action, within the contexts of social experience.⁴⁰

Pragmatism, viewing thought and action as irrevocably connected and intertwined, fundamentally challenges the Cartesian dualism between thought and action and the prevalent means-ends model for understanding action, replacing it with an account of the situational and corporeal embeddedness of action.⁴¹ Thus, pragmatism and its sociological heritage in the Chicago School of sociology suggests that instead of asking why people adopt alternative dwelling technologies (assuming that fixed means operate to accomplish fixed ends), we can instead ask how people come to adopt such technologies, exploring the cultural context and socially derived understandings of behavior that shape action. Andrew Abbott claims that Chicago School sociologists utilized research methods that converge on the direct analysis of patterns of social activity in temporal and social context. . . . They tell us what are the actual patterns, not what are the crucial variables.⁴² In this way, the Chicago School sociologists were themselves focused on the analysis of practice.

The pragmatist approach to understanding action is also consistent with understanding technologies as instruments of power. While pragmatists and Chicago School sociologists rarely show explicit interest in relations of power, the understandings of action provided by pragmatism are consistent with a cultural, contextual, and processual understanding of power. As the pragmatist and Chicago School sociologist W. I. Thomas once wrote, the positive limitations of evolution which society imposes upon the individual by putting him into a determined frame of organized activities . . . establishes a regularity of periodical alternations of work and play, food and sleep, etc., and with the help of economic, legal, and moral sanctions prescribes and excludes certain forms of behavior.⁴³

In other words, our shared social practices are shaped by a multitude of factors, including the technological systems that dominant our daily lives. A determined frame of organized activities shapes what we do and how we see the world, including our residential dwelling patterns and our perceptions of these patterns. Based on this intellectual lineage, the four case studies presented in this book suggest that the motivations and patterns of practice that shape alternative forms of residential dwelling are shaped by what I call orientations. The concept of orientations helps connect thought and action, the normalization of behaviors and the actual patterns of behaviors themselves, in order to understand what motivates individuals and communities to actively engage in dwelling in resistance.

Dwelling in Resistance

The concept of orientation guides us to focus on both the perspectives and practices of the people examined in this book who are living with alternative technology. Orientations can be understood as organized around a particular set of ethics. I see these orientations or orienting ethics as conceptually similar to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic⁴⁴ (in that they are too broad and abstract to offer specific, consistent guides for every action), Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus⁴⁵ (although in our highly differentiated society, these metaphorical spaces are no longer organized simply based on class or status placement), and Max Weber’s discussion of practical ethics. For Weber, and for me, the most important aspect of an orienting ethic is how it guides action.⁴⁶ These orientations help to highlight how individuals understand their relationships, including relationships among individuals, between humans and the natural world, and between the social and the material world. Based on this conceptualization of orientations, people think and act based understandings about relationships among people, nature, and the technological systems that support residential life.

I argue that individuals organize their life preferences and actions based on these orienting ethics, although they are not necessarily conscious positions. Orientations shape action, the patterns of practice involved in daily living. In each of the cases described in this book, people are engaging in alternative kinds of technological practice—they are, for example, sharing residential living spaces with people beyond their nuclear families; organizing life so they can live where they work; using renewable energy systems for electricity; harvesting and filtering their own water; treating their own waste; and engaging in alternative economies, kinds of diets, food production, and systems of childbirth and education. Yet upon close examination of the relationship between their practices and the language they use to describe their motivations for these practices, it becomes clear that the orientations that motivate these alternative kinds of residential technology use are not themselves all that alternative.

While the orientations that operate in each case are unique, they demonstrate a common theme. Focusing on residential dwelling as a domain of practice provides a means of moving past purely individualist, value-oriented attempts at explaining behavior.⁴⁷ Adopting solar energy technologies, constructing a home with natural building techniques, and living a voluntarily simplified lifestyle in terms of resource consumption are all often described as environmentally motivated behaviors, suggesting that individuals who espouse environmental values or internalize environmental concerns are the ones who are likely to adopt alternative technologies that lessen their impacts on the natural world. Yet labeling something an environmental choice actually limits adoption of that choice among many American consumers.⁴⁸ Research suggests that people adopt technologies and practices that are considered environmentally responsible for a multitude of reasons,⁴⁹ and decades of environmental psychology research has failed to demonstrate that environmental values consistently predict environmentally responsible behavior.⁵⁰

Moving beyond an analysis focused on the individual values that predict individual behaviors allows us to recognize that residential dwelling involves a constellation of practices, bodily habits, techniques, and behaviors that individual dwellers engage in throughout their daily lives, and that these behaviors are shared among groups of people within particular social groups and cultures and in particular times.⁵¹ Adopting alternative technologies involves a change in bodily practices and routines, suggesting that household practices are socially embedded and socially structured consequences of visible technical and political structures as well as invisible cultural expectations and understandings of normality.⁵²

The case studies presented in this book all involve adoption of radically different technologies and forms of technological, spatial, and social organization that reduce the negative impact of human activities on the natural world. Yet the motivations to use less fossil fuel–generated electricity, go off-grid, or share resources communally were not universally or exclusively discussed in terms of environmental responsibility. I argue that orientations, operating as ethics to frame the way individuals and groups see the world and the priorities they emphasize in terms of their relationship to the natural world and relationships among people, shape the use of material systems and the corresponding bodily behaviors. Arguably, the orientations operating in each of these case studies reflect cultural values and tendencies rooted