Solving Climate Change

SUBHEAD: The key to this existential crisis is beneath our feet in the soil.

By Ellen Brown on 26 December 2019 for Truthdig -
(https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-key-to-solving-the-climate-crisis-is-beneath-our-feet/)


Image above: Close-up of living soil from the original article.

The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:

The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize. 

Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …

If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot. …

The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and it can be done while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.

The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role.

Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. 

Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.

Big Ag’s toxin-laden, nutrient-poor food is also a major contributor to the U.S. obesity epidemic and many other diseases. Yet these are the industries getting the largest subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, to the tune of more than $20 billion annually. We don’t hear about this for the same reason that they get the subsidies – they have massively funded lobbies capable of bribing their way into special treatment.

The story we do hear, as Judith Schwartz observes in The Guardian, is, “Climate change is global warming caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. We stop climate change by making the transition to renewable energy.” Schwartz does not discount this part of the story but points to several problems with it:

One is the uncomfortable fact that even if, by some miracle, we could immediately cut emissions to zero, due to inertia in the system it would take more than a century for CO2 levels to drop to 350 parts per million, which is considered the safe threshold. Plus, here’s what we don’t talk about when we talk about climate: we can all go solar and drive electric cars and still have the problems – the unprecedented heat waves, the wacky weather – that we now associate with CO2-driven climate change.

But that hasn’t stopped investors, who see the climate crisis as simply another profit opportunity. According to a study by Morgan Stanley analysts reported in Forbes in October, halting global warming and reducing net carbon emissions to zero would take an investment of $50 trillion over the next three decades, including $14 trillion for renewables; $11 trillion to build the factories, batteries and infrastructure necessary for a widespread switch to electric vehicles; $2.5 trillion for carbon capture and storage; $20 trillion to provide clean hydrogen fuel for power, cars and other industries, and $2.7 trillion for biofuels.

The article goes on to highlight the investment opportunities presented by these challenges by recommending various big companies expected to lead the transition, including Exxon, Chevron, BP, General Electric, Shell and similar corporate giants – many of them the very companies blamed by Green New Deal advocates for the crisis.

A Truly Green New Deal

There is a much cheaper and faster way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere that doesn’t rely on these corporate giants to transition us to 100% renewables. Additionally, it can be done while at the same time reducing the chronic diseases that impose an even heavier cost on citizens and governments. Our most powerful partner is nature itself, which over hundreds of millions of years has evolved the most efficient carbon sequestration system on the planet. As David Perry writes on the World Economic Forum website:

This solution leverages a natural process that every plant undergoes, powered by a source that is always available, costs little to nothing to run and does not cause further pollution. This power source is the sun, and the process is photosynthesis. 

A plant takes carbon dioxide out of the air and, with the help of sunlight and water, converts it to sugars. Every bit of that plant – stems, leaves, roots – is made from carbon that was once in our atmosphere. Some of this carbon goes into the soil as roots. The roots, then, release sugars to feed soil microbes. These microbes perform their own chemical processes to convert carbon into even more stable forms.

Perry observes that before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil – equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.

So how can we increase the carbon content of soil? Through “regenerative” farming practices, says Perry, including planting cover crops, no-till farming, rotating crops, reducing chemicals and fertilizers, and managed grazing (combining trees, forage plants and livestock together as an integrated system, a technique called “silvopasture”). 

These practices have been demonstrated to drive carbon into the soil and keep it there, resulting in carbon-enriched soils that are healthier and more resilient to extreme weather conditions and show improved water permeability, preventing the rainwater runoff that contributes to rising sea levels and rising temperatures. Evaporation from degraded, exposed soil has been shown to cause 1,600% more heat annually than all the world’s powerhouses combined. Regenerative farming methods also produce increased microbial diversity, higher yields, reduced input requirements, more nutritious harvests and increased farm profits.

These highly favorable results were confirmed by Paul Hawken and his team in the project that was the subject of his best-selling 2016 book, “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.” The project involved evaluating the 100 most promising solutions to the environmental crisis for cost and effectiveness. 

The results surprised the researchers themselves. The best-performing sector was not “Transport” or “Materials” or “Buildings and Cities” or even “Electricity Generation.” It was the sector called “Food,” including how we grow our food, market it and use it. Of the top 30 solutions, 12 were various forms of regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture, tropical staple trees, conservation agriculture, tree intercropping, managed grazing, farmland restoration and multistrata agroforestry.

How to Fund It All

If regenerative farming increases farmers’ bottom lines, why aren’t they already doing it? For one thing, the benefits of the approach are not well known. But even if they were, farmers would have a hard time making the switch. As noted in a Rolling Stone article titled “How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis”:

[I]implementing these practices requires an economic flexibility most farmers don’t have, and which is almost impossible to achieve within a government-backed system designed to preserve a large-scale, corporate-farming monoculture based around commodity crops like corn and soybeans, which often cost smaller farmers more money to grow than they can make selling.

Farmers are locked into a system that is destroying their farmlands and the planet, because a handful of giant agribusinesses have captured Congress and the regulators. One proposed solution is to transfer the $20 billion in subsidies that now go mainly to Big Ag into a fund to compensate small farmers who transition to regenerative practices. We also need to enforce the antitrust laws and break up the biggest agribusinesses, something for which legislation is now pending in Congress.

At the grassroots level, we can vote with our pocketbooks by demanding truly nutritious foods. New technology is in development that can help with this grassroots approach by validating how nutrient-dense our foods really are. 

One such device, developed by Dan Kittredge and team, is a hand-held consumer spectrometer called a Bionutrient Meter, which tests nutrient density at point of purchase. The goal is to bring transparency to the marketplace, empowering consumers to choose their foods based on demonstrated nutrient quality, providing economic incentives to growers and grocers to drive regenerative practices across the system. 

Other new technology measures nutrient density in the soil, allowing farmers to be compensated in proportion to their verified success in carbon sequestration and soil regeneration.

Granted, $20 billion is unlikely to be enough to finance the critically needed transition from destructive to regenerative agriculture, but Congress can supplement this fund by tapping the deep pocket of the central bank. In the last decade, the Fed has demonstrated that its pool of financial liquidity is potentially limitless, but the chief beneficiaries of its largess have been big banks and their wealthy clients. 

We need a form of quantitative easing that actually serves the local productive economy. That might require modifying the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has modified it before. 

The only real limit on new money creation is consumer price inflation, and there is room for a great deal more money to be pumped into the productive local economy before that ceiling is hit than is circulating in it now. For a detailed analysis of this issue, see my earlier articles here and here and latest book, “Banking on the People.”

The bottom line is that saving the planet from environmental destruction is not only achievable, but that by focusing on regenerative agriculture and tapping up the central bank for funding, the climate crisis can be addressed without raising taxes and while restoring our collective health.


