The Unsettling Outdoors. Russell Hitchings

life-affirming accounts of how certain groups of people are responding to some difficult environmental times. But those who are studied here are also those whose personal sentiments often chime well with a broader ethical project of seeing humankind as entangled.

      I have often wondered about how, in many contexts, people seem quite happy to live some relatively disentangled lives. Indeed, they might even prefer that (in view of how being entangled instinctively seems unattractive, it is perhaps surprising to see that it has become a kind of rallying call for attempts at reimagining social life). My thinking here is that, though it has been tempting to focus our studies on those who see themselves in this way, this leaves broader questions about the rest of us open. Wider societies might not want, or have the time, to become entangled. Going back to how Bixler and Floyd (1997) noted how increasingly sanitised lives could be engendering new levels of reticence when it comes to encountering the ‘natural world’, they were effectively alerting us to how modern societies have been quietly disentangling themselves. Kaika (2004) argues something similar when she highlights how it can now feel ‘uncanny’ to be reminded that constant domestic water supply, for example, ultimately depends upon what the ‘natural world’ is able to provide. Ingold (2004) similarly points to how hard many societies have worked to achieve standards of ‘modern metropolitan’ living that are all about achieving a state in which their members are relatively oblivious to these kinds of entanglement. Many people now give little thought to the practical challenge of urban walking, for example, partly because their societies have furnished them with shoes and surfaces that help them to forget about it.

This takes us back to the extinction of experience thesis. My point now is that, whilst this area of geographical work has trained our attention onto how exactly people handle the ‘nuts and bolts’ of nature (and whilst doing so has breathed new life into the accounts that we write about how people live with the nominally ‘natural world’), less has been said here about the broader sweeps of social change that may quietly be serving to pull people away from them. This book aims to connect the two. In order to do so, it now turns to a different way of seeing human life that could help me to explore how people may be turning their backs on greenspace experience, irrespective of whether they would, in principle, like being there.

      Acknowledging the Power of Practices

      In order to explore how broader processes of social change might be reconciled with my interest in the detail of how human relations with ‘nature’ play out, I turned to another body of research. Here the focus was more squarely on patterns of ‘everyday life’, how those patterns are sustained, how they are experienced and how they evolve. Unlike how some of the geographers were keen on finding entanglements, this work was interested in how predictable routes are carved out for people. These were theories of ‘social practice’ and they have attracted a growing amount of interest in recent years. There are many versions, with some being preoccupied with change, others with the role of materials in sustaining practices, and others with the most conceptually sophisticated vision of social life. There are also several overlaps between these ways of imagining everyday life and those to which the above geographers were drawn (see Maller 2019). In view of that, I should itemise the components that I picked from the expanding menu of suggestions produced by this second body of work (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017).

      One key feature is there in the basic terminology. The idea here is that we should imagine social life as essentially an outcome of how ‘social practices’ come about and evolve. The implication is that we should focus on how different practices, namely particular recognisable activities, spread through societies, and how they draw people into this process as time goes on. In this respect, a central aim of this work has been to push beyond the way in which it was previously tempting to paint social life as either governed by imagined ‘structures’, like culture, which were ultimately unsatisfying and unhelpful when, in the final instance, they made individuals seem entirely without choice, or instead to invert the picture by championing the ‘agency’ of people. This was also deemed unsatisfactory in the sense that it could end up seeing them as in a constant process of making decisions about how they wanted to live (instead of attending to the constraints that curtailed their actions).

Recognising that there was probably some truth to both claims, and in an attempt to reconcile these two visions of social life, ‘practices’ were seen as providing us with a promising path between them (Giddens 1986; Reckwitz 2002). For me, they were also promising in the way that they pointed to how people were sometimes reflecting on their actions and sometimes simply doing what the situation (or rather the practice) encouraged. People are reimagined here as potentially little more than the mere ‘hosts’ or ‘carriers’ of practices (Shove and Pantzar 2007), who, once they have been effectively infected, may have little occasion to question certain actions thereafter. This idea chimed well with the above suggestion that a range of, hitherto relatively unacknowledged, social trends could be creating new ways of relating to greenspace.

      If I were to draw on these ideas, my focus should be on certain practices, namely activities in which many people commonly take part. Various practices have already been examined using these ideas, including how people travel around (Watson 2012), how they organise their eating (Warde et al. 2007), how they keep warm at home (Gram-Hanssen, 2010) and how they are drawn into particular leisure activities (Shove and Pantzar 2007). Building on that work, this book is concerned with four practices that are currently commonplace and which could be feeding into the ‘extinction of experience’ that some of the above researchers have worried about. Accordingly, the aim is less about positioning people as essentially ‘entangled’ in the sense that they are grappling (in presumably at least partly conscious ways) with how they should respond to specific material circumstances. Rather it is more about how familiar settings, along with the accumulation of experience, can serve to do almost the opposite – namely curtail the likelihood of much active reflection by providing relevant groups with conditions that structure their actions. We might, as we will see, sometimes reflect on the processes involved (how did we find ourselves in this situation?). But practices can equally discourage those involved from too much analysis.

      Purpose and Restoration

      For me, theories of social practice suggested a useful way of studying how easily outdoor experiences infiltrate everyday lives. And whilst there are many ways of accommodating the nuts and bolts of nature within theories of social practice, my starting point was to see these components as potentially destabilising threats to certain everyday practices that are both common and often increasingly widespread. Turning again to the ‘entanglement’ metaphor, this encouraged me to see outdoor greenspaces as environments that people might feasibly get caught up in in ways that might snap them out of their preoccupations.

Though their authors would be unlikely to express it as such, some of the above greenspace studies that I started with also hinted at a certain kind of entanglement. One of the suggestions that they examined, after all, was about how greenspace experience could be beneficial because it allows us to transcend our immediate concerns and put aside what was troubling us beforehand. In effect, people can become ‘mentally entangled’ in a way that leads to valuable forms of human respite and restoration. My point is that, whilst this now sounds like an enjoyable experience, it may also, for many people, feel like a risk if it proves hard to return to everyday life afterwards. The assumption that runs through some of this work is that it should be relatively easy to go back refreshed (after a beneficial burst of greenspace restoration) to what was happening beforehand. But the truth of the matter might be another thing and, if we run with the argument about starting with the practices, it is also possible that our practices might not always be so willing to let us escape their grip.

      This finally takes me to the ‘subjectivities’, or personal feelings, associated with carrying out practices. Understandably, these features have not often been at the forefront of analysis for those working with these theories. The point, after all, was partly about putting the practices, rather than the people, centre stage in our understandings of how patterns of everyday life become established and evolve. If that is the aim, too full a focus on the experiences of taking part in relevant practices risks analysis drifting back