This weekend I saw the TV show Wa$ted and the documentary Born Into Brothels — two entirely different shows, but I think I saw the heart of a problem we have: we have become accustomed to a way of living that will be difficult to part with.
Wa$ted is a TV show — they come into your house, find how you’re wasting energy, propose and install solutions, follow your progress for a month, give the first year’s annualized savings in cash. The episode I watched resulted in a modest reduction in energy consumption by the family, and several refusals to part ways with some of their things. Born Into Brothels is about a photographer living in Calcutta who realizes the plight of the children of sex workers, gives them cameras, knocks down numerous barriers to help get the kids raised out of abject poverty, and has both success and failure.
These are very different shows, but it helped me see that regardless of outcome, even when the result is positive, people are resistant to change.
Without doing a disservice to Born Into Brothels, which is incredibly inspirational, I was struck by one aspect: the photographer successfully managed to get past all of the social, bureaucratic, and political barriers to help several of the kids she was working with into schools that would certainly have provided an avenue of escape … but in the end, all her work was thwarted by mothers who were unable to accept this change, taking their children out of schools. It is heart breaking.
Wa$ted made me groan — a couple was simply “way to used to their SUVs” to give them up. However in the end, the changes made in their household were expected to save $2,800 annually, and the couple was applauded for reducing their global energy footprint from something like ten times a sustainable level down to eight times (these numbers may be off). Sure, the family was able to reduce their consumption, but by an almost trivial level. Their level of consumption, comfort and waste, even afterward, is huge.
The most immediately striking thing for me was that compared to the poverty of Calcutta, Americans live an unbelievably comfortable life. We have clean water, food, education, mobility, and space — lots and lots of it. The families in Calcutta lived in confined,cacophonous, chaotic squalor. To be sure, these are polar opposites. I would not want to live like the people in the film, even if is it possible. Indeed, millions of people are able to live at all in these conditions suggests that there is indeed a lot of scope for change in our lifestyles.
The Things We Need and Cannot Do Without
Yet in America hear people saying “I cannot” make a given change, or “I need” some convenience of life, a larger house, and so on, and that people describe themselves as “green”. My family has made many, many changes to be green … but honestly haven’t made any sacrifices in our quality of life (on the contrary). Yet using the global footprint calculator, we still use almost three times as much resources as the earth can sustainably support. Every change takes a little “getting used to”, to be sure. But of the many things we though we “needed”, we could do without most of them. We need to continue changing.
Actually the picture is different — in effect many of our changes have been investments in longer-term consumption reduction. For example, we just spent several hundred dollars getting the house properly insulated. Within a couple of years, this investment will pay for the cost in savings … and our house will be more comfortable. Our monthly expenses on energy alone have fallen, rather dramatically.
Over our lifetimes, we have gotten very used to our American way of life. At first, all change seems like reduction.
The reality is that change is hard, even if the result is a change from a bad situation to a better one. In Born Into Brothels, many of the children were unable to break free from lives of poverty because the change, even from horrible conditions, was too much to bear.
I would only hope that we can consider that the changes Americans and other industrialized nations can make may seem hard, or that we’re parting with things we “need”. But the truth is, these changes are very minor adjustments. All change is hard, but some change is easier than other. And in the end, you’ll be living a better life.
I feel like the movie (or TV series) somebody really needs to make (and maybe it could be based on a book that someone’s already written… but I don’t know about) is the one that’s set in a future where we’ve successfully become an ecologically and economically sustainable species, without descending into chaos and poverty. We don’t as a society know what the happy ending looks like, though people like Alex Steffen at Worldchanging.org are trying to tell us.
We really need characters we can get to know and love and hate and a narrative that’s woven through such a world, and it needs to be a believable, feasible world, without any magical leaps of technology requiring a suspension of disbelief, or inspiring us to wait until later. Neither Wa$ted nor Calcutta is the solution.
