Lhe media and political gaze has recently focused on social inequalities in the face of environmental issues, focusing on the use of private jets. However, several sociological works have underlined that it is on the working classes that the injunctions to green lifestyles weigh the heaviest. Over the past ten years, the social sciences have thus shown that the working classes are both those who contribute the least to pollution, who suffer the most from it and who are the most distant from political discourse on ecology. Is greater distance from discourse equivalent to indifference? In a recent article published in 2021 in Contemporary societiesJean-Baptiste Comby and Hadrien Malier rely on these now firmly established results to study in detail the consistency of the links that the working classes maintain with ecological issues.
Sociologists combine two surveys on the reception by members of the working classes of injunctions to the ecological conversion of their daily practices – the main watchword of public policies for the protection of the environment for many years. They underline the centrality of popular realism in the face of this attempt to moralize their conduct. They willingly claim to put abstract ideas at a distance, for, as Richard Hoggart wrote about the English working classes of the 1950s, “Do not forget “the world of realities”, that of work and debts”.
In the case of the environmental question, this translates into an often acute awareness of the issues, but always by reinscribing them in the very concrete aspects of daily life marked by material constraint.
“A feeling of helplessness tinged with fatalism”
This realism is both practical and moral. Practical, because greening one’s daily practices appears to be a burden, both organizational and financial, often incompatible with an already very constrained daily life. This does not mean, however, that respondents have no environmentally responsible practices.
Jean-Baptiste Comby and Hadrien Malier however insist on the fact that their practices in themselves saving energy and natural resources (carpooling, strategic use of off-peak hours for electricity, repair, recycling, second-hand purchase) are justified by material necessity, not by forms of ecological valuation – public policies of environmental responsibility do not value these primarily popular practices either.
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