Non-Local Locality among those Choosing a Life of Simplicity in Israel

"Think globally - act locally" is one of the most prominent slogans in the world of environmental activism. This study examined how environmentalists in Israel interpret the slogan and how in practice they act. Dr. Einat Zamwel and Prof. Orna Sasson-Levy analyzed the daily political activities of Israelis who choose a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity out of environmental and humanistic concerns. Their research points to the contradictions and complexities that underlie the political activism of those who choose this lifestyle.

The study focused on a group of people who lead a lifestyle based on the principles of sustainability and conduct themselves according to strict decisions regarding daily consumption and especially reducing it. The premise of the article is that consumption is a political matter, when it is done with the aim of changing the practices of organizations or of the market. In order to understand the politics of the electorate in a life of simplicity, their perceptions and actions were analyzed on three spatial levels: the global, the local and domestic:

At the global level, voluntary simplifiers are troubled by post-material issues such as environmental pollution, loss of species diversity, population explosion and sweatshops; the world is the focus of their concerns, and they perceive themselves as having global responsibility. Due to their ideological perceptions, the home is the place where the politics of these people are simply implemented through reduced consumption, ecological choices on various issues, growing a vegetable garden and the like. The home serves to showcase the simple life and the personal example.

The main argument in the article focuses on the intermediate, local level. Locality is a sublime value for voluntary simplifiers. As environmentalists they prefer local consumption patterns that reduce a person's carbon footprint on his/her environment, yet they perceive local space as having pure environmental value, ignoring political, ethnic, gender and national issues that arise in the local environment.

The researchers argue that these people’s intention is simply to fix a global world, and at the same time, to engage in domestic political action, and neutralize the concrete meaning of localism, which is defined as "anywhere within a short distance from home" and can exist anywhere - Israel, Australia or the United States. Therefore, they do not deal with local political issues in Israel. Similarly, social and class inequality preoccupies them mainly in the global context, and not in its national-Israeli context. For example, they are concerned about employment conditions in sweatshops in China but are not concerned about employment conditions in Israel.

Zamwel and Sasson-Levy conclude that these people simply want to return to localism, but that it is a synthesized locality – very local on the one hand, and pan-global on the other. In their view, the global concern of voluntary simplifiers and their disregard for Israeli local issues does not indicate a lack of political interest but is an expression of the privatization of the political. That is, there is no rejection of political life here, but a change in the ways and locales in which citizens choose to operate in an age of neoliberal globalization.

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