At the same time, neither is The Age of Stupid, or An Inconvenient Truth, or Earth 2100, or any of the other “call to arms” doom and gloom pieces. Getting all apocalyptic isn’t helping anyone. The little “we can do it!” spiel that gets tacked on at the ends are sad and amorphous and unconvincing. I recently watched Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s movie “Home”, and was sad to see that it’s the same kind of long slow disaster (though by far the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen). O Brave New World, where are you?
Comment by Zane Selvans — June 15, 2009 @ 6:12 pm
Or, maybe there could be a cable TV surreality show called “Bright Green”, which is like Wa$ted, except that they always get the household down to being actually sustainable… and in the process end up having to transform the entire neighborhood, or city, or state!
Comment by Zane Selvans — June 15, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
[...] Being “Used To” Our Lifestyle Makes Change Seem Difficult – The range of lifestyles which people have been able to become accustomed to and enjoy throughout history and spread out over the globe, is immense. Some of them are sustainable; ours is not. The willingness to experiment and accept change, to be flexible at a societal level, is of paramount importance today, and has in the past meant the difference between survival and obliteration for countless other civilizations, as detailed in Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse". But change is hard, whether you drive an SUV and have managed to shave your lifestyle requirements down to 8 earths from 10, or whether you're the child of a prostitute in Calcutta. We are creatures of habit, quite literally. (tagged: sustainability film energy green stuff money ) [...]
Pingback by Shared Links for Jun 15th at Amateur Earthling — June 15, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
Born Into Brothels Kids Sue Filmmakers! (Calcutta newspaper, August 2008)
Yes, it’s true.
Born Into Brothels is a story of lies, half truths, distortions and exploitation. I invite you to read the newest blog and numerous other articles written on the hidden story behind the Hollywood-blessed “documentary.” You read, you decide. It’s your call.
The blog can be found at http://bornintobrothelslies.blogspot.com
Comment by mb — June 15, 2009 @ 8:33 pm
Zane –
Check out World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler. It’s apocalyptic (no, really, it’s a novel set after an apocalypse) and it’s one of those books where it’s hard to believe that you could possibly accept the premise. But then it turns out to be pretty good.
And actually, getting apocalyptic kind of helped me in the same way that seeing Calcutta helped me reset my understanding of how much latitude we have, as a country, to dial back our profligate ways and still manage to survive. Even using the word “survive” is inflammatory, of course. But my only thought was “wow, millions of people actually manage to get by, and meanwhile some game-show contestant is whining about having to give up her precious Ford Explorer because she is used to it”.
No, it’s not helpful for most people. A while back I came to understand that I am not like most people, and that my views are far outside anything normal or usual. But I am also not a complete idiot, and recognize that having such revelations may not be helpful for most people.
But in being “helpful” I see the kind of nice, gentle, attaboy kinds of stuff they are doing on Wa$ted and wonder if we really are being far too gentle, kind, and caring about the larger issues here.
First, while it’s not Calcutta, sometimes I feel like we (Americans, in particular) believe it’s our God Given Right to use up the world. I do believe the two are extremes.
Yes, the scenes in Calcutta are hellish. But even a middle class, hard working, far from unusual American family, such as the one in the Wa$ted episode actually seems to be a kind of extreme, when viewed with a modicum of world or historical perspective. We have been seduced into a world of comforts that seems normal. It’s not normal. The world most Americans live in today is not normal — it’s an extreme that we have arrived at, and rather quickly, but still slowly enough to not really notice. We’re used to not only our current state of being, but also to the rate of change. Both are extreme.
Of course taking our comforts away, or even threatening change is downright un-American. Yet from almost any perspective (except the one most Americans live in, even poor Americans), the living standards we enjoy are extreme indeed.
So I have been writing here on this blog for five years now and have seen the ebb and flow of public sentiment about the changes we might make to move ourselves closer to some society we could rationally describe as “sustainable”. We have come a long way in five years, to be sure. In many ways, our about-face is remarkable, incredible, and almost even inspiring. I am cheered, to be sure.
