Den nye jord: Et feltstudie af et bæredygtigt virke på Farendløse Mosteri

The New Earth: A field study of sustainable practice at Farendløse Cider Mill is an examination of how actors do a sustainable practice (et bæredygtigt virke) related to local ecosystems and natural processes. This PhD thesis builds on the growing interest in gaining knowledge about how global concerns about climate change can be seen in relation to actions carried out by individuals and organizations (Goworek et al., 2018), and how actors can learn from the natural processes and develop new ways of doing sustainability (Tor Guthey et al. 2014; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011; Whiteman & Cooper, 2000; Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013; Roux-Rosier et al., 2018; Beacham 2018).
The field study at Farendløse Cider Mill comprise the foundation for the theoretical development of the concept “a sustainable practice” (et bæredygtigt virke). In the analysis I use an “eclectic approach” (Husted & Pors, 2021), which means that I combine three theoretical concepts to investigate how the actors at Farendløse Cider Mill carries out a sustainable practice. The three concepts are: 1) How the actors are creating contexts (Asdal & Moser, 2012) for a sustainable practice, 2) how the actors are training (Sloterdijk, 2013) in a sustainable practice, and 3) how the actors succeed in using different scale categories (Moore, 2008) in their daily work with sustainability, climate change and ecology.
The results of the analysis firstly show that the actors have individual motives for creating their specific context for their sustainable practice. Secondly, the results show that the execution of a sustainable practice rests upon continuous training, while simultaneously the daily training enables the actors to change fundamental habits. Thirdly, the results demonstrate that relating everyday activities to different scale categories is essential for doing a sustainable practice. The actors achieve this by reaching across scale categories and placing their own actions outside an a priori approach to the scale of climate change.
With the theoretical concept of a sustainable practice, the thesis contributes with an understanding of how it is possible to act in relation to climate change and work with sustainability in concrete activities. Moreover, it offers empirical methods to investigate the implications associated with carrying out sustainability in activities.