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Mayan Civilization Continues

SUBHEAD: Usually when a civilization over-extends it experiences rapid decline in complexity.

By Albert Bates on 9 July 2017 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2017/07/maya-theater-states.html)


Image above: Illustration of a Mayan priest conducting a public ritual from atop a temple pyramid. From (http://wallpapercave.com/age-of-empires-wallpapers).

The collapse of the Classic Maya period, around 900 CE, is an active academic field, with many conflicting theories and a mountain of literature. While traveling in the Yucatán we are reading Arthur Demarest’s Ancient Maya: the Rise and Fall of the Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

One of the terms Demarest uses to describe the period is a “theater-state.” The ruling elite, known as the K’uhul Ajaw, or Holy Lords, were relatively hands-off with respect to economics, social welfare and trade but devoted lots of resources to legitimizing their political and religious authority through monumental architecture, art, pageant, sports spectacles and warfare.

This resource misallocation — taking away from the real needs of the populace, especially in times of stress — led to swelling the elite class, enormous diversions to unproductive types of labor, depredations from unnecessary wars, resentment from disenfranchised youth who were relegated to javelin–fodder, and, of course, ecological decay — as previously elegant eco-agriculture microsystems (using 400–500 species of plants) were consolidated into monocultures and overproduced.

A question Demarest probes is why, in so many areas, did not Mayan leaders respond with effective corrective measures for the stresses generated by internal and external pressures they could not have failed to notice.

We generally think of complex societies as problem-solving machines, in which elaborate chains of central command and control “wire” a nation to meet its goals. Yet beginning around the Eighth Century, the Holy Lords were apparently away from the control room.

Demarest thinks the problem was structural. Since the elites of the most classic Maya kingdoms did not farm or manage production of goods, the “real” economy was decentralized to community or family.

The role of the Holy Lords was to manage a “false” economy that was derivative, its only marginal utility being that it gave their Kingdoms some sort of patriotic zeal or sense of exceptionalism.

When these derivatives eventually began to unravel, the Holy Lords, like mechanics with a limited set of wrenches, did what they knew best — they intensified ritual activities, built taller and more ornate temples and expensive stages, props, and costumes, and scheduled more performance rituals, wars, and feasting.

Contrary to earlier results, however, these measures only prolonged or intensified the problems, led to further disenchantment, which eventually brought about whatever cataclysm dethroned them.

Successive rounds of quantitative easing had diminishing returns. The “real” economy suffered a century-long drought punctuated by severe droughts in CE 810, 860 and 910. Even the “false” economy could not help but feel reality intrude.

Today the theater state is shown in high definition and 3-D, and it resembles in its own way the grand Berlin pageants of Albert Speer as much as the scenes from Apocalypto.

Mad-Men have refined the manufacture of consent, to use Chomsky’s phrase, to a fine science, and as in Classic Maya times, military recruitment is viewed as a fortunate outlet for the unemployed.

However, a “classic” period, signifying the peak of empire and also a peak in energy, productivity, and population in most cases, is never sustainable, because it is inherently unbalanced.

Demarest’s insight here is that we tend to characterize every civilization in terms of “preclassic, classic, and postclassic,” but we might do better to think of it as “stable and expanding,” “unstable,” and “shrinking and reconsolidating.”


Image above: Illustration by Roy Anderson of rural Mayan farming practice that supported the empire. From (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/11/121109-maya-civilization-climate-change-belize-science/).

Preclassic Maya agriculture was exceedingly diverse, with agroforestry, household garden plots, rotational field crops, chinampas and aquaponic systems, and perhaps also novel farming techniques we have yet to learn about. So was the postclassic.

We have only just recently begun to appreciate that the “slash and burn” found in many parts of the tropics was once a highly productive and ecologically sustainable biochar amendment system when practiced in the ancient ways.

The Mayan preclassic food system was only marginally regional. While trade and tribute brought in salt, chocolate, hardwoods, hard stone, luxuries, textiles, and non-perishable goods, transportation of corn or other staples was largely prohibitive from an energy efficiency standpoint.

Moving corn on the back of a man 25 km requires the consumption of 16% of the caloric value of the load.

Transport from 100 km would have cost a third of the load in expended caloric energy. Demarest wrote, “Such high transport costs might have been maintained by a few Mayan cities at their peak, but more generally Mayan subsistence economies and markets were probably based on an area of about 20 to 30 km — a day of travel from the major center and its periodic markets.”


Image above: The Sprawl of Mexico City today. Photo by Paul Lopez. From original article.

Joseph Tainter’s famous 1988 analysis of civilizational collapses argues that what generally occurs when a civilization over-extends is not a complete disappearance but a rapid decline in complexity. Axiomatically, it can be said that the instability experienced at the peak of a culture is a function of over-complexity. 

While this might be true of the Maya in some ways, in other respects that analysis fails to satisfy. While the theater state of the Holy Lords reached a peak complexity and then declined, a different type of state followed that increased in complexity over what had existed in the classic period.

The end of the theater state led to the cessation of monumental architecture and the disappearance of high status exotic goods and ornaments, but good riddance.

At the same time, although at different times and speeds in different regions, there was a flowering and transformation to the new order. Extensive ecological, archaeological, and settlement pattern studies have found a resurgence of complex agricultural regimes that were well adapted to population levels with no indications of nutritional stress.

When the curtains were drawn on the theater state, the health and welfare of the people improved. With the loss of simple monoculture and central authority and the diffusion of complex microfarming diversity and decentralized councils, the new order recaptured stability.

What followed in the postclassic period were a diffusion of distinctive new variants of the classic culture, with strange costumes, long hairstyles, experimentation with new legitimating ideologies, and unusual features in buildings, sculpture and ceramics (e.g.: ubiquitous serpents, brightly colored murals, and the psychedelic temple complex of Tulum).

The Maya that flourish in the Guatemalan highlands and Yucatán today are as populous and even more vigorous economically than during the classic theater state, but they do not generate anything like the art and architecture of their predecessors from 1000 years ago. They don’t need to.
Demarest observed;

For at least 6000 years, the hallmarks of the Western tradition have been linear concepts of time, monocultural agricultural systems, overproduction and exchange of surplus in full-market economies, technology-driven development, a long history of attempts to separate religious and political authority, and judgmental Gods concerned with individual, personal moral conduct.  

As we learn from the Maya, none of these traits is universal, none of them was characteristic of classic Maya civilization, and none of them is critical to the fluorescence of high civilization.

***

Too often scholars and the public viewed non-Western societies with an implicit, unconscious condescension. We tend to regard their political and economic systems as incomplete (“less evolved”) versions of our own. Ideology and cosmetology are viewed as detailed esoteric collections of ideas fascinating for scholarly study and public imagination.