It still annoys me that some people won’t change a light bulb or two, or take the time, money or effort to consider the problem we’re faced with as one they are part of solving. But I get over that quickly and fall back to the “what’s most effective” strategy. For it does seem to be turning the ship of state’s course, if slowly. And it’s possible that if we get a little momentum, the changes we must make will turn out to be easy — there’s plenty of reason to think that, in fact. So yes, everything rational tells me to avoid the desire to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
What you’re describing is, I think, a strategy that is effective, rather than extreme (indeed, pointedly not extreme). This is undoubtedly the pragmatic, realistic, and most likely fastest way of getting to the goal.
But still, there’s something to be said for a little bit of shock. In all these shows describing the state of the world, we’re being timid about explaining the problem … or at least equivocal. For one, we’re telling all those who will listen, but not many more. Second, everything intended for mass consumption is couched in gentle terms — as you say, with the not-really-convincing “we can do it!” exhortations. It’s all very staid, journalistic, and prudent.
Yet, the only truthful conclusion one would draw from any survey of climate change (for example) is that we are well and truly screwed. The best outcome is likely to be that in a world of increasing chaos, we have found a way to maintain our strength, avoid conflict to the degree possible, and weather some decades of unpredictable, yet relatively slow-moving catastrophes, coming out the other end on top. I personally believe that this kind of world, while horrifying in many ways, also offers opportunities to those who accept the problem for what it is and do what seems best to deal with it. But it’s not a picture many people seem willing to accept. It’s the denial that worries me most, I think.
Every bit of science shows that the most conservative estimates of magnitude of change are frightening where well understood, and even more frightening in that the other 80% we have no idea what changes will occur. And these are the conservative estimates, which each year are proving to be under-estimates.
So if all this stuff is coming, or even is probably coming, or hell, maybe just “might come”, I sometimes have to adjust my view of the world and think: “but isn’t this something we should really, really, really care about?”. Sure, all my pragmatic instincts tell me that panic is not the answer, neither is talk of apocalypse.
But if these means of communicating a large, complicated, indirect problem are not the answer, then what methods are?
Why is the “slow disaster” something we respond to so differently from the normal quick ones? After the tsunami in Sri Lanka several years ago, millions of Americans gave hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of days. Everyone leapt into action. It was amazing.
Yet it doesn’t do any good to say things like “that was just a preview of coming attractions”.
All I can say is that I am glad we have level-headed people running the country these days, and not nut-jobs, such as myself.
Comment by Tom Harrison — June 15, 2009 @ 9:04 pm
@mb — regarding the blog you reference, I see two posts over the course of two years. Just because something can be posted to the web does not mean it is true. I read the posts, and they seem to be allegations about the intentions of the film-maker. I checked the Wikipedia reference, and there’s no indication I could see of scandal. If it is true, then it is sad.
In either case, you miss my point, which actually has little to do with the movie, but with the realization that the kind of poverty depicted in the movie, even if exaggerated, is in stark contrast to the kind or normalcy accepted as usual by Americans.
Comment by Tom Harrison — June 15, 2009 @ 9:21 pm
I read ‘World Made by Hand’, and I’d just like to say I’d like to read a book like that written by a woman! I was put off by some of the extreme violence (not that I deny that extreme violence happens, especially in the world he created, I just found it a bit sensationalized – which may be due to my gender and my protected life). I was more put off by the reverting to stereotyped gender roles. I know the author probably thought a lot about it, and thought it was pretty likely to really happen in his world, but I think that conclusion is bullocks. Maybe a lot of serious manual labor might be taken over mostly by men, but at least the doctor or the local engineering genius or someone would have been female! We don’t lose our brains and retreat completely to the kitchen just because the world as we know it shuts down. Enough of my railing, though, Zane is right, we need more views like that, with realistic portrayals of where we could go, and how it could still be all right. I think a lot of us secretly and guiltily want to just get to the hard times already, so we can stop seeing all the resources wasted on petty things – like perfect lawns and sports cars and ultra-hygiene. …So that we aren’t hampered by regulation and custom from installing composting toilets and keeping chickens in the city and biking across town without getting run over by an SUV. We should all think about and write our possible best-case paths for the future, as they will all be different, but we need the possibilities to steer by.
