By Dr. Pallavi Singh

A mother saves water left from cooking and pours it onto her plants. Another insists that food should never be thrown away. A child learns to use both sides of a sheet of paper. Lights and fans are switched off in empty rooms. Old newspapers, clothes and metal objects are carefully put aside for the kabadiwala, the local scrap dealer.
Today, we have a language for these things. We talk about sustainable consumption, conserving resources, reducing waste and recycling.

But what if, for the people doing them, they are none of these things?

What if they are simply the way things have always been done?

Our conversations with mothers and their adolescent children in India led us to think differently about where sustainable consumption begins. We found environmental lessons in unexpected places: in family stories and childhood memories, in traditions and everyday routines, and in practices quietly travelling from one generation to the next.

Often, nobody called them environmental.

The stories we inherit

Every family has stories.

Stories about how things used to be. Stories inherited from parents and grandparents. Stories about places, people, beliefs and the right way to live.

And sometimes, within them, are lessons about our relationship with the natural world.
One mother we spoke to remembered places she had known when she was younger – greener surroundings, cleaner water, a different environment from the one her daughter now knew.

Her daughter could not remember those places as her mother did. She had never seen that earlier landscape. But through her mother’s memories, she could imagine it – and glimpse what had changed.

A mother’s memory had become a child’s story of environmental change.

Other stories travelled differently.

Megha, a teenager in our study, remembered a story her mother had told her. “A man going to worship Lord Shiva decides to offer water instead of milk. He reasons that everyone else will bring milk, so his small departure will make little difference.”

But when he arrives, he discovers that everyone else has thought exactly the same way.

Megha used this old story to make sense of a very contemporary dilemma: why should I act if everybody else may not?

Her mother expressed the lesson through a familiar Hindi saying:

“Boond boond se sagar banta hai.”
Every drop creates the ocean.

There was no language of carbon footprints or climate action here. Yet a culturally familiar story had given a young person a way of thinking about individual responsibility for a collective problem.

The things we do without thinking

Stories were not the only things travelling between generations.

Practices travelled too.

One mother remembered being taught by her own parents to switch off lights and fans when they were not needed. Eventually, what she had been taught became habit. When she had children of her own, she passed it on.

Elsewhere, the lessons were woven into rituals and beliefs. One mother described teaching her child not to pick flowers in the evening, and not to take more than was needed. The lesson was simple: resources are not there to be consumed without thought.

Other families saved water, reused kitchen water on plants and used both sides of paper. Food should not be casually thrown away. For some, food was understood as a blessing; wasting it was morally troubling. Leftovers could be eaten later or given to animals. Newspapers, clothes and metals were kept for the kabadiwala rather than simply discarded.

‘A very welcome, extensive review of the role of consumption in the organisation and experience of everyday life, this volume is a monument to the coming-of-age of an empirically-founded sociology of consumption. It offers synoptic overviews of research projects on a broad range of topics examined during the last decade, capped by succinct essays on key approaches to consumers and consumption, consumer culture and consumer markets.’
– Alan Warde, University of Manchester, UK

Today, we might gather all of this under the banner of sustainability.

The families often used a much simpler vocabulary.

Don’t waste.
Respect food.
Save water.
Use what you have.

This is what our parents taught us.

This is how we do things in our family.

Culture lives in stories – and in habits

Sociologist Ann Swidler describes culture as a kind of toolkit. It is a useful image.

Families hand down more than possessions. They pass on stories and memories, beliefs and rituals, habits and ways of doing things. Children learn through what they are told, but also through what they repeatedly see.

In the families we studied, two parts of this cultural inheritance stood out: the stories families tell and the everyday practices they pass between generations.

A story can teach that one person’s actions matter. A memory can make environmental change imaginable. A household routine can teach that water should not be wasted.

And a practice repeated for long enough can become so ordinary that nobody thinks to give it a name.

What if sustainability is already there?

This does not mean that traditions are automatically sustainable. Nor can the experiences of a small group of families in India tell us how all families or cultures understand consumption and the environment.

But they invite a larger question:

What forms of sustainable consumption might we overlook because we are searching for them only through the contemporary language of environmentalism?

Much environmental communication asks how people can be persuaded to change: how greener attitudes can be encouraged, environmental knowledge increased and new behaviours adopted.

Those questions matter.

But perhaps there is another question to ask alongside them:

What is already there?

What stories are parents telling children? What memories of changing places are being passed on? What family rules surround food and waste? What objects are repaired, reused, passed on or sold rather than discarded? What everyday practices already contain ideas about restraint, responsibility and care?

These questions shift our gaze from the exceptional to the ordinary.

They also remind us that consumption is never only an individual choice. It is woven into relationships, histories, cultures and everyday family life.

Some environmental lessons may begin long before anybody uses the word “sustainability”.

They begin with a story. With food that must not be wasted. With water saved for a plant. With a child watching what a parent does – and, years later, doing the same.

Boond boond se sagar banta hai.
Every drop creates the ocean.

These ideas are explored in greater depth in “Cultural narratives and family practices: Examining pro-environmental behaviour in India”, by Dr. Pallavi Singh, Caroline J. Oates, Panayiota Alevizou and Sunil Sahadev, a chapter in the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Consumption, published by Edward Elgar Publishing.

Research Handbook on the Sociology of Consumption (2026), edited by Jennifer Smith Maguire.

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