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Choosing between life and lifestyle

By Peter McMahon - posted Monday, 30 April 2007


People in western countries have to make some tough decisions. We simply cannot continue to live the way we have been over the last few decades. We can get smart and change our behaviour, or we can keep doing what we are doing and condemn everyone on the planet to great hardship and eventually death.

The basic problem is this: pollution and resource depletion caused by mass industrial development, now occurring on an increasingly global scale, have resulted in an emerging global crisis. The two most obvious aspects of this crisis are climate change and oil depletion.

Rapid oil depletion would result in economic chaos, but climate changes threaten to end civilisation itself. The science tells us that unless we change our ways global warming will continue until it hits a tipping point, after which runaway warming will likely destroy the capacity for normal life on earth. Some scientists think we may have already hit that point; we can only hope they are wrong.

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Some people place their faith in new technology, but there are no signs that such a development can occur in time to put things right. In sort then, we need to cut back dramatically on fossil fuel use, and thus energy use overall.

Estimates as to the amount of energy we need to cut back on range from about 60 per cent to about 90 per cent of current usage. We cannot achieve anything like these reduction levels and continue to live the way we do.

However, there are two ways of looking at this problem that suggest we can effectively manage the change, as long as we are intent on doing so.

The first point is that we only need to go back to the sort of energy usage levels of the early 1960s. Life was not bad in the 1960s. In fact, whenever researchers look at actual quality of life, it seems life was optimal in the period from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s.

In this period the things humans actually need to prosper - nutrition, shelter, health, education and social cohesion - were at adequate levels. So our real material and social needs were being met.

But in those days we also enjoyed a more communal existence. Neighbours knew each other; shops, churches, pubs and other social infrastructure were within walking distance and served as regular meeting points; children played together in backyards and parks; the elderly were part of the community.

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Now, after several decades of economic growth, we have a worse nutritional situation, a worse health situation, and collapsing education systems. More and more people hide away in their huge McMansions and watch their wide screen TVs and suck down their choice of psycho-active drug because they are stressed and miserable.

Or else they are stuck away in suburban ghettoes with minimal social interaction. The young and the old lead increasingly lonely, isolated lives interacting with impersonal institutions or technology driven by commercial, not human need.

Things were hardly perfect in the 1960s, but it is arguable we lived a more balanced life in those days. The mix between the social, economic, cultural and personal was better than now when a toxic individualistic materialism has squeezed out most other things.

We can fix up the material things readily enough. We can convert the houses, establish proper public transport, rebuild community infrastructure, use our mass communication infrastructure to promote green and socially interactive practices. It will take some money, but mostly it will take intention. We already know what it would take and how to do it; we just need to decide to do it.

The second thing to mention is how easily it will be to make substantial changes that do not impact on real quality of life at all. The reality is that in our orgy of consumption, even the average person had become addicted to what were once considered luxuries.

We do not need the huge houses we build; we cannot even fill them up no matter how much high-tech junk we buy. We do not need the huge cars we drive, and we do not need to drive so fast (setting country and freeway speed limits at 80 kph, the speed at which most engines run most efficiently, would save an enormous amount of oil in itself).

We do not need to take regular holidays overseas. We do not need to take those interstate or overseas business trips. Increasingly, for many workers we do not even need to commute each day to work.

The explosion of increasingly trivial wants and the related technology over the last few decades has been remarkable. We have been chasing ever more absurd dreams of material satisfaction, as if the next kitchen conversion, the new car, the new generation phone or TV will finally make us happy. After all, the people in the ads look happy …

To take just one example of this obsession with the image of prosperity, let us consider the suburban lawn. When I used to work mowing lawns we used one roller mower and one rotary mower. Then came ride-on mowers (undoing the best thing about mowing, which is it kept you fit), then came edgers, then came brush-cutters, then came blowers and vacuum cleaners. All at great expense, all highly polluting, all noisy as hell. And along with them came new expectations; suddenly a lawn had to be edged and all the grass around the trees cut, and the few grass clippings left by the catcher blown away.

If we are so worried about such things, we can go back to hedge clippers and rakes. But really they were always just matters of aesthetics, and it is time we changed that. Maybe our gardens should look like pasture or even bushland, but not an English manor garden. Even if we keep lawns they should be left a little long to optimise water intake instead of being cut bare like bowling greens.

This shift in expectations, and aesthetics, and tastes, might just save our lives. We need to stop consuming energy-intensive goods and services and do more for ourselves. Be more social and less commercial. Shift our material wealth from the satisfaction of personal desires to meeting community, national and ultimately global necessity.

Most importantly, we need to start talking to each other again and we need to reclaim our time. We have become functions of our possessions, driven by the need for more and better, but losing our emotional and social meaning along the way. Mass-industrial society delivered us from want and disease, but it has become a mad religion that is about to cost us everything.

The decent housing, fridges, washing machines, reliable cars and telephones that appeared after the 1930s made real improvements to quality of life, alleviating our fear of poverty and disease and improving our capacity for socio-cultural interaction. Now our ever larger houses and cars, our obsession with electronic entertainment and processed food reflects our insatiable insecurity.

And the money we save from living sensibly will go to dealing with the emergencies that will come as drought, floods, storms and disease become more common. And it will go to making the large-scale changes that will be needed to adapt to our new low energy world. Personal wealth that once bought luxury will increasingly go to taxes and insurance premiums to deal with the big problems.

And we should become more involved in how our political systems work. Over the last few decades people have left politics to the professionals, which has resulted in popular apathy and structural corruption. Things are now too serious to let that situation endure.

The western lifestyle has become increasingly absurd, resulting in growing mental illness, widespread depression, poor health, social alienation, and it turns out, environmental catastrophe. We should never have been so stupid, and we must return to a more balanced life as soon as possible.

If those in the west - Europe, America, Australia, Japan - make this change, those seeking to become like westerners in China, India and elsewhere will get the message. If westerners do not change, only disaster waits.

If we can change, a new economy, a new politics, and a new society with different values will emerge that can deal with the global environmental problem. They may well turn out to make life a whole lot more interesting and enjoyable as well.

We don’t really have a choice in this, and we are just wasting time. To avoid global catastrophe the whole of western society needs to mobilise and change our ways. If we do the rest of the world will follow and civilisation will escape the trap we so carelessly laid for ourselves.

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About the Author

Dr Peter McMahon has worked in a number of jobs including in politics at local, state and federal level. He has also taught Australian studies, politics and political economy at university level, and until recently he taught sustainable development at Murdoch University. He has been published in various newspapers, journals and magazines in Australia and has written a short history of economic development and sustainability in Western Australia. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation was published in the UK in 2002. He is now an independent researcher and writer on issues related to global change.

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