Packing Light for a Long Journey
Recently I resurfaced at European Tribune to collaborate with a friendly local, the very well-informed ‘Nomad’. Our theme was inspired by several ET threads from recent weeks: the name of Dmitry Orlov has come up more than once; Peak Oil is constantly on the table; the question “has the human race overshot the planetary carrying capacity” is hovering in the air. While the cornucopians continue to babble about Nuclear Power to the Rescue (though I note they have the decency no longer to claim it is “too cheap to meter”, nor do they blandish us with cartoons of friendly dancing and singing atoms), I continue to push stubbornly for a discussion of — gasp — reducing consumption.
I quote a comment of mine from an Overshoot discussion thread, trying to answer the question “what is a terron today?”:
well a terron (which I may or may not have invented) is one person’s share of Terra. which varies — depending on how many other people there are, and on what kind of life we think is an acceptable life.
if you crowd us into 100-storey arcologies (in tiny multifunctional cells or larger multiperson dormitories) so as to reclaim the maximum amount of arable land; if we kill off every species that isn’t directly useful to us (a dangerous undertaking since we have only a very poor and warped grasp of usefulness and interdependency in biotic systems) so as to redirect all photosynthetic activity on earth to feeding humans; if we produce our food by the absolute bedrock max-efficiency methods (probably algae and fungus farming on a massive scale); if we scrupulously recycle all our water and other materials, keep the absolute minimum amount of personal possessions each, live under an intrusive and comprehensive set of rules governing each person’s behaviour and consumption of resources, etc etc — my non-quantitative bet is that we could support more people “in comfort” than are now presently alive.
but the quality of that “comfort” is highly questionable — how would such an existence differ from life in a prison? the iron discipline of space-station resource management does not make for an open and free society (back to FH’s insightful quote). and the authority necessary to impose that iron discipline suggests an authoritarianism that human beings have never in history managed to implement without abuse and atrocity (another goram Milgram Experiment); we are not as well suited as bees to living in hives with draconian resource limits. (remember that bees kick out their surplus drones at season’s end to starve, so that the life of the colony may continue — though egalitarian and delightful creatures, bees are not sentimentalists and the life of each bee means very little compared to the bee polity which is the real organism.)
to accommodate the maximum possible number of humans on earth w/in constraints of physical reality would mean evolving into a hive organism in which individuals had very little scope for freedom, living on a planet from which we have extirpated every aspect of the natural world that makes us happy, for which we were adapted in the previous 200K years or however long it’s been. is that the future we want for our descendants? is it consonant with our so-called Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty?
one terron might be very small in such a model. and it might be sustainable. but is it a goal to aim for?
a slightly larger terron might yield a less oppressive and stifling culture — one in which your neighbour is not morally obligated, as a matter of survival, to report you to the neighbourhood committee for wasting a half gallon of water, and where your diet might be more interesting, tasty, and nutritious. a larger terron yet — several acres per person — could yield an idyllic lifestyle with the luxury of open space, fresh produce, eggs, and moderate amounts of grass-fed meat for everyone.
or — and this is the traditional human pattern, replicated from the earliest agricultural era through modern capitalism, and the subject of Colman’s recent gloomy prognostication — we could concentrate resource consumption in a small elite and keep everyone else on the ragged edge of malnutrition, exposure, and related diseases or just let them go on dying in droves. “one terron” for a planet of hyperconsuming billionaires is so much land and biotic productivity that the “one terron” left over for the lower classes is too small to live on.
so the question of what a one-person share of Terra looks like cannot be disentangled from the question of “how many of us should there be,” which in turn cannot be disentangled from what lifestyle we think is “decent” or acceptable or happy, and (critically) how much inequality we are prepared to tolerate. there are people — I have read their published opinions and even contended with some in person — who contemplate with equanimity the liquidation of vast numbers of poor people, rural people, indigenes, peasants, brown people, “backward” people etc, so as to “free up resources” for a far smaller number of (presumably worthier, superior) people for whom “the American Way of Life is not negotiable”. I find it hard to distinguish this from the Lebensraum justification for annexing Poland or the Conquistadores’ conviction that God really meant the wealth of S America for them.
