A growing interest in environmental issues within the community has seen suburban backyards, streets, houses and curbsides become sites of experimentation around sustainable lifestyle practices. Drawing upon research on various grassroots green initiatives around inner urban and suburban Melbourne, this article discusses what the rise of these kinds of lifestyle politics might mean for conceptualizing scale, citizenship, and social change in the contemporary moment. Drawing on social practice theory and its focus on the embodied, habitual and more-than-human elements of everyday practices, I argue that green suburban lifestyle initiatives such as ‘permablitzes’ are transformational in a number of ways and that they embody, materialize and perform broader sets of changes in people’s lives as they seek to switch from practices of consumption to a focus on self-sufficiency and making do. Video-ethnography and photography are some of the ways in which I have sought to capture such enactments and, in this article, I discuss the ways in which such combined media methods can enable researchers to both document and participate in the politics and practices of lifestyle transformation. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of how such a participatory research agenda might be translated into an environmental planning and policy approach that draws upon and enables the distributed agency, creativity and performative energies of community-led green practices.