Comment by Michelle Wilber — June 16, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
Okay, I admit that I have read neither the Long Emergency, nor World Made by Hand, but I did read Kunstler’s blog for a while, after seeing his TED talk criticizing American suburbia, which I loved. If his books are significantly different from his online writing, then my impression of him will be wrong, but based on what I’ve read, I can’t help but feel that he is an uncreative nut. I just don’t buy his vision of a wholesale reversion to 19th century living as a result of oil and gas shortages. Peak oil may well be in our near future, or even our near past, and that realization at scale would no doubt transform our economy and our world, but I think it would be pretty different from our past. I think he underestimates human flexibility and creativity when actually put under pressure to adapt. For instance, huge swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, despite its economic and political messes, has cell phones. The resources required to maintain informational connectivity are small, compared to the economic and societal benefits. My impression is that he is exactly the kind of apocalyptic prophet we do not need today.
American resource consumption is profligate, but not so much more profligate than Europe or Japan, compared to sub-Saharan Africa or rural China and rural India. What we need is a different goal for both those peoples and ourselves to aspire to. It’s soul wrenching to see both India and China barreling toward automobile-centric cities, and domestic auto industries, just as the US is maybe, possibly, taking the most tentative first steps toward realizing that actually that wasn’t the greatest way to organize our cities. If only they could somehow be building these megalopolises for the first time as green cities. If they could look at Copenhagen or even Berlin as models, instead of (gah!) LA. They want a version of what we have, because we have it, but they don’t get to have it, and the truth is that in the fullness of time, we don’t get to have it either.
Neither doom nor half-measures will get us where we need to go, and I guess partly I’m just expressing my fatigue with both. There are plenty of people around the world who “get it” with respect to the severity of our resource problems, and for them — for us — we need a new content stream, one that isn’t about how bad the problem is, but rather about what plausible solutions look like. What endpoint we’re moving toward, and what steps can be taken now in that direction.
For instance, on energy, there are only two energy sources that can even conceivably scale up to 10 terawatts, which is what we need if we are going to displace coal, and still provide decent energy services to the world. They are direct solar (i.e. CSP, PV, or highly efficient photochemical reactions: much better than natural photosynthesis), and nuclear (with reprocessing and breeder reactors… ugh). Wind, tides, hydro, geothermal, biomass, biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol, etc. might be okay as transition energy sources, and might fulfill niche energy needs like liquid fuels, but they are useless if what you need is 10 TW. Hardly anybody talks about this openly. It’s much worse than the whole lightbulb thing. So, any plausible (happy climate ending) vision of the future has to have some combination of: much smaller human population, drastic increases in energy efficiency, and massive global deployments of solar and/or nuclear power.
Okay, I’m rambling here… maybe I should just hit submit.
Comment by Zane Selvans — June 16, 2009 @ 8:09 pm
Michelle and Zane –
Thank you both for your thoughtful and insightful comments.
First let me say that my “endorsement” of World Made by Hand was tepid, at best. I agree that the book fell into some rather old traps, including (but not limited to) gender stereotype. It’s merely thought provoking in a limited way.
I would certainly love to have some views about how the world could be good and right after
the apocalypsewe get a handle on things. Help me out here — what do you see?I agree with the overall sentiments: we need to see a plausible future that is neither doom nor “change a bulb and we’ll be fine”. I am actually very hopeful that the combination of attention, investment, and economic incentive will make renewable energy take off. And if that happens, many, many other issues are on their way to being better. It’s all perfectly feasible … as long as someone (anyone) sees the need to make change.
