In 1987, the United Nations’ Brundtland Commission put sustainability at the centre of economic growth and development. Since then, sustainable consumption has grown into a mantra for states, business and civil society. Thirty-five years later, it is time to take stock.
This lecture will follow the meteoric rise of the idea of sustainability and asks whether it stands up to what we know about the dynamics of consumption, past and present. It will look at the long-term forces that were pushing up consumption long before the “great acceleration” after the Second World War that tends to receive attention.
Inspired by Hal Wilhite’s work, we will also consider changing cultures of comfort and energy. Mobility has proved especially stubborn. Recent attempts by cities to make urban transport more sustainable reveal the challenges and contradictions of the dominant ethos. In the light of these problems we should ask: does sustainable consumption have a future?
Programme
Welcome and introduction
Arve Hansen, Researcher, SUM, University of Oslo
Lecture: Sustainable Consumption: Past, Present, and Future?
Frank Trentmann, Professor, Birckbeck, University of London
Comments
Monica Guillen-Royo and Mikkel Vindegg, Researchers, CICERO Centre for International Climate Research
Discussion
About the speaker
Frank Trentmann is the author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First which has been translated into many languages and which won the Austrian Science Book Prize for the best book in the humanities and social sciences.
Trentmann is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and also a Professor of the History of Consumption and Morality at the University of Helsinki, and was the Director of the £ 5 million Cultures of Consumption research programme, and the Principal Investigator of the Material Cultures of Energy project. Previously he taught at Princeton University and has been visiting professor at many leading European universities.
He has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, a Moore Distinguished Fellowship at Caltech, the Humboldt Prize for Research, and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Prize. His new book is Out of the Darkness, a moral history of the Germans from the Second World War to the present, out in November 2023 at Allen Lane/Penguin.
Registration
The event is free of charge and open for all but requires registration.
Hal Wilhite Memorial Lecture
The Hal Wilhite Memorial Lecture is organised annually in memory of our dear colleague Professor Harold L. Wilhite. Hal is best known as an anthropologist, but always with a strong interdisciplinary orientation. At the Centre for Development the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, he led groundbreaking research on sustainable consumption and energy.
Hal’s research has had a great impact internationally. His numerous publications based on fieldwork in Asia, Latin America and Norway, are widely read. Hal insisted on the importance of understanding human action in its social and economic context. He was particularly critical towards the idea of a green transition which did not involve reducing consumption, and considered a low carbon society impossible to realise in a growth-oriented economy. He was deeply passionate about environmental issues, and lived according to his own high standards regarding sustainable consumption.
Organizers
The Hal Wilhite memorial lecture is organized by Centre for Development and the Environment and Include - Research centre for socially inclusive energy transitions at UiO.