Tullia Jack

Dear students,

This is not a rehearsal.

When I started teaching sustainable fashion in 2012, “sustainability” was still daggy, hempy and a bit embarrassing. Back then, my students were just beginning to grasp the scale of the problem, but once they saw it, they couldn’t un‑see it. They organised guerilla clothes‑swaps, dumpster‑dived for dinner, turned up at protests with home‑screen‑printed banners and leaking dye‑stained fingers. Their projects were messy and sometimes naïve, but they were trying with their whole selves to live as if the climate crisis was real.

Now, in 2026 in the middle of an unfolding climate emergency, most of you can recite the crisis perfectly: 1.5 degrees, tipping points, IPCC, planetary boundaries, you probably even know the SDGs off by heart. You know the facts. And then, in the next breath, many of you tell me your dream is a sustainability role at a major oil company or fast‑fashion brand, ideally with an international relocation package and a fancy job title.

David Graeber called them “bullshit jobs” roles so pointless that even the person doing them suspects society could function fine without them. In sustainability, we’ve invented a sub‑species: green bullshit jobs. The ones that massage emissions inventories, polish “net zero by 2050” brochures, or design the reusable cup campaign for an airline that keeps opening new routes.

Here’s the hard part: I am scared I am helping train you for precisely these green bullshit jobs. Are my classes a conveyor belt into the greenwashing departments of organisations still betting on a cooked planet?

In 2018 hundreds of thousands of students signed pledges not to work for companies expanding fossil fuel extraction, and to use your leverage to push institutions to divest. I was proud, inspired, a bit in awe. What happened to you?

I lecture about climate justice, sacrifice zones, frontline communities already losing homes, livelihoods and lives. Then I mark an essay about not being allowed to board a plane because of an anxiety episode, and something in me breaks a little.

Your anxiety is real. Being stranded at an airport is awful. You are living through overlapping crises – climate, housing, cost of living, political instability – and it would be strange if that did not live in your nervous systems. I don’t want to belittle that. But I also don’t want our work together to shrink “social sustainability” down to whether you are treated politely by airline staff.

So here is what I actually want for us.

I want us to treat the climate and biodiversity crises as the non‑negotiable background of everything we do. Not just a themed week. Not catchphrases you memorise and then forget, but the basic condition of our lifetime.

I want us to centre climate justice. To ask, in every case: who is this for, who is sacrificed, who decides? To trace how profits depend on extractive supply chains, unpaid care, land grabs – and to sit with the communities resisting that, not as stakeholders, but as political actors we stand alongside.

I want us to practice refusal. To treat saying NO as a skill – not just an individual moral drama. That might mean asking uncomfortable questions in job interviews, writing rejection emails to employers whose business model conflicts with your values, or joining others to push your future workplace, or this university, to change.

I don’t need you to be pure; there is no pure place to stand. I need you to be awake, situated, conflicted – and still willing to act. This is not a rehearsal. This is your one wild and precious life, in the only climate we will ever have.

With love, frustration and stubborn hope,

Tullia

I’m very happy to have received four years of funding from FORMAS explore starting this week. This is the first time I have been able to hire colleagues and I am super excited to have people who are interested in the same topic around. Watch this space for happy research discussions.

Project abstract:

IDLE explores idleness as a profound response to interconnected existential threats, including climate change, species extinction, inequality, and decreased life satisfaction. While efficiency measures have failed to reduce environmental impacts, IDLE proposes idleness as an alternative organising principle for society that can reduce production and consumption while increasing well-being. This four-year project will investigate societal idleness through in-depth interviews to understand lived experiences of idleness, and impacts of increased idleness, as well as examine relationships between policy, idleness, working time, production and consumption, and social and environmental sustainability. Combining social practice theory and critical theory, IDLE will analyse reduced working hours. Fieldwork in Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland will provide cross-cultural insights. By empirically investigating the lived experience of idleness, IDLE aims to generate groundbreaking knowledge on how idleness help can meet sustainability challenges. The findings have the potential to inform policies on work, consumption and well-being, and contribute to broader societal changes in how progress and fulfillment are perceived. This research is in line with growing interest in work-life balance and sustainable lifestyles, and can potentially inspire new directions in sustainability science, sociology and policy development.

A post on Lund University’s sustainable travel blog about my experiences of travelling for conferences with my family.

A write up by Izabella Rosengren in ETC. This is based on a recent article Feminist LCAs: Finding leverage points for wellbeing within planetary boundaries. I think her title is catchier 😉

In this holiday-intensive season, many are deep into boxing day sales, glittery tops for New Year’s parties and exchanging unwanted christmas gifts. But what footprint does our holiday consumption leave behind, environmentally and socially?
By now, most people are well aware of the climate crisis and the importance of stopping over-consumption and radically reducing C02 emissions.
Many have switched habits and traditions to greener alternatives, such as buying Christmas presents second hand and replacing traditional meat orgies with more environmentally friendly vegan holiday food. Changing consumption has a positive impact on the environment, but what are its effects on happiness and well-being?
New research shows that consuming less also makes us happier.

