Holism and the reconstitution of everyday life: a framework for transition to a sustainable society

In this paper, a framework to assist transition to a sustainable society, incorporating the insights of whole systems science and philosophical holism, is proposed. It is argued this framework needs to be embedded in everyday life, and that everyday life is more likely to be sustainable when communities control the satisfaction of their needs at all levels of scale — households, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions — 'The Domains of Everyday Life'. When everyday life is sustainable, these Domains arise as people strive to satisfy their needs in place-based ways. They are emergent, self-organizing, participatory, networked, nested and semi-autonomous forms, characteristics they share with living, whole systems. In modernity, however, control of need satisfaction has largely been ceded to centralized institutions and the Domains have consequently been hollowed out and gone into decline, leading to everyday life's unsustainability. Transitioning to a sustainable society requires the reconstitution and reinvention of the Domains. An additional Domain, that of the Planet, has emerged in modernity and its development could give everyday life a cosmopolitanism it lacked in pre-industrial societies.