And it’s that need to make change … the urgency, the willingness to make an effort that I don’t see emanating from the very pores of Americans. Yes, Europe and Japan and China are all part of the problem, but America has a special responsibility … or perhaps it’s just a lingering opportunity … to make the big step that sets the world on a better path (or at least doesn’t make the rest of the world’s efforts utterly futile).
So aren’t we all talking about what it is that will actually make us stand up and make change, or get out of the way to let change happen? The picture of the future doesn’t necessarily have to be bleak … just different. We can either let the future happen to us, or try to make it happen in some way that seems better.
Yet human nature tends to favor lassitude, and that’s what I am seeing in America’s tepid, or sometimes hostile response to what is a real and present danger. If we don’t take action, all those doomsday scenarios being painted by nuts like Kunsler (and the US Government, in their report today) will be the default outcome. We need to act.
Zane and Michelle — if you’re in need of a vision of the future check out Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) for a stream of positive solutions. They are truly unwavering in their ability to conceptualize a solution to major problems that leaves us better off in all respects. I find their work inspiring, and filled with the genius of simplicity. It’s just that politics keeps interfering and leaving us with remarkably untidy, unhelpful, partial solutions.
So my current railing is mainly that we have at least one rather significant opportunity to set a policy (I am neutral on carbon tax or cap and trade) that would provide the necessary groundwork for real change to happen — the Waxman-Markey bill is in process right now. I think it is what we need.
But I have the niggling fear that we have only one serious shot at getting something close to being good in place now, and if not, then not again for the next several years … or more.
My fear is based on my perception of our continued lack of understanding (or perhaps it’s just fatigue) with hearing about non-specific bad things that will happen … and more non-specific things about what we need to do to make it better.
I recognize the desire to see what the future will be like. That is something we can shoot for. But we need to see a reason to make the effort to take action — without clarity about the scope of the problem, it’s easy to be lulled into partial complacency (or fatigue).
Ask a neighbor, or friend, or someone else who is not as involved in the issue as you are — there’s a good deal of ignorance. You might get a response about what global warming is. You might get a response about what might occur. You might even hear what solutions there are. But I don’t think most people really understand the scale or immediacy of the problem. It’s still an abstraction, and it’s hard to see why we need to solve abstract problems.
Yes, painting a picture of the future is necessary. Arriving at plausible solutions isn’t that hard, actually. Detailing what changes we’ll have to make is fine, at least in the abstract.
Explaining why the future cannot be the same as the present is the hard part … that’s when we all realize that we’re going to have to make changes — concrete ones that affect us. And that some of the assumptions we make are no longer valid and that the way we live will be different (not worse, just different).
Comment by Tom Harrison — June 16, 2009 @ 11:03 pm
I guess part of what I’m thinking is that hopefully, most of society will never have the visceral experience of “getting apocalyptic” that you, and I, and Michelle, and Bill McKibben, and just about any of the other ardent sustainability activist have had. The right solution to our collective woes does not involve a bloody revolution, or a world war, or a global famine, or a pandemic pestilence, or any experience which remotely resembles them, though there are plenty of paths to the other side that do run that way (I’d call them the wrong solutions personally). Most people just aren’t going to stare into the abyss until the abyss is at their doorstep, because it’s pretty unpleasant… like when the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses unexpectedly, or we have an abrupt climatic state-change that causes global crop failures, or some similarly unignorable event that immediately impacts hundreds of millions or billions of people.
If we avoid those scenarios, the billions of people in developing countries will still experience an improvement in their standards of living, but it will be along a different path than the one we took with and after the industrial revolution. For us, the character of our lives will change, but not for the worse. Incumbent industries will collapse, and new ones will rise in their place.