abundance — of land, of energy, of water and food — enables us to practise inequality in relative moral comfort and safety, because the elite (the tapeworm in my previous mini rant) can gorge itself and still leave enough over for the many to get by. scarcity, however, brings inequality into focus: as soon as resources are constrained it becomes very obvious that scarcity is in part created by the gorging and conspicuous waste of the few; and the few start thinking about getting rid of the many rather than sharing. (back to Jared Diamond).
industrial capitalism seems to be the historical trifecta. it concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny elite with greater speed and efficiency than any previous system of accumulation and kleptocracy; it does so while simultaneously burning up raw materials and resources at a rate unprecedented in human history; and its very modus operandi is predicated on the creation of scarcity, Enclosure of the commons, etc — and perhaps worst of all, scarcity and crisis are profit opportunities for capitalists so they have no interest in preventing same, only a short-term enthusiasm for profiting off them (Halliburton, Iraq war; NOLA, carpetbaggers and mercs; US energy policy set by the fossil lobby). a person’s “share” of Terra doesn’t mean anything in a hegemonic belief system to which the very notion of “sharing” is anathema…
what Gini coefficient is acceptable?
what minimal lifestyle is acceptable?
for how many centuries do we want our culture to persist w/o crashing?
if we have answers to these questions, then with a great deal of effort and some uncertainty we can answer the question of what a terron is, which in turn will offer an answer to “how many of us should there be?”one thing I know for certain — as a technogeek and as a simple primate — is that infinite growth is a fantasy, and therefore the mainspring of faith that drives our culture is irremediably broken. climax ecosystems are stable; runaway proliferation of any one species dooms that species and many others in the web around it.
another thing I know for fairly certain is that complex biotic systems (like a farm, a forest, or humanity) cannot be micromanaged and controlled with precision. they can only be encouraged and discouraged — more like steering a boat than like carpentry, as I think someone once said? we already know many of the factors that encourage lower family size, greater equality, better public health: we have working models for many encouraging guidance signals. women’s emancipation, universal literacy and freedom of communication; suppression of monopolies and encouragement of micro and regional commerce; land reform; sustainable agriculture; least-toxic manufacturing; prioritising public transit over private autos; human-scale urban design; participatory democratic institutions, devolving authority to the most local level possible; the powerful notion of “human rights”; wealth redistribution via taxation or periodic “jubilee years”; and so on. we have an extensive menu of excellent ‘steering mechanisms’ that tend towards lower family sizes, lower resource consumption, better public health and longevity, less violence, and happier people.
and all of them, without exception, are antithetical to maximum profit-taking.
we do seem to be in the Greenland Colony Predicament; in order to survive and thrive we have to change the foundational assumptions of our culture. can it be done?
The question that I am now proposing to discuss (with Nomad’s help) at ET is the second one from the short list above: what minimal lifestyle is acceptable? — specifically, what do we think we really need to be happy? and what can we easily live without? it’s my belief — shared with quite a number of other folks — that the late industrial capitalist culture with its constant glut of manufactured goods, the intrusive marketing needed to whip up demand for that overproduction, and the accelerating liquidation of biotic systems to feed the machinery of production, is not producing happiness: quite the reverse. It’s producing “mountains of Things” as Tracy Chapman sang, but also armies of dispossessed peasants and alienated, increasingly depressed and crazy affluent suburbanites and psychotic superelites.
Here’s the link to the ET diary and here is a synoptic quote:
[DeA:]
I thought more than once of the house full of Stuff “back home,” the accumulated consumer goods of 30 years, and how completely irrelevant and unimportant that all seemed when travelling. It seemed to me that I had everything I really needed to be happy — even luxurious.This line of thought led me, of course, to musing on the decade ahead of us (and the one after that!), and the impact of peak oil and other self-inflicted resource liquidation crises that humanity faces [actually, the "self" that's inflicting this vandalism on the planet is only a small proportion of humanity at large, but for those of us in the industrialised West who are that resource-gobbling minority it may well be said to be a self-inflicted crisis we are facing]. We hear very often all kinds of plans, from the fantastical to the suicidal to the murderous, for maintaining or even expanding “the American Way of Life” despite very clear and loud warning signals from an overstressed biosphere and dwindling reserves of water and fossil fuels. We hear relatively seldom about reconsidering the size and weight of our luggage as we contemplate our journey through the next 20 years and beyond.