We also tend to emphasize aspects of ancient religion that attempted control of nature as “primitive science.” In so doing, we ignore the personal and philosophical challenges of experiencing another worldview — an alternative perspective on existence and death.

***

From an openly philosophical, subjective, and postmodern perspective of our society and its science, we are no wiser than the Maya priests and shamans in the face of these mysteries.

For that reason we can study the ancient Maya, and other non-Western cultures, as sources of alternative views of reality and of contemplation of our own culturally ingrained worldviews.

You can view the classic Maya as a less developed society trying to control the forces of nature and to survive economically. Or instead, they can be regarded as fellow travelers who simply chose a different path through the darkness.

The pre- and postclassic system of mimicking the diversity and dispersion of the forest allowed the Maya to maintain populations in the millions in the Yucatán for over 1500 years without destroying a rich but fragile tropical environment and biodiversity.

They are still here — still engaged in that work. That offers hope for us all.


Image above: A Mayan woman with weaving at the beach in present day Belize. The Maya continue their culture today with a population of about six million in part because they have been able to inhabit a single unbroken area including parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and El Salvador for millennia. From (http://jacerivers.tumblr.com/post/34217736135).

This is an update of an essay we wrote six years ago from the Fourth World Congress on Ecological Restoration in Mérida, México. It was published as part of the collection Pour Evian on Your Radishes in 2014.



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Living on PV requires change

SUBHEAD: Ways to live off grid on less watts is a necessity for almost all but the largest PV systems.

By Susan Patterson on 25 February 2016 for Off the Grid News-
(http://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/8-simple-ways-to-live-off-grid-on-less-watts/)


Image above: An off grid home requires a different more attentive lifestyle than living on grid. From original article.

How often do you take electricity for granted? If you are like I once was, it happens quite frequently.
Often, I would shut off lights and unplug things when not in use, but I still never really took the time to think about what it would be like to go without power — that is, until I spent more than two weeks after a hurricane in just that situation.

I didn’t like it at first, but after a while, it was kind of nice to read with a lantern by my bed or work hard while the sun was up and relax once it retired. I figured it must have been kind of like how life had been for my great-grandparents at one time.

I eventually did get into a routine, and it was at this time that I realized just how much the availability of electricity set the tone of my life.

Just last year I had the amazing opportunity to spend several months off the grid in a very remote location.

Although the home I rented had a well-appointed solar system and a back-up generator, there were still some things that I had to “get used to.” It took some time to develop a good working relationship with the solar system, and I prided myself on using the generator as infrequently as possible.

Of course, the amazing thing about going solar is that you can make your system as large as you desire. For me, though, there was some adventure to working with the system that was in place and having to adjust to the solar power rather than taking power for granted.

For example, vacuuming was something that was reserved for days when there was ample sun and backup power. We did quite a few things differently while we learned to live on fewer watts, and our off-grid experience was richer for the thought we had to put into preserving the free power from the sun.

Here are just a few of the changes that we made to our off-grid lives that helped us use less watts:

1. We never took a shower before the sun was up.
2. We never took a shower when the sun was down.
3. We only did laundry between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., and only one load per day.
4. We went to bed early and got up early (this proved to be most productive).
5. We used battery-operated lanterns and book lights for evening reading.
6. We unplugged everything — the coffee pot, the toaster, etc. – when not in use.
7. We rarely used the microwave.
8. We never left the TV on, and we used it sparingly.

I think the nicest thing about living on fewer watts is just the lifestyle that it dictates. You become much closer to nature and the rising and setting of the sun and much more aware of your surroundings.

The changes that we made did not come naturally, and it did take time to grow accustomed to them. But after a month or so, we were in a pretty good routine and had more than enough power for our day

I am convinced that the time living fully off-grid made me a more resourceful person, and I am anxiously awaiting another opportunity to leave the grid behind again!

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On Surplus - Part One?

SUBHEAD: My wife and are still adjusting our lives so that we might live within the means we can expect.

By Erik Linberg on 5 June 2016 for Transition Milwaukee -
(http://transitionmilwaukee.org/profiles/blogs/on-surplus-part-i)


Image above: Detail of cover art for the Rhythm Pimps "End of Suburbia" album. From (https://therhythmpimps.bandcamp.com/album/end-of-suburbia).

This is Part 1 of a 2 or 3 part series on the concept of surplus. Surplus is one of the most central features of modern industrial and democratic societies. In fact it is so central and its permanence so taken for granted that it is scarcely noticed and even less understood. The following installations are my attempt to discuss several of its facets, for the slow disappearance of surpluses is, I think, the cause of great bewilderment.

Overshoot
A few weeks ago I came home from work one day feeling utterly defeated, oppressed by a life-weight that was buckling my knees.  Money was short, jobs seemed ready to go off the rails, and there was no way I could stay on top of all the moving parts.

The driver’s side door of my truck would no longer open due to some sort of malfunction and a day of scooting over a passenger seat full of job folders, miscellaneous tools, and the other refuse of a contractor/carpenter life was making a previously broken wrist ache.

I looked around at our house and yard and saw the wreckage of a half-completed life.  I’m a third done with a home restoration project that starts when some money comes in and stops when it doesn’t, but going on year three I leave things set up and un-tidied as if to tell myself (and my restive neighbors) that the work is in permanent progress.  The sink was full of dishes, the garbage overflowing, and the living room an explosion of Legos, Lincoln Logs, sticker-books and crumpled artwork.

Dust-bunnies, dirty socks and cheerios huddled along the walls.  Only a fire or a flood. . . (I thought to myself) could solve this problem.  All of this was the results of two overworked parents who, already running large deficits on our own time, also can’t afford the hired help that would be necessary to keep everything put together in the wake of our twin four year olds and their boundless entropy.  This is not what I expected.  This is now how I grew up.

This scene is of course also our own doing and is indicative of quirks and weaknesses that my wife and I share.  But there are aspects in it that also represents a unique moment in American (and probably European) culture today.

For it is not just about a messy house and overwhelmed parents, but a greater sense of a botched life, of having not lived up to our potential, of grinding ourselves into nubs of our former selves without the prospect of relief; we fight our way through the tangled underbrush without hope of finding a clearing or a vista.

This moment is marked by a place where shrinking paychecks cross paths with our expanding hopes and aspirations, leaving so many of us frustrated, angry, looking for answers.  Though  usually misnamed, this moment and its trajectory seems to be all that we talk about, at least during a political season, though without any real understanding.