A Canadian research report Buying well-being: Spending behaviour and happiness shows that people who choose experiences and leisure over material things say they are happier and more satisfied with their lives than others. Experiences seem to increase the sense of meaning in life more than material possessions, which can quickly lose their allure.
There are many different ways to approach a life with fewer possessions. Thinning out excesses and choosing simplicity and minimalism are actions that contribute to reducing consumption while increasing the sense of well-being.
Voluntary simplicity can include cutting down on working hours and reducing financial dependency by living in a smaller home, ditching the car and taking public transport or cycling, buying second-hand, growing your own food and much more. Simplicity is not the same as poverty. It is a conscious choice to live with fewer possessions and focus on quality of life.
The European study Does less working time improve life satisfaction was published this year in the journal Health Economics Review. The results show that people who work less and cut back on consumption are less preoccupied with fashion trends and measuring themselves against others. Many people, particularly those in the middle class, feel they have more control over their lives and are less stressed.
The distribution of income across countries is usually expressed in terms of a Gini coefficient, where a low value means less income inequality and a high value means more. Zhang and Churchill’s study Income inequality and subjective well being from China, 2020 shows that people in societies with lower Gini coefficients feel happier than people in societies with greater income inequality.
In 2020, Sweden’s gini coefficient was 26.9, lower than the EU average of 30.8 and much lower than China’s 46.6. Sweden and the other Nordic countries also consistently top the list of countries in the world where people feel happiest.
The ability to choose to cut back to avoid getting stuck in a merry-go-round of jobs, shopping, debt and pressure is a good foundation for a good and happy life.

Our New Year’s resolutions can reduce the environmental footprint we leave behind, while making us feel happier and more satisfied with our lives. In the local community, replacing some of our consumption with spending more time with family and friends, has both environmental and social dividends.
At the societal level, people in countries with high levels of well-being and equality have every opportunity to redesign their lives. New Year’s Eve is an excellent opportunity to reflect on how well we are doing and decide to live so that future generations can enjoy similarly good lives.

A debate article Claire Hoolohan and I wrote for SydSvenskan – article available online.

That the ultra-rich are responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions is gaining a wider coverage in the media. But why are we so apathetic in demanding them to change and so eager to adjust our own (carbon insignificant) lives?

Oxfam International recently released a comprehensive report into carbon emissions by income group concluding that the richest 1% emit more than double the carbon of the poorest 50%. Thinking this was a surefire way to start a recreational outrage discussion on how to de-rich this problematic carbon emitting group, I posted a link to my Facebook asking if any of my friends had good ideas for tackling climate change. To my surprise the discussion was more around things we could do in our everyday lives: one of my friends commented ‘Eating locally and organically produced food!‘ another commented that the current debate environment was not conducive to reducing carbon emissions, while yet another commented about building atmospheric processors to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. To give the discussion justice one of my friends, Henner, did comment ‘Eat the rich?’ which received a lot of likes, but the overwhelming focus missed the cash-shaming, de-richification discussion I had expected.

In the EU the top 1% of households have carbon footprints over 50 tCO₂eq/cap while the bottom 50% has less than 5 tCO₂eq/cap. Only 5% of the EU households live within a carbon footprint target of 2.5 tCO₂eq/cap needed to mitigate climate change, according to Diana Ivanova and Richard Wood. This indicates that – yes – we should focus on reducing everyone’s carbon footprint, but there are significant environmental gains to be made by reducing the carbon footprints of the ultra-rich. But if we don’t provide any pressure or incentives I’m not sure the ultra-rich are inclined to stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere – I mean they are the ones who can afford to pop off to mars and leave us suckers here to deal with droughts, flooding, hurricanes, fires and goodness knows what else the climate change gods have in store for us.

I wonder how we could change narratives around changing individual behaviour and focus on reducing carbon emissions of the ultra-rich?

Since finishing my PhD I have been working a lot: applying for funding, writing papers, organising conferences, teaching, teaching, teaching, keeping an eye out for a contract longer than 6 months… And then two women I look up to suddenly left academia. Two women who glided effortlessly through challenges, generously shared teaching material and always had time for an encouraging word, without warning got ‘real’ jobs. Well maybe there were warnings: long long hours, bosses on sick leave, increasing student loads… Wistfully wondering if it’s worth it, I stumbled on this piece that sums up my feelings perfectly. By Matilda Dahl on Curie (my (a bit aussie) translation).

I’m really excited to find out I have been granted a two year Marie Curie postdoc project based at Aalborg University Copenhagen with Professor Kirsten Gram-Hanssen. Now all I have to do it NOT press the terminate project button.

Project abstract

Human population has wide ranging and often negative consequences for the natural environment. Population stability and decreasing fertility have thus been heralded as promising for sustainability. However, household size has been decreasing steadily in both developed and developing countries, at an accelerating pace, since the 1980s. The European Union (EU) leads this trend, with nearly a third of total households consisting of single residents. As a result of more people living alone with associated higher consumption, slowing population growth has resulted in neither fewer residences nor decelerating human impact on the environment. This MC-IF aims to investigate the trend toward living alone and create new knowledge about environmental impacts of different household configurations, drivers for different occupancy trends and alternative sustainable housing configurations. The research will be carried out in three phases, firstly by using existing population, housing and consumption databases; secondly be interviewing both high and low impact single resident households and finally by studying low impact household configurations in-depth. This will provide new knowledge on: how different household configurations impact sustainability; why people choose to live in different various configurations; and drivers and barriers for emerging sustainable alternatives. This knowledge will be valuable for policy makers planning sustainable urban environments. During period of training the ER will: Acquire specialised knowledge on sociology of consumption; deepen her mixed methods analysis; improve her multicultural and team communications skills; have policy impact; and publish scientific articles in international journals. 

An article written together with Alison Browne and Russell Hitchings based on our Geoforum paper: ‘Already existing’ sustainability experiments: Lessons on water demand, cleanliness practices and climate adaptation from the UK camping music festival. Click on the link to go to our academic paper (open access). Click here to go to our popular science summary (Swedish, pay wall).