It is a pleasure to read Frank Baber and Robert Bartlett’s review. I have little to add, and nothing to contest, with regard to their summary of my book’s central themes. They provide a succinct account of my pragmatic theoretical argument in the first half of the book and of my engagement with material practices and political values in the second half. I was also intrigued by some of the parallels they draw—which I had not considered before—between my approach to social criticism and Elinor Ostrom’s important work on the governance of the commons. Finally, I have discovered that a hazard of writing about everyday life is, as they note, that it can be misread as a narrow “manifesto for personal improvement.” Thus, I especially appreciate their emphasis upon the larger political implications and ambitions of Engaging the Everyday.

One aim in writing the book had been to do so in a manner that reflected the underlying argument: to “do” political theory in a style that is engaging and accessible. Yet, in reading Baber and Bartlett’s review, I found several turns of phrase and ways of presenting my own argument that I wished I had written. Foremost among these is their observation that my approach stands on its head the familiar environmentalist admonition to “think globally,” and that in fact my discussion of everyday material practices could be properly understood as a call to “think locally.”

Rather than parochialism, I aim to present this “local thinking” as a means of critically engaging with, and hopefully motivating action upon, the massive challenges of environmental sustainability that we face. There seems to me no other viable basis for resonant social criticism. And while the book is no doubt ambitious, in this sense my project is actually quite limited: I aim to justify and explore ways to think, and to talk, differently about these challenges.

In the later part of their review, by contrast, Baber and Bartlett are interested in finding consensual norms for international policymaking and intelligible standards by which to identify the appropriate level of decision-making. These themes are central to their own book and I am pleased if mine contributes to their thinking in this regard. But it is not something I address. Moreover, I am wary of the direction in which they take my analysis here. In their account, the role for the theorist is to discern patterns in public attitudes; this might be read as positioning the theorist to speak on behalf of this public. My vision of political theory as social criticism, instead, emphasizes respect for public attitudes and values as a foundation for developing resonant ways of speaking with these publics. Ultimately, determining the appropriate level or fora for decision-making is beyond the scope of my project. In this sense, while I believe it is imperative to “think locally,” it remains contingent whether or when we should “act globally.”