Because I have been a student of this moment for almost a decade (let’s keep things general for now and call it the changing wealth of nations) I know not to compare my life with the life of my parents, for the wealth of their nation was far different than is ours.   This difference will be my eventual topic, but I think the lived experience of it is a crucial groundwork.

I know not to make this comparison, then but there are moments of defeat or frustration, when everything seems such a hopeless and uncleanable mess, and I look around and feel like a failure as old images from my childhood--of clean and sparkling success--sneak out from their hiding place.

These images represent not only what I lived as a child, they were additionally pounded into the crevices of my being by years simply of living in America, the land of high expectations, where we walk to the uniform drumbeat of forced want and desire.

You can turn away from all this unfortunate cultural training.  You can know that success is not the same thing as having, and that simplicity can be beautiful, and imagine a beautiful and simple life for yourself.

You can read and write and march and protest in order to dislodge these images, bury them in community gardens dug until your fingers bleed;  but some are so deeply embossed on our emotional backdrops, ready always to remake their mark—ready, in my case, for the moment when the façade of my life appears to crumbling.

For when I came home that afternoon I suddenly recalled in the most vivid crystalline light an image of my childhood home, always tidy and well-kept, my parents relaxing in the shade, tending  the flower garden and reading quietly after supper.  It was an ordered life, lived well and well within its means.

But virtue of this order, it seemed a modest life; and compared to many portrayed on TV and movies as the most idealized kind of American wealth, it was a modest life--comfortable, yes, but without a hint of ostentation.  Their life, in any case, was the opposite of our frantic overshoot.

“Everything I wanted”
My parents did live extraordinary lives of the kind that could only happen in America and during a short and extraordinary time.  From relatively humble, evangelical origins they marched together away from that past to the top of academic ultra-success--my father writing the books, giving the papers, and directing the institutes, my mother hosting the parties and providing a welcoming place for graduate students and new faculty.  They did this without Ivy League credentials or any insider-edge.

In fact they struggled in the early years of academic life to discard their old inherited evangelical bumpkinisms, like confusing sherry for white wine, a crime against humanity in 1960s Ann Arbor.  They were sensitive, honest, and forthright--and faultlessly dependable.  They worked hard and with spectacular diligence.

And, as my father always emphasized, they were lucky.  Especially when two years into his Michigan appointment, a position opened up in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin, where he was to spend the rest of his days.

By the time he was my age, he had published a shelf full of books, many translated into dozens of languages; he lectured widely around the world, and was positioning himself for his end-of-career glory, in which he was bestowed with all the honors available in his field.  He was soon to publish the standard textbook on “the origins of Western science.”

He was awarded a Vilas Professorship from the University of Wisconsin and had countless life-time achievement awards from various scholarly societies in the decade before his death.  He was smart, of course, and very hard working.  He was disciplined, organized, a revered teacher and trusted colleague.

He never missed a deadline and his constant productivity was rewarded with a lifetime of summer grants and other funding that allowed us to spend a year in Princeton when I was four, and a year in Oxford when I was a pre-teen, along with countless other stays in various global academic hot spots.[i]

Because of the accompanying material comfort and stability, theirs was not just the picture-perfect academic life.  It was an upper-middle class life as well, even though we, like most people in America, felt ourselves to be closer to the middle than we actually were.  It was, to be honest about it, a comfortable life of bourgeois consumption, despite the high-culture and socially critical hue to it—entirely ecologically unsustainable despite its ordinary and modest lack of anything considered excessive.

True, we were more frugal than most of our family friends and neighbors, adopting new middle class conveniences like central air-conditioning, color TV, snow blowers, and automatic garage door openers after everyone else we knew had.  And true, as I noted, our consumption often had an edifying angle to it—Europe rather than Disney World, camping rather than amusement parks.

But the sort of “headwinds” that many experienced during the 1970s energy crisis and economic slow-down had no apparent effect on our lives.  The two week summer vacations never ceased, we bought new (if very modest) cars whenever they were needed.  We upgraded from a modest ranch to a larger cape cod style house in 1973, and we took a 5 week European vacation in 1974.

Despite the years of “stagflation,” the research grants (in the humanities no less!) and summer funding never missed a beat during the seventies, nor, for that matter over the course of at least five presidential administrations.  We were nothing if not economically secure.

If life in America might be called super-abundant, it was also ultra-secure.  That we might have a routine crisis (a car breakdown, the need for a new furnace or washing machine, even a kitchen no longer suited to our position in life) and not have the savings to address it immediately was unthinkable.

Life could be well-ordered and tidy in so many inner and external ways because, like a balanced ecosystem (though that it was not) the flows and supplies, the inputs and outputs all seemed to work according to a well-proportioned logic.

I would write a history of the structural tectonics of the 1980s in a much different way than I would describe lived-experience during the Reagan years.  Although my parents believed Reagan was a scourge on the Republic, they also enjoyed rising possibilities at the same time, though without ever understanding the connection.  The vacations became more frequent and more luxurious, the artwork real, the personal indulgences less reserved.

But still they saved staggering amounts of money—at least from my perspective--had long-term care insurance, a place reserved at a very nice retirement village, and were still able to put two children through private college and then graduate school, help with our home purchases, and still maintain large reserves.  My children, sadly (or not), will have none of these privileges.

Like every life, theirs had its turmoil and tragedies and our family had the normal mix of pathologies and dysfunction, resentments and disappointments.   But, at least in my mind, these never characterized the sum of their life.  As my father once commented to my mother, he had managed to get everything he had wanted in life.  This is an extraordinary feat.

The wants were not extravagant, but they were in many ways highly ambitious.  It was a beautiful life that combined hard work and discipline with leisure and enjoyment, intensive days of research and writing, and relaxing strolls by the Madison lakes.

Their access to money is alien to my experience, but even more befuddling is how much spare time they had—time to pursue hobbies, art, culture, and an active social life.  How did my dad write the books, paint the house himself, never miss one of my soccer games, read every night, exercise, entertain, work for hours in his woodshop?  Where did all that time come from?  And where has it gone?

What I Have
I learned a lot from my parents and consider my childhood to have been good training for my current life.  They modeled good parenting, and I always felt loved.  I was granted remarkable intellectual privileges, for we talked and debated and thought for hours on end as a family.  But beyond this, none of what I have been describing is available to me and my family.

To be clear, compared to most of the world, I still enjoy unwarranted privileges, but not with as much ease and regularity as many of my parent’s generations.

Although I have worked hard, especially over the past decade, to curtail my wants and redefine success, there are days in which I feel like a complete failure.  I have not, to put it bluntly, gotten very much of what I wanted, or at least I sometimes feel like that, and I probably should have more trepidation than I do about my family’s material insecurity.

