Choosing between life and lifestyle

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.