[Nomad:]
Despite some optimism which I’d share with DeA, I’d argue here that the prospect of finiteness is the heart of the matter — why prodding people towards an awareness of The End of Oil remains a practically insuperable obstacle. Stuck in the current energy rut, spoon-fed and powered by the inescapable growth trap of modern economics where the common word for downsizing is ‘negative growth’ — I’d begin to despair to even attempt getting the message across … and that’s even without considering the “Apres moi le deluge” crowds.I despair even more now I’ve begun to observe South Africa. [...]
Earlier I had visited The Rock, a monumental point of resistance for the people of Soweto under Apartheid time — it was the look-out point where people could see the police forces coming into Soweto “to restore order”. It was a Sunday. The Rock area was surrounded by gleaming cars. Beats of township rap at high volume were pumping through the subwoofers into the air, making it nearly impossible to converse. People complimented each other’s cars, sharing around food.
It’s a liberating, even touching experience to see how this community embraces their freedom with a certain flashiness of material possessions which for so long were denied to them under the Afrikaner viciousness. Yet cringeingly, I could also not help the thought that this catwalk for cars was nothing more than following in the exact footsteps of the white community leading towards the same economic pitfall. National petrol prices are going up, the people demur but they do not stop driving — there is hardly an alternative. There are some eight million cars in South Africa, or so is the estimation. The end of cheap oil is as inescapable for Africa as it is for the West – yet for a city like Johannesburg, correction, for a nation like South Africa whose economy at first appearances is so single-handedly dependent on cars, I can not suppress the niggling worry that when the world hits the cliff, the fall will be thrice as deep in Africa as for the western world. For Africa, the current window of opportunity in the bonanza world needs to stay open longer to be able to make the stepping-stone work. But is the country preparing enough? [DeA: is anyone? are we?]
[...]
What makes matters worse: Most of the energy from South Africa is based on coal, and SA is swiftly becoming the largest exporter of coal-to-liquids technology. The Sasol plant at Secunda has already announced it wants to expand by 20%, upping its production to 180.000 barrels per day in 2014 and barely a word on carbon capture. [DeA: and Africa is dispropportionately hit by global warming damage, more heavily than most of the industrialised North: paying the bill for the carbon binge, even though it came so late to the party as hardly to be a participant at all.]So there we are. Most of the white S African community is as blind to the coming energy crunch as most of the western world. The black community has an additional nuance: it was never allowed the Suburban White Dream and wants to catch up with it in the fastest way possible. And who the hell are we to make them stop dreaming as long as the white community and western world doesn’t wake up and start buffering?
So. Is there a lifestyle — a mode of living, a diet, a level of comfort and amenity — that we’re willing to adopt, that we could say (without arrant hypocrisy) is sustainably generalisable to the mass of humanity on Earth? it certainly is not the contemporary suburban “American Way of Life” — which would require about 4 to 6 more Earths’ worth of resources to generalise to 6+ billion people. And if so, what would such a sustainable — and happy-making — lifestyle be like? Are we willing to travel lighter, in the hope of arriving someplace less Hellish than where we presently seem to be headed?
skol:
This might be a silly question, but how feasible is it to live on your backyard, at least for food? I don’t know anything about water tables or well digging in the city, etc (and I’m not even taking into account rent, bills, etc, or anything else too money related). Maybe I’m one of those people content to just stay at home. Ideally, for me at least, all I would need is that. Plus community and all those things, but that’s all rather near my backyard; I’m far more worried for them, although I think things like relocalizing are already in the works on some scale subtle enough to take for granted in the longer run.