When I set out in 1990 in pursuit of my own Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, I believed that I had every reason to expect that my future might bear some resemblance to my past.  We could of course quibble with the details but it is safe to say that my father and I have roughly the same general range of natural talent and I benefited from a life-long academic acculturation that he did not have.

He was more disciplined than I am, but I am probably a bit more creative.  He was more focused on the end-product, while I am probably more attracted to the ideas themselves. He was moderate where I tend to be radical.  But the same sort of life in the academy was not ruled out by some major break in in aptitude, intensity, or motivation.

As some of my readers are aware, I am a carpenter rather than a professor.  I had some successes in the academic world, including a number or articles in refereed journals and a page full of conference presentations.

But no job.

The life of a carpenter and small business owner, into which I fell backwards, has some marvelous features and it initially provided an interesting sort of relief from the very different competition and status-based world of an academic aspirant.  It allowed me to pursue urban farming, and perhaps a more radical and free-ranging sort of social activism and intellectual work.

I like working with my hands and my body, and have an interesting niche in the local restoration market.  The life of a carpenter has allowed me to feel strong, resilient, and capable.

If I can’t fix it, I know someone who can.  This is a gift in a world where most of us grow increasingly dependent on high-priced experts.  There is much to be grateful here, especially as the University of Wisconsin inches towards systemic collapse.

But this career path was only partially chosen.  There was a time in which I very much wanted an academic job and worked furiously to secure one.  I am at heart more interested in ideas, language, and concepts than anything else, and for the first time in fifteen years yearn for a life that would allow complete dedication to ideas.

In graduate school I wrote a very long and intense dissertation on the history of the idea of the unconscious.  Into it was packed all sorts of social and political philosophy, literature, and a focused study on cultural narratives.  I lived and breathed this stuff, and after a few years of practical respite in carpentry, still do.   I had some job interviews after finishing the dissertation—good jobs that I would have been thrilled to accept.

But, for a number of reasons, none of the jobs panned out and I was soon swept away, for a time, by the excitement of building things that pushed the limits of my knowledge and experience almost every day.

The usual path for a graduate student in the humanities looking for a tenure-track job is to become a “lecturer,” which, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is a step below the coveted “adjunct professor” position.  The mis-named “lecturer” is a transitional position that, for many, becomes permanent.  It even has a version of tenure, aptly named “indefinite status.”

That means they will probably keep you around as long as enrollments remain high, while those who are not given indefinite status by default have “definite status,” which means they are definitely not going to be kept around for very long.

Marx referred to the industrial equivalent of this as “mobile army of surplus labor,” and the lecturer (or whatever else it is called in other universities) is indeed the university proletariat, the caste my wife belongs to.

A lecturer in the English department teaches up to four classes (often, because of the low pay, supplemented by another class or two at a community college).

Lecturers do some of the most labor-intensive teaching in the university and often that which requires a level of teaching talent not required to deliver the weekly lecture that many high-ranking professors are permitted; in the English department they work with entry-level students in basic writing classes that involve thousands of pages of writing to be graded and commented-upon each semester.

Although it can be fulfilling (as it is for my wife who loves her students and is revered by them), this is work in the trenches in an institution that is supposed to only have high and broad vistas, and where only merit trumps equality but never at the expense of fairness and respect.

For reasons I will be discussing, the university in America today cannot afford its high principles, nor its lavish grants and light teaching loads.  The low cost of temporary and disposable labor is becoming the financial backbone of the university, just as outsourced labor is used to keep corporate profits aloft.

The wave of retirements (that made job prospects appear promising for my generation of graduate students) resulted less in new tenure-track hires, and more lower-paid and easily eliminated lecturers and adjuncts.  Professors bemoan this situation, but, I should add, are equally unprepared to share their privilege.  They too feel under fire from above.

I opted out of the lecturer track, falling back on my experience as a roofer (where speed, endurance, and focus are proportionally rewarded and at a much higher pay rate than the itinerant intellectual worker) while also finding promise in the growing remodeling industry of the late 90s.

About 8 years later, by which time I had built a small but solid company called Community Building and Restoration, we in the construction industry were beginning to realize that we had been banking on a system of borrowed home-equity money. and had been floating untethered within an exploding bubble economy.

Like most people in my position, I was almost wiped out when the housing bubble popped, found myself laden with unpayable debt, and came out the other side barely limping.  Things have never been the same since.

This isn’t to say that some business models aren’t performing well, as least for now.  But I have given up all former dreams of an upwardly mobile life of a small business man, where I might settle into leisure and comfort as I get older and hand off the harder physical labor work to underlings.  I don’t aspire to this anymore, because I don’t think it is an ethically responsible life, but I couldn’t have it if I wanted it.

There is neither a path from where I am to a parallel version of the life my parents made for themselves, nor for a university-based one secured by my wife, despite her rare talent as a teacher. In fact, there is scarcely much chance for basic economic security in our future.  I hope the university survives and that my body doesn’t break down too soon.  I worry about the next popping bubble, but probably not as much as I should.
 
My main purpose in sharing these personal reflections is, perhaps contrary to appearances, to explain the structural tectonics that have fractured the roads to success upon which many in my generation once set out.  My experience, I think, is not entirely unique.  The comparison between me and my parents is largely a generational one. 

On a whole, my generation does not live as securely as our parents did and our opportunities are shrinking.  This is born out in the statistics and in the life experiences of many of my peers.  There are of course exceptions.  Those who went into “financial services” live with excessive comfort, as do many physicians and lawyers and people in the “tech industry.”

But for most of the rest of us, whether we work in retail, the trades, manufacturing, as teachers, in most government jobs (the list could go on), the fact that wages have “stagnated” tell only part of the story of slow decline.

The life of a young university professor, one who did manage to find a foothold into the world in which my father thrived, also provides a good insight into a world I know well, while reinforcing my sense of generational differences.  The university is not funded the way it used to be, and, in addition to the truly beleaguered lecturers and adjuncts, tenured professors are also feeling a pinch.

They can live very comfortable lives, it is true, but the expansive opportunities enjoyed by my father’s cohort have largely dried up.  In the humanities, summer funding is rare, teaching loads are increasing, departments are shrinking, and even tenure is being questioned as the university is being “run more like a business.”

If I am honest with myself, these personal reflections are flavored with own bitter aftertaste.  I admit it—I do have a chip on my shoulder about the university and about the amount of unpaid research and writing I perform in my scarce free-time and for no compensation.  Living in a different generation, my father had more free time to do what he wished after he was done writing, lecturing, and leading seminars than I have to do any reading and writing in the first place.

There is some self-pity (since I’m already opening myself up for dissection, I might as well admit it all) in my moments of defeat, when I just don’t have the time I need to pursue what I value and what might get give me pleasure.  I do, as I have said, sometimes feel like a failure when life has run me down, and when I feel like a failure, I also feel a bit sorry for myself.  So there you have it.  This might all be read as an attempt to come to grips with my own pathetic little feelings.

