This is still in a proposal phase, at least where financing is concerned,
but since projects are needed to break into the world of research and academia,
I'll work on it anyways, and present some of the main ideas here.

Abstract:

A transformation to sustainability, ultimately, is an issue of culture: as life practice, world view, and salient, diverse orientations. Many "cultural resources for sustainability" have been suggested by scholarship.

Lately, largely without scientific/academic attention, initiatives creatively commingling elements of traditional culture and aspects of modernity in order to "perform" - suggest and present - transmodern cultures of sustainability are under way.

The contexts of greatest importance are

• the USA (as a culture of conspicuous consumption, but also at the forefront of green living),
• Europe (where social and environmental issues have longer been connected, but oftentimes less creatively),
• Japan (as a place "in-between" high-tech, even post-industrial, contexts and Asian rather than "Western" traditions),
• and China as a country that increasingly serves as the nadir of global sustainability.

This project will, through a combination of research and analysis based on human ecology and environmental anthropology, elucidate the theory and practice, themes and actors, of such "cultures of sustainability."

Small, mainly online hints are now being collected in a "work blog" of mine, to be found here.