I’m being optimistic and I apologize for simplifying things so much…I notice a trend already inside the US (OK, just Wisconsin, and just one city in it, from personal experience) with enough growth and potential that a workable infrastructure will be somewhat in place when the “old way” simply won’t meet our expectations anyhow. And all this is happening currently, so this newer infrastructure may already be displacing the dying one. Or something. Does this make sense? I don’t understand Marx (et al) very much, but it seems the periphery is sort of becoming the core (in a matter of speaking, possibly). Or I’m talking out my butt :-p
[i]I’m[/i] willing to travel lighter. At least I think I am. I don’t think that’ll be going against the grain in the future, either, but that’s just imho.
14 June 2007, 12:58 pmMarcilla:
I blame God.
That may seem like a silly idea to proffer (especially coming from an atheist Unitarian); and sure, the economics of consumerism (sometimes called “capitalism”) is to blame; but I want to go in a different direction this morning, so I blame God. Or maybe I should say people’s perception of God. At least “God” is the name given to the power that is expected to save the world by people like my mother, a mostly otherwise educated, intelligent womyn. Now, I’m not saying she isn’t a conservationist, we’ve even had discussions on it’s merits; but since God said She wouldn’t destroy the world again after the Noah flood (which science says couldn’t have happened and scholars believe was a mistranslation anyway), how could God let us run out of “stuff”. After all, the accumulation of “stuff” is, according to the Puritan heritage, God’s earthly reward for good behavior.
And much as I love his long hair and steely blue eyes, Jesus bears some responsibility here, too. After all, he did (supposedly) promise to come back and save the world, just in case you think God is too “hands off.” Then there’s comments attributed to him such as Matthew 6:25-34. Now we hear it is sin to even question whether God will be able to provide.
I make the analogy like this: if there were seven of us stranded on an island, what would we do? Would we allow the captain to lay claim to everything on the plane that wasn’t personal baggage and then begin an “every man for himself” barter and trade system (capitalism)? Would we gorge ourselves while believing that rescue by some act of God was imminent? Or would we have to get serious, making plans, assigning tasks, seeking out and distributing what resources could be found, taking on responsibilities for the good of the whole? Well there aren’t seven of us, there’s (going on) seven billion. And we don’t have an island, we have a planet. Still, we face the same issues and should approach our conclusions with the same focus on grim reality. Therefore, I submit that:
1. No amount of belief in a God will save us. In fact, it may even be detrimental to the cause in some cases. And the nearest planet that could sustain life intelligent enough to come rescue us is light years away and frankly, I doubt we’re worth saving to them. So we can write off the search party.
2. If the airline captains of our island (present day capitalists) want to play “every man for himself,” why do we agree to their silly rules that pretty much ensure they will always win? I mean, if you’re going to advocate for that approach, why have rules at all? This is how they have played in any number of third world countries (Somalia, Haiti, others) and you see how well it has worked for them.
3. I would love if the current debate was over what size a terron should be or which -ism could best achieve that, but until the Deus ex machina delusion is abandoned and people are ready to admit that Adam Smith might have missed a thing or two, we aren’t ready as a whole for the necessary paradigm shift yet, although we need to be.
Finally, I’ll paraphrase from Dr. Billings (FSU) who posed if it’s true that there is a crisis of overpopulation, and a decision has to be made, which can the Earth support more of: people eating fast food hamburgers in their cars, or people eating rice in grass huts? Some of us may not like the answer the other “bees” come up should the time come to kick out a few drones.
15 June 2007, 9:13 amStan:
The Somalia/Haiti example is very important, partly because there is no “consumerism” in those places.
Here is the distinction between “consumerism” and “capitalism,” as best I can lay it out. It might sound like hair-splitting nowadays, because we tend to see systems only within our own lifetimes. But it is crucially important, because establishing consumerism as a phase with specific time and place locates one of the dots that, once connected, maps out a trajectory for the system that explains things about where the system is headed. It also tells us something about how gender norms an be adjusted in time and place to suit the needs of capital accumulation, as the strategies for accumulation are altered in the face of manifold crisis… without challenging either the fundamental rule of capitalists or men.