But this may make it all the more significant, if for no reason other than the way  I have spent the last eight years on what I now think of as a spiritual journey—one bent on understanding not in  terms of personal entitlement and disappointment, but in structural and historical ones, the changing course of the wealth of nations and especially the American nation.  I don’t believe the world owes me a growing economy and increased consumption.

Just the opposite, in fact—for an economy the size of our current one has already overshot the planet’s biological capacity for production and regeneration.  I know this--and still the lived experience of decline and contraction is more than I can gracefully accept or emotionally process when my back is up against the wall.

My wife and are still only beginning to adjust the reality of our material lives so that we might live within the means we can expect.  We, too, are still in a position of overshoot.

So I’m getting personal, here, because I think the struggles I am able to articulate are ones that others will, though each in their own way, also be required to confront as well—if not now, then in the future.  Feelings, hopes, expectations, disappointments—this is where politics and the economy are lived.  And the changing wealth of our nation will give us a difficult journey.

Or maybe it is not so difficult, per se; perhaps we as a people are unprepared for minor challenges of a certain sort.  In either case,  my own unfinished journey to a new acceptance has taken lots of painful and persistent work and I still have a long way to go.

 And when I see the supporters of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump acting as if their candidate could possibly remake the America that my parents and their generation enjoyed, I see denial and postponement of the inevitable real revolution—one of expectations.

When I see faculty at the University of Wisconsin view their current struggles almost exclusively in personal terms of a bad governor and an indifferent state legislature, I see people who have neither begun to understand nor integrate at the level of lived-experience the great structural and systemic changes in the wealth of nations that are afoot.

I know I risk coming off as smug, here, but that is not my intention, even though (to be honest again) I do feel smug at times.  But I am also afraid.  For if the most educated and most adept at structural and historical thinking among us are not able to translate their own lived-crises into a broader systemic one, then what hope is there for the angry, frustrated and increasingly violent supporters of someone like Trump and all that they represent and portend in a world of decreasing surplus?

For those readers who have made it this far, I would only ask this: listen to my coming systemic explanation for the sorts of frustrations, worries, and disappointments that so many Americans are experiencing today.

See if it makes more sense than the usual explanation, in which America is suffering a temporary setback at the hands of bad governance or a false ideology or those on the other side of the political divide.

---

[i] There is of course a valid feminist critique of the support role that my mother played without question.  But on the other hand she was also revered among their circle for her warmth, humor, and friendship, along with epic garden parties and superb gourmet cooking whipped out with no apparent effort.  This division of labor in what from the outside, as least, was a beautiful life was of course made possible by the simple fact that a simple university salary was more than enough to exceed any material ambitions they had dreamed of as they set out on their life-journey. 

.

Notes on Living Small

SUBHEAD: My husband and I have been lucky, in a peculiar way. Our ‘freedom’ is highly contingent on living small.

By Christy Rodgers on 3 February 2016 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/baucis-and-philemon-in-the-21st-century-notes-on-living-small/)


Image above: Painting of Baucis and Philemon entertaining Hermes and Zeus circa 1800 attributed to Andrea Appiani. From (http://www.layers-of-learning.com/baucis-and-philemon-a-greek-love-story/).

I live in the nation with the highest rates of personal consumption and energy use ever seen on earth, and I live small. But it isn’t an intentional experiment, like no-impact, no-plastic, all-local, Tiny House, zero-waste, or any of the others that periodically make waves now.

I didn’t decide to start living small one day and rearrange my life to fit a programme. It happened because, as the memoirist Vivian Gornick says of living alone, ‘I said yes to this and no to that’ and at some point found myself in this situation.

Even though I’ve adopted a number of now-familiar lifestyle habits to limit my consumption of goods and energy, that’s somewhat incidental. I’ve also made some ‘small’ choices less trumpeted by sustainability advocates: I have stayed in one place for a long time, which requires far fewer resources than the constant uprooting common here in the US (where we change our homes on average once every four years).

My place happens to be urban, so I’m lucky that, at least in this country, it’s easier to be resource-efficient in the city than the suburbs or the countryside. I should say that this is not to be confused with ‘self-sufficient’ (whatever that actually means – there’s a whole other essay there).

The vast infrastructure that sustains me is profoundly wasteful; I’ve just limited my demands upon it somewhat.

I also own no real estate, no home or land. (Individual property tenure is possibly the most anti-ecological type of tenure ever invented, notwithstanding the hash some societies have made of attempts at large-scale collective tenure.)

I live in a rented flat; the same flat I’ve lived in for over 20 years. I live with my husband, who had been there for 15 years before I met him, in the city where he was born.

We have two rooms, a kitchen, and bath. We have no yard, laundry machines, or dishwasher, no children, no pets, and no car.

In fact, outside of this country our lifestyle isn’t particularly exceptional. To this day, millions of people live as we do in urban areas around the world, although it’s somewhat rare to be our age and not to have children.

At the same time many others, urban or rural, have even fewer possessions than we and have had to work harder for those they have.

And to be honest, none of this really came about because of an ecological awareness on our part. It had more to do with a lack of personal ambition, and a feeling of alienation toward the drivers of what is called ambition. So what does living small really mean, in this context?

The Principle of Expansion

What it really means in my experience is that some aspects of your life may simply roll to a stop, long before you are old. And they are precisely those that most people centre their whole lives upon, notably here in the US, but actually now almost anywhere in the world, in whatever social class.

Human life today is based on a principle of constant expansion. For the great majority born poor, expansion is essential for sheer survival. For the rest, it’s merely the only way life is understood to have meaning or purpose.

In societies where a majority has already obtained basic physical comforts, additional resources are sought to position one’s children to obtain even more, and to maintain and improve one’s own acquisitions indefinitely.

People also dream of having jobs in which they can advance, ideally becoming experts or receiving plaudits in some field, but basically always earning more. Others dream of starting businesses that could grow sufficiently to be sold at a profit when they wish to retire. Those who are already rich dream of expanding their empires.

Such desires may be costly in every respect, or generate inordinate amounts of waste, but they are invariably said to have social benefit, regardless of waste or cost.

My husband and I have none of those aspirations to guide us. We both do jobs that require some skill but are not central to our idea of who we are and simply enable us to survive. (It’s safe to guess that this is also true for the vast majority of working people in the world, whether they dream of doing something different or not.)

We have the satisfaction of knowing that our jobs are socially useful; many don’t, or the value is dubious. But neither of us works full-time, or has a much greater income now than we did ten years ago. We don’t need to strive for more because our needs are already more than met.