Some characteristics that I think a happy-ending world would have, for instance…
No flood irrigated agriculture. It’s suicide by salinization in the long term. The only way this will happen is with market pricing of agricultural water usage. Even drip irrigation in arid climates is a finite lifetime affair, but it’ll last hundreds of times longer than flood irrigation. Also no more surface transport and storage of water. Store it underground in aquifers, transport it underground in aquifers and qanats. Graywater usage on a massive scale in urban areas. Evaporative losses and single-use water will end. And Certainly with 6-10 billion people, most of us will be mostly vegetarian, because using grain and forage and water for meat production just isn’t efficient.
No concept of “away” as a place to throw things. Material resources will eventually stop flowing around the world, because we re-use materials. One way to make this happen is some version of Germany’s “enhanced product responsibility” laws, in which producers are responsible for recycling or disposing of their products and packaging, giving them an incentive to design things for durability, repair, and recycling. This will be weird, because a non-trivial portion of our international interdependence (and thus incentive for getting along with other organizational entities) relies on material transfers. If we have all the “stuff” we need, and can recycle it forever using energy that doesn’t get imported… how free does a nation become to ignore what the rest of the world thinks about it?
Sustainable economic growth will be all about better information, and better technology, and creating more wealth with the same material resources, and less energy. This will also be weird, because information just doesn’t behave the same way as materials. It’s difficult if not impossible to contain, and it can spread as copies instantly. It’s not entirely clear how one builds an economy on top of non-rivalrous non-exclusive goods… Also, a lot of the disparity in cross-border labor prices are going to disappear, which will be disruptive to the developed nations. I think a lot of the world might end up looking more like India, where the entire economic/development spectrum is represented within a single country, instead of the US, where even the semi-literate can get a college degree, a mortgaged 4000 square foot house, and a shiny new SUV. That’s not bad necessarily, as it means the educated and motivated people of say… the Congo, will be much better off. But try telling that to the chuckleheads and nosepickers living on houseboats in S. Florida.
And of course, the magic sauce that makes any kind of sustainability easier, which nobody wants to hear, is just having fewer people. With an order of magnitude fewer humans on Earth, sustainability would become almost trivial at this point. All the happy talk about peak population in 2050 is unconvincing to me. It might happen, but population dynamics are inherently non-linear, and influenced in our case by social dynamics, which are fabulously non-linear. We really don’t know what population is going to do.
Time and again I see a lot of our unsustainable behaviors being tied back to our limited planning horizon. Even the most long-thinking organizations have a very, very hard time planning beyond 100 years, partly because we’ve come to expect that 100 years from now, the world will be utterly changed (as it has been in the last 100 years, and the 100 years before that…), but also I think because of the way our money is constructed, with a positive discount rate making the future essentially worthless (a la the Stern Report), and because of the way *we* are constructed. Most of us will never meet our great-grandchildren. They are abstract people, hardly any different to us from someone living in a refugee camp in Chad, for whom we are demonstrably unwilling to do much of anything. Bizarre as it might seem, given the population implications, and the likelihood of social upheaval, I think that one of the things which might improve the sustainability of our species-wide behavior would be obtaining an indefinite individual lifespan. Not an unlimited lifespan necessarily (though that would work too), but literally indefinite, with some small, unchanging probability of death each year after say, age 50. Fantasy at the moment, to be sure, but it’s worth thinking about deeply before it stops being fantastic. The rhetorical portion of this talk by Aubrey de Gray is wonderful for this thought experiment. The biology, I haven’t really read enough to be able to assess. But if we don’t blow ourselves up, there will someday come a generation who actually has to deal with this, and it will be very, very strange.