We need to ask ourselves why consumerism in global capitalism is concentrated in overdeveloped metropolitan areas (N Am, Eur, Japan, Aus, etc). There is more to it than just the fact that in semi-peripheries and peripheral nations, only a small sliver of the total population has the economic capacity (money) to engage in the consumption of “luxury” commodities. Because most of those commodities are now being manufactured precisely by people who have no capacity to consume them.
Back in the day, when the US was an industrial powerhouse (for more than infotech and weapons), esp in the immediate post WWII period, comparatively well-paid workers in the US were also the consumer market for a lot of those goods. So there is one big difference between then and now.
Those of us who can think back that far remember that the ethos promoted by the powers that be was one of fiscal conservatism, taking credit seriously as a responsibility, frugality, saving, etc. Now, we are inundated with promotions to take on irresponsible credit (see the film Maxed Out for a devastating analysis of how debt is crashing the US “middle class” as we speak).
Another big difference between then and now.
Before WWII, in the Depression/post-Depression period (it took a war to liquidate the excess capital underlying this crisis, and to shift the burden of this liquidation onto weaker populations), women’s responsibilities in the household economy were to do all those things required to survive, much as women in the 3rd World do now. After WWII, in the US, women were established as one of the primary expansion sectors for consumption of (then) hi-tech goods for the household.
Marx outlined how profit was the appropriation of surplus value at the “point of production.” But Luxemburg made note of the fact that the other stuff that was put in to the process was coming from outside the closed system of the formula M-C-M+ (turning money into more money in this point-of-production exploitation). In the larger scheme of things, someone had to be continually knocked in the head, ripped off, defrauded (“primitive accumulation”), because stuff keeps getting scarcer as it is used up. Moreover — as we point out here all the time — contrary to the whole pre-industrial stereotype of a “short, brutal,and nasty life,” pre-industrial people if they were left the hell alone to grow enough food and deal with life on their own terms, they had healthier lives with a lot more free time. Cities brought along things like plague epidemics, not subsistence farming or hunting/gathering. So people had to be knocked in the head, ripped off, defrauded just to make them work in the cities, in addition to “resources” being exhausted.
That’s still true. It’s why we are knocking people in the head, ripping them off, and defrauding them now from Baghdad to Capetown to Jakarta.
But now the world has become more specialized; and the US has taken on the collective role of consumer-to-the-world so that capitalists operating in Honduras or China have some place to sell their shit; and when buyers have more than they need, they are induced to buy shit they don’t need (thru demand-production, ie, advertising, fashion, and all these other chicaneries), or the M-C-M+ formula comes grinding to a halt. Capital cannot be “valorized,” as they say.
Spatial separation is required in this imperial system, because the state at the top of the heap (the US) requires at least some popular support at home to maintain its political grip. So the goodies are shipped in; while the waste and horror are shipped out. When you see African Americans and increasingly Latin@s as “external” even tho they are geographically internal, you can see why Elaina and me and others we know refer to systematic racism in the US as a “national” question (there are oppressed nationalities, as in imperial core vs periphery).
But the problem remains that the physical world is finite, that once you take all the guano out of Peru its gone, once you take all the trees off the English countryside, you have to get fuel elsewhere, once you peak out oil production in a system that has to “grow,” then somebody has to go…
These limits are reached, as are the limits of human tolerance for being extracted and abused, and the underpinnings of the system itself threatens the power at the top — then they have to go for what’s left, in this case, the US “middle” class (also called a labor aristocracy), because there’s not enough left elswhere.
So after WWII, we were encouraged to be responsible and buy US produced shit (and women were redefined as Mies shows as “consumers” and sex objects, ie, housewives), but that’s over now, and we are in a new phase of “consumerism,” where we are encouraged to take on more and more debt to continue the valorization of capital by being as irresponsible as possible (noticed how many credit cards you are being offered, how they wan to give you equity loans on the house, etc?), because now even consuming is means to an end… the new primitive accumulation (fraud) being directed at the last drops of juice in the big orange — consumption as a means to produce debt slavery into perpetuity.
it’s way more complex than this, but the point is that it is evolving, not static, and that capitalism is morphing through crisis after crisis, and that consumerism(s) are transient aspects of the same, and one concentrated in core areas.
