Sustainability Practice in a World at Risk

This chapter ventures into the question of what sustainable action looks like in practice. With the empirical case of an eco-tourism adventure guide school and river-rafting/kayaking tours business based in Nepal and Sweden, the World Risk terminology by German sociologist Ulrich Beck is used to bring forward behavioral tendencies characterized by precaution and cosmopolitanization. The empirical case example display how entrepreneurs cope with what Beck claims to be politically skewed versions of danger turned into humanly manufactured risks, concerning particularly the global ecological crisis. The case example shows that coping with a world risk awareness, the entrepreneurs push themselves towards an expanded praxis of a number of elements: Their value understanding, pragmatic and behavioral implementation of those values, personal action and initiative, community mobilization, and business strategies. The pragmatic embracing of a triple value understanding transforms the entrepreneurs into what I call sustainability ambassadors. The financial struggle, caused by choosing to give up a mere profit focus, has them actively seeking out multiple other understandings of value output, as well as other strategies for running their businesses. The cosmopolitan idealization of sustainability as concept legitimizes, maybe even pushes into, the coping strategy observed and has the entrepreneurs experiment and create practical solutions which match both global and local versions and understandings of the term ‘sustainability’. This has the sustainable eco-tourism adventure business and guide school feed into the logics of the cosmopolitan when making graduates relevant across the globe as eco-tourist guides knowledgeable about how to be in nature without ruining it, for people or the ecology. Though Beck’s point is critical of nature, the participants in this field tell of practically and experienced improved living environments when changing into practicing the expanded sustainability value understanding, even though the effort to stay financially afloat has to be rethought more often with the sustainability approach. The chapter finally discusses from a learning perspective and interest in “resistance potentiality”, how the omnipresence of a world risk society, on a political and legal level, leaves room for diverse responses, constructive or restrictive accommodative response, depending on whether the challenges of a world at risk are met with a potentiality perception or a sense of overwhelm.