Comment by Zane Selvans — June 17, 2009 @ 3:25 am
I hate to be pessimistic, because I am not, but I have little hope of the transition being anything but jarring, at least. I think, for many reasons – including that many people don’t fully grasp the problems, that the political will is not there world-wide to respond with a safe margin of time in a sustainable fashion to the impending crisis. Many things will happen that I can’t imagine or don’t think now are possible. Perhaps we will get a handle on many of these pieces. But I’m guessing that the needed reduction in population will not be nicely handled. Maybe increased infertility and cancer from environmental pollutants will help. Maybe as the cost of living increases people will choose to have many fewer children (as we are now an overwhelmingly urban species, where more kids can’t really help out on the farm). I don’t think it will be all apocalyptic mayhem though. I think we will patch things together, and ingeniously solve problems in lower tech, or at least lower energy ways. I am also a bit of a Luddite, and unlike Zane, like envisioning a bit more of a return to some local, small, sustainable, more agrarian communities. But I totally agree with him on many of his points for a happy path, and I know that he likes to grow food in his yard too :) I do think it is important to maintain our world-wide connectivity and information exchange – it is what makes the world light and livable. We may not be able to fly across the globe anymore someday, but I’m not sure I want to live in a world where it isn’t easy to know how people are living or communicate with people across the globe. I also live in Alaska which makes my personal take on things a bit different from the average lower-48 American, but I am sure there are many takes on things depending on bioregion, etc. Without a huge population boom here, water is not an issue locally, except that given we need a lot more local agriculture to support our population sustainably, and early summers will likely get dryer, we will need to appropriately develop ponds and impoundments for snowmelt, and/or catchment to get us through to the rains on individual farms. Most of the solutions are out there in books on permaculture, ecological design, etc.
Many people have written about appropriate paths and solutions in a non-fictional way, it would be neat to see novels and fictionalized accounts though (books or movies) that can personalize the path and draw in the average joe and joette.
This article http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.06-energy-an-inconvenient-talk/ discusses how we may have fewer years than we think to peak hydrocarbons (not just oil), and that there may not even be enough quickly recoverable coal to reach our worst climate change predictions. If all hydrocarbons are soon to be very very expensive, then so will the transition to solar, nuclear, enhanced geothermal etc. And it is apparent we have reached the end of cheap energy, even if the above analysis is wrong.
My happy ending involves much greater communalism. It involves the building, ASAP, of neighborhood community centers – probably libraries – to fulfill the old roles of the cathedral, long house, etc. These would be built with oodles of insulation and big enough to fit the local feeder community. They would have appropriate construction and technologies to stay comfortable without big energy inputs. They would have internet and books and communal kitchens and meeting space and solar panels and efficient electric lights etc. They would be a place where the neighborhood populace could go and have a feast and listen to a talk and read about how to grow potatoes and be warm and comfortable without everyone heating and lighting their homes all day with expensive fuels or scarce wood or whatever. Then everyone can trundle home in the evening and pull up the down comforters and snuggle into bed in less cozy homes. To be funded by taxes or donations or dues or who knows?
I think one thing we need to do is start to prioritize where our energy goes. My list will be different from yours, but maybe we can reach some consensus about where not to spend our energy as it grows more and more expensive. For example: I would be ecstatic if people weren’t in personal autos, but I’m ok with fuel in trains/buses and my CSA farmers’ truck right now. Many people can agree on frivolous energy uses – much plastic surgery, stock car racing, etc – it’d be nice to start channeling that into building the systems we will need to have a good life in the coming decades.
Back to the original post – I think most people can change when they really need too – emergency situations generally bring out heroic, unaccustomed behavior. I just hope enough people who see the writing on the wall change enough before an emergency so that the nucleus of strength and resourcefulness is there to reradiate out into the contracting society and channel it to a happy ending. I think this is happening – small pods of people in every community are thinking about the problems and implementing solutions that can be expanded as needed.
Comment by Michelle Wilber — June 17, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
I guess I’m fundamentally optimistic that sustainability will become a non-political issue in time, hopefully soon, because ultimately, it’s not much of a philosophical or “values” debate, it’s a practical problem, and short of a population collapse, in the long term it’s not going to go away, no matter how much we ignore it or take half measures. The real political opposition is from the incumbent industries which benefit from unsustainable behavior, and I have to hope that our recent financial debacle has sensitized people to the dangers of trusting incumbent industries to do the right thing…
RMI is great. I’ve read a lot of their stuff. They’re another source of optimism.