We find pleasurable things to do with the extra time and money we have, like taking trips to visit new places or distant friends. My husband plays music and occasionally entertains our friends or performs at local events. He volunteers at a local school. I have time to study, write and garden (I grow fruits and vegetables in an elderly neighbour’s yard, and in turn, she gets her weeds pulled and hedges trimmed by me).

We go for long walks, in places where the unbuilt world still holds some sway, when we can. And in a city that is a magnet for artists there are always cultural activities – sometimes involving people we know, an added pleasure.

Even so, we spend a lot of time alone in our flat. That’s mostly pleasant too: there are books to read, films to watch, meals to cook and enjoy. Living small, it turns out, is also living slow.

I’m content with this life, overall. It fits us, like comfortable clothing. It feels oddly like what people actually mean when they talk about freedom.

But I have to admit to an underlying unease – a sense that the engine of aspiration and expansion pushing others constantly forward is stalled in our case. The future, at least until we are too old to work, which is still a long way off, looks much like the present.

And then? Well, even if you spend most of your fullness of life preparing for your old age, even if you have children and a great deal of money – nothing guarantees you an old age at all. Much less one as untroubled and full of pleasures as the possible life you sacrificed to obtain that elusive future.

But all around us the world crashes, shrieks, moans, bleeds. It is filled with striving.

Freedom is a Ghost Town

It can feel a bit lonely living as we do. We are both outriders in our birth families, with whom we are not close. They value children, accumulation, and achievement, so our choices are odd and even troubling to them. Our friends may be iconoclasts in some ways, but they are still largely occupied with the demands of complex family and professional lives, and property ownership.

We still meet other people who don’t fit in: artists, intellectuals without portfolio, or sometimes just interesting drifters. But more and more as we age, those few true bohemians we encounter are elderly and marginal, and seem a bit lost.

Many aren’t inclined to sociability, although they may have time for it. Their air of depression or bitterness comes perhaps from being almost invisible to society at large and having no acknowledged place in it. Their gifts ignored, their ideas not heard; their example of personal freedom not much followed.

In a society where the ideal of freedom is invoked unceasingly with longing and awe, you can discover that freedom, when you actually get there, is a ghost town.

My husband and I were radicals who dreamed of building a different society, and spent years engaged in efforts to do so. But the times went careering away from most of our hopes, and we drifted out of movement structures and politics as they became increasingly abstract, repressive, and irrelevant to our day-to-day lives.

Our experience of them in this highly isolate society was also, ironically, antithetical to relationships of practical mutual support or ‘community’ (a word that often seems as emptied out by idealisation as freedom).

We have not made a separate peace; we have not deserted our core beliefs. But we have taken a quieter way of living them out.

My lifetime has seen utterly unprecedented human population growth and decimation of the non-human world. Like much else in my life, childlessness was never a wholly rationalised or altruistic choice; it was primarily the result of pursuing a shifting and mutual notion of personal happiness.

But I now have the unexpected realisation that, at least within the context of this time and place, it may have a wider worth – as a tiny legacy to fellow humans and other living things. I am more convinced of this when I read about the concern capitalist economists have begun to express that many of the world’s countries are already under ‘replacement fertility’.

All the more satisfying to me since their model – the one my husband and I spent all of our adult lives opposing – is entirely founded upon the principle of expansion.

All around us, people seem desperate to simplify their lives, make them less stressful, hectic, expensive. They speak longingly of the beauty of living day to day.

But even those with the opportunity to choose such a life would be likely to find its realities daunting.

Many are no longer able to simplify much in any case; their choices were made, their paths laid out long ago. It’s much harder to divest yourself of family obligations, major possessions, or a high-powered career than never to have had them in the first place.

Given the pressures to conform, belong, or simply exist, it’s understandable why people today would end up living mainly for the future.

And there are even older forces at work on all of us than the principle of expansion. There is a kind of heroic ideal with which we are instilled, and in reality, living day to day is very anti-heroic.

Baucis and Philemon

That idea of heroism struck me, as I cast around looking for some representation of our living-small ethos in myth or folktale. I think we choose the models for our personal lives based not so much on rational self-interest, as the economists would have it, as on mythic archetypes we often don’t even recognise, since they arose long ago in societies that are no longer extant.

The hero and the quest (or conquest) is probably the essential myth underlying personal ambition and the expansionist paradigm.

But what about my husband and me?

Of the many mythic tales, heroic, tragic, triumphant, or catastrophic, there is only one I know of whose characters seem exemplary and worthy of emulation to me. They are Baucis and Philemon, an old childless couple who are the archetypes of friendship and hospitality in ancient Greek myth.

They live in a town whose other inhabitants are all too busy or suspicious to offer food and lodging to several of the gods who come to visit them in disguise. When they die they are rewarded for their uncompelled generosity by being transformed into an oak and a linden tree, eternally entwined.

I discovered through reading Marshall Berman’s critique of modernity, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, that Goethe makes use of this story in his poetic tragedy Faust.

But he uses it in a different way, which is also, as Berman describes, a metaphor of modern civilisation.

Faust, as part of his deal with Mephistopheles, gets enormous power to shape the world. He becomes, late in the story, a kind of developer. He wants to build a tremendous industrial operation that he feels will benefit mankind, on a stretch of coast where Baucis and Philemon happen to be among the few inhabitants. He needs to evict them to get the land.

He hires men to do it for him, and tells them to do whatever they must and not to inform him of the details. So the hired men kill the old couple and Faust gets the land.

It’s an extreme metaphor for the kind of frenzied dislocation that’s actually been taking place in our home city as money and people with big ideas about making more of it come sweeping through, uprooting anything that’s in their way.

Elderly and disabled people are the majority of those long-term tenants evicted in this most recent wave, which we have so far escaped, for no logical reason. The Faustian bargain is not destructive to Faust alone.

The Limits of Civilization, the Abundance in Limits

As much as human striving has debilitated our global habitat, that habitat is resilient and it’s evident that it could rebound if the engines of human expansion slowed or stopped. But we are caught in a destructive tangle of consequences that first began to ensnare us tens of thousands of years ago.

We are an ambitious and clever species, even though ever fewer of us now have the skills that were once needed for our survival, and ever more are dependent upon tools we don’t even know how to improve or repair.

Like Faust, archetype of the civilised man, we want to believe our actions are motivated not by mere expansion, ‘the ideology of the cancer cell,’ as the naturalist Edward Abbey called it, but by a desire to improve our surroundings.

Yet every attempt we have made to ‘improve’ living systems rather than respecting their constraints and — as an increasing number of scientists have come to acknowledge — their irreducible complexity, has produced larger and more dangerous unintended consequences, at a minimum. In his provocative overview of the history of our species, Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the case that we may have worsened things in every sense, even for ourselves, except our sheer numbers.