Anyway, I’ve prattled on long enough. Final point is that dependence on money (in our case, US money) is the key to obedience. Think about that one.
17 June 2007, 3:04 pmgluelicker:
Stan
Yes, the imperial dollar (however weakened by the rise of the euro) ensures that the US is the consumer of last resort and the inscribed habitus of living on credit (however imperiled by the crashing of subprime mortgages) ensures that US households are consumers of last resort
However, I find this nagging tendency among US leftists who are so preoccupied with the predatory and violent behavior of the US imperium in its death throes — which to be sure is a phenonmenon too real enough — to ignore the triumph of consumerism as both an ideology and a way of life in other metropoles as well as among the nouveau riches and the “new middle classes” of the “emerging market countries” (as the Economist magazine might so gauchely put it)
Exaggerated spending habits and consequent debt dependency among the US masses have as much or more to do with the peculiar use-value structure of US consumerism — the individual form of need satisfaction and the frontier mentality, rooted in US settler colonial history and currently manifested in the median consumer goods basket of a gas-guzzling SUV and a large-lot single-family suburban house — as it does with any peculiar and exclusive US disposition toward over-consumption
For example, if indigneous endowments of real estate and fossil fuels weren’t so scarce, the household spending patterns of mature Japanese capitalism would be just as profligate… but because said scarcities obtain, disposable income is directed toward low-impact and high-value consumer goods such as Italian luxury handbags and artfully expensive cuisine, rather than matter-and-energy-intensive powerboats and patio furniture… but the same fundamental desire toward “status differentiation through branded consumption” is still there
Hell, I’ve got 19-year-old kids in my university classes here who show up heavy-lidded at 9am because they’ve been awake from dusk to dawn, “night-trading” in emulation of the big institutional speculators who play the “carry trading,” borrowing yen on the cheap at less than one point and parking it in offshore Maltese accounts… all to pay the monthly note on their latest iPod upgrade or Honda scooter
God bless “authoritarian capitalist” China and Russia for putting the squeeze on grandiose US hegemonist designs, but you gotta know the propertied and bureaucratic cliques populating Beijing and Shanghai, Moscow and Saint Petersburg have no more ennobling mission in mind
The mindset that insists that such follies are distinctively USian is guilty of an inverse national narcissism, a cousin of the epistemology that is shocked and disturbed when occupied Iraqis don’t greet US troops with a showering of rose petals, in ignorance of the empirical evidence that lies beyond such tunnel vision
Not saying you’re 100% guilty of this, or even 50%, just saw an opening for some insights I’ve long wanted to unload
BTW, Jim O’Connor has a fabulous analysis, more or less along the same lines, in what he claims (or used to claim when I knew him well) to be his magnum opus… _Accumulation Crisis_
LD
Akita, Japan
19 June 2007, 9:22 amStan:
Good insights, too.
Read Henry Liu’s latest two-parter at Asia Times. He doesn’t get machine fetishism; but he sure knows how metropolitan finance capital does organized theft.
19 June 2007, 7:19 pmAlan:
Stan:
“Is there a lifestyle — a mode of living, a diet, a level of comfort and amenity — that we’re willing to adopt, that we could say (without arrant hypocrisy) is sustainably generalisable to the mass of humanity on Earth? …. And if so, what would such a sustainable — and happy-making — lifestyle be like?”
Yes. Short answer: a lower-middle-class, or slightly
lower, level of lifestyle/consumption (developed
world or U.S. standard) is approximately sustainable;
i.e. eliminate ALL the most egregious, unnecessary
consumption (airplanes, automobiles, etc.), but
retain the essentials and modest pleasures (e.g. a
kayak here, a computer there). Rule of thumb: the
lifestyle that one can live on an income of, say,
$6-8,000 per year, excluding rent. PLENTY for all
real needs, but insufficient to satisfy wanton
greeds.