I love growing some of my own food, and turning my own compost pile, and being able to completely build and un-build my bike, and cook my own meals, and brew my own beer, etc. Part of what I’ve tried to do is replace external entertainment with functional activities. Doing these things is fun! I don’t think that makes me a luddite. Wanting to remove all cars from the city doesn’t make me a luddite either, even though 200 years ago, there were no cars in the city. Those cities also sucked, in different, manure-sewage-and-dead-horse ways. The future might look like the past in some superficial ways, but I suspect that if you were to somehow drop either Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison into the pedestrian, bicycle and transit NYC of 2050, they would be hopelessly confused.
Speaking of NYC… have you seen this passive-house co-housing thing in Brooklyn? That, to my mind, is a lot of what the future looks like, and I think it sounds a lot like what you’re describing Mickie.
David Rutledge, an electrical engineering prof here at Caltech, has been doing the round with a “peak coal” talk. I think it’s dangerous, because I think he’s likely to be wrong, as we do not yet have a really good global inventory of coal resources, and because his meme plays well to both the apocalyptic Peak Oil crowd, and the climate delayers. When really, the point of his talk should be: regardless of how much coal we have, we must stop burning it now, as other positive feedbacks will at some point take over.
Now, why on Earth can’t I get this much discussion going on over at my blog?
Comment by Zane Selvans — June 17, 2009 @ 3:35 pm
So it sounds like Zane is the optimist and Michelle is the realist and I am just a curmudgeon :-).
For me, it is truly hard to envision a “soft landing” scenario for climate change. The report on climate change from earlier this week kind of sinks that point home with best case scenarios resulting in some rather dramatic, near-term changes. But don’t get me wrong — when we have eventually taken our licks, I can see that the world will, necessarily arrive at a much more sensible, sustainable, community oriented point. I like the vision as it seems sane, humane and more … mature.
And, to make another non-curmudgeonly observation, I don’t think the main issues will tend to be a result of energy shortages. The science I have attempted to understand suggests that there is rather an abundance of clean energy, several orders of magnitude more than we use now available to us — yeah, sun, wind, and geothermal. There are many issues to be solved before we can recast our technologies so that we can actually replace our current dependencies on fossil fuels … but I do think the magnitude of that problem is the kind that, given sufficient incentive, humans are remarkably good at solving in the blink of an eye — as Michelle says, when there’s an emergency, we manage to do in hours or days things that would usually take months or years.
The specter of climate change creates some of the incentives we need, I think. And that’s why I don’t think there’s really that much of an issue with peak oil and certainly not peak coal — it’s not supply constraints that create the issue — it’s the great abundance of coal (and to a lesser degree oil) and our profligate consumption of it that make climate change the more immediate issue.
The cost of energy is certainly an issue now, and it probably got people motivated to listen a little in the first place. It’s quite possible that in the shorter run it will become an issue again, at least with oil. But if we really attack renewable energy issues, including distribution, storage, and the transition, along with commensurate reduction in waste, I can easily see a path to energy equilibrium.
So maybe al of this hopefulness is what’s bumming me out so much. I think we can solve the root of the problem. But I don’t think we yet have the necessary political will or momentum to do the job. And as we dither, Rome burns, as it were.
It’s the next 20 years or so that worry me most. The effects of climate change will start to create a lot of global political instability. Famine, draught, pestilence, floods and all sorts of other Biblical sounding things are not likely to make the world a more stable place.
If we seize opportunities (e.g. various carbon pricing methods, conservation, invention) and we head off the most terrible impacts by planning in advance I think we could really make the world a less turbulent place.
It’s a big “if”, though…
Comment by Tom Harrison — June 17, 2009 @ 4:47 pm