Alan
STAN: Thanks Alan. I will go one step further, however, and ask if general-purpose money is compatible with sustainability; and whether “developed” world standards can serve as a system of measures for a sustianable world. Before we make the conceptual and decontextualized leap along a kind of US-centric continuum, ask the question, “How does everyone eat in a sustainable world?”
23 June 2007, 8:55 amNil:
“The minimum amount needed to be happy” probably has very little in fact to do with actual resources. As you note, the enormous resource consumption of US-ians does not in fact make us particularly happy.
So asking “the minimum amount of resources needed to be happy” isn’t even the right question. Sure, there is such a minimum–those starving, those without a roof over their heads, etc., lack it. But in the right circumstances, you don’t need much more than that.
I submit that the right circumstances have a lot to do with participating in meaningful work with comrades in an honestly egalitarian environment (that is, where both power and resources are honestly shared more or less equally)–and not much to do with how much Stuff you have.
28 June 2007, 6:26 pmAudrey:
From a tv report in Portland: “Woman content living in 84-sq. ft. dream home”
One woman is living in a house that you really have to see to believe. “It’s 84 square feet, so roughly the size of a parking spot. Actually, smaller than a parking spot,” says Dee Williams, who decided it was time to move. She was living in a 1,500-square foot home in Portland, but decided the house wasn’t small enough – yes, small enough!
Dee built the tiny cabin herself out of salvaged material. She picked the door out of a dumpster and retrieved the floors from a house fire. Dee’s new tiny home sits in her friend’s backyard. “In exchange, I do work on their house,” she says. It takes Dee five steps, sometimes four, to get from one end of her house to the other. “Two steps through the kitchen and you’re in my living room. Two steps into the living room, you bang into the wall,” Dee says, laughing.
Two solar panels provide electricity. A tiny propane tank allows Dee to cook in her $10,000 home on wheels. Do her friends think the 44-year-old hazardous waste inspector is crazy? “My friends definitely thought, well, they had some questions for me!” she says. The obvious question: Why?
The simple answer: “A simpler life, time, more money. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have a big utility bill,” Dee says. Her monthly heating bill in the winter is $6, less in the summer. “I’m able to offer money to my family if they need it, (and to) my friends if they need it,” says Dee. To get to her bedroom, she walks up a step ladder to her loft.
http://www.katu.com/news/local/8499817.html (the video link gives a tour of the house.)
I’m glad it made the news; we need more images like this in the public eye. But knowing how much of the world lives, as an outsider I would think it was very odd that a woman living in a small house is considered newsworthy here.
STAN: And this. Thanks, Audrey.
15 July 2007, 5:10 pmMichael Anderson:
Here’s a link to a website concerning a couple who made “Sustainable living” a reality for 50+ years. They packed light. Scott Nearing was the first person arrested under the 1919 Espionage Act. He defended himself and was acquitted. Might not happen these days…
http://www.goodlife.org/index.html
25 September 2007, 2:47 amMichael Anderson:
Found a book that might be of use in “packing light”. Had it many years ago and didn’t read or heed it too well, but now is different. It’s called “Other Homes and Garbage”, published in 1975 (and now out of print) by 4 Stanford Engineering students. A good layman’s intro to the subject of sustainability.
22 November 2007, 4:40 pmRobert Reed:
It seems to me that in terms of basic human needs, comforts, and accomodations, on the continuum between sleeping in the dirt with nothing and owning a mansion- one of those privately self-contained, fully heated, weather and and windproof, electrically wired, indoor toilet-equipped, basic cooking amenities included 100 sq. ft. homes is about 98% toward the “mansion” end of the scale. Maybe 99%. Or 99% plus.
Without the dust mice, the maintenance and upkeep labor and expenses, and last but not least, the horrendous energy wastage.
I don’t want a rec room, a dining room, a TV room…I want a clean planet that I can go outside and enjoy. And I’ll use the space saved by the smaller footprint for a garden.
21 December 2008, 2:53 am