And perhaps those of a few other species, most of whom we have enslaved for food.

And now, of course, for the first time in our history, our unintended consequences are global in scope.

Even with the Faustian powers of science and technology in its hands, today’s global civilisation has been unable to free itself of the bargain with Mephistopheles. It is still on the path that specialised, hierarchical civilisations have followed since they first appeared.

The only societies that have been ‘sustainable’ throughout the ten-thousand-year rise and fall of civilisations are non-hierarchical, place-based, limited-group societies. Where living small is not a catchphrase.

So I feel a bittersweet gladness in having, by a combination of chance and choice, found my way to a smaller life. What was once serendipitous has become my ideal.

Small is truly beautiful to me, for all I have said to qualify it. I’ve discovered (as have many before me) that when you impose or accept limits on certain aspects of life, you are gifted with unsought abundances. Above all I’ve been given time, which, when you think of it, is life itself.

I would say my husband and I have been lucky, in a peculiar way. Our ‘freedom’ is highly contingent, and our living small is too.

But it still seems better to be living this way now by some semblance of choice than because the way is compelled. Compelled as it was in the past that our civilisation is annihilating — compelled as it may one day be again, in a barely recognisable landscape of the future.

.

Thoreau

SUBHEAD: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

By Richar Adrian Reese on 15 August 2015 for Culture Change -
(http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/941/1/)


Image above: From an illustration of Henry David Thoreau from a 1856 photograph taken then he was 38 years old.  E(http://www.psymon.com/art/The_Wellfleet_Penman/).

Henry David Thoreau had a mind that was intelligent, complex, and rigidly righteous. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, into a family of uppity Unitarian abolitionists. After attending Harvard, he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years.

 Later, he lived with Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as a tutor, handyman, and editorial assistant. Emerson took him under his wing, and encouraged his literary efforts. Emerson owned land on Walden Pond, and he allowed the young man to build a cabin there. Living by the pond led to experiences that inspired Thoreau’s classic, Walden.

Thoreau built the cabin at age 27, and moved out at 30. His thinking was not yet set in concrete, and it wandered to many regions in the world of ideas, tirelessly searching for eternal truth. He read the ancient classics in Greek and Latin, and discovered that enlightened philosophers preferred paths of voluntary simplicity. He adored Native Americans, because they thrived in wildness and enjoyed a simple life. He worshipped nature, and loved spending time outdoors.

Unfortunately, he was born during a diabolical hurricane of what is now called Sustainable Growth™. Concord was becoming discord, as the ancient forest was replaced with gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, a lead pipe factory, and a steam powered metalworking shop. It was rare to stroll by Walden Pond in daytime and not hear whacking axes.

Railroads were the latest fad for rich folks. Countless trees were hacked to death to provide millions of railroad ties. By 1850, just ten percent of the land around Concord was forest, and wild game was getting scarce.

Obviously, the residents of Concord were not philosophers aglow with timeless wisdom. They were also not wild folks who had lived in the same place for thousands of years without destroying it.

These new people acted crazy! They were possessed, out of their minds, infected with the highly contagious status fever. They burned up their precious time on Earth in a furious struggle to appear as prosperous as possible — fancy houses, cool furniture, trendy clothes. If a monkey in Paris put on a traveler’s cap, then every monkey in America must do likewise.

Thoreau was not impressed. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” In 1845, he moved into his tiny new cabin. He hired a farmer to plow two and a half acres (1 ha), and then planted a bean field. Using a hoe to control the weeds proved to be far more challenging than his fantasy of humble simplicity. The net income for a summer of sweat and blisters was $8.12, far less than envisioned. He learned an important lesson, and this experiment was not repeated.

A low-budget life of simplicity required a low-budget diet. Thoreau’s meals majored in water and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal. Over time, he lost interest in hunting and fishing. “I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination.”

The second summer included a pilgrimage to Maine. He had a gnawing hunger for genuine wilderness that Concord could not satisfy. He also wanted to meet real live Indians, and be invigorated by their purity. Alas, Mount Katahdin was a rugged wilderness without trails, and the philosopher from Harvard was shocked by how difficult it was.

Big Mama Nature gave him a swift dope slap. In The Maine Woods he recorded her harsh words. “I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?” This nasty wilderness “was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.”

His experience with the Indians also disappointed him. After 200 years of colonization, their traditional culture had long been bludgeoned by smallpox, whiskey, missionaries, and civilization.

“Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes of the great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other.”

Sadly, Thoreau never experienced a community that was fully wild, free, and at one with the land. He returned to Walden, a tame and comfortable place, and buried some fantasies. He wasn’t at home in wilderness, and he wasn’t at home in civilization. Could he find peace somewhere in between?

He soon packed up his stuff, left the cabin, and returned to the Emerson home. He had learned a lot from 26 months of solitude, but he was wary of getting stuck in a rut.

After eight years of work, and seven drafts, Walden was published in 1854. It caught the world’s attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income. Thoreau’s sister died of tuberculosis in 1849. His father died of tuberculosis in 1859. In 1862 it killed Henry, at the ripe old age of 44.

He had spent his life trying to find a beautiful, healthy, and ethical way of living. His education prepared him for a life in civilization instead, loading his mind with myths, hobbles, and blinders.

Thoreau was well aware that his society was on a dead end path. Its citizens robotically submitted to the peer pressure of their culture. They could imagine no other way to live. The only thing they could change was their clothes. Consequently and tragically, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

His core message was “explore thyself” — question authority, question everything, every day. Never assume that you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane — it is not! Stay away from status fever, and the living dead that suffer from it. Go outdoors! Live simply! Live! Live! Live!

Thoreau’s world was deranged. But viewed from the twenty-first century, it looks far less crazy than our nightmare. He gathered chestnuts by the pond, a species that would later be wiped out by blight.

The skies were often filled with passenger pigeons, now extinct. Millions of buffalo still thundered across the plains. He drank water directly from the pond. There were no cars or aircraft.

Most folks moved by foot or horse. They did not live amidst hordes of strangers, they knew each other. None spent their lives inside climate-controlled compartments, staring at glowing screens.


Henry would have hated our world. His mission was to live as mindfully as possible. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”


Notes:
This article appeared on the author's What is Sustainable series, at What is Sustainable: Thoreau on August 14, 2015.

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1854. Download

Thoreau, Henry David, The Maine Woods, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1864. Download

Sims, Michael, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Bloomsbury, New York, 2014.

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Low Tech living post Peak Oil

SUBHEAD: Practical solutions to living in a sustainable world that might avoid disastrous Climate Change.

By S. Alexander & P. Yacoumis on 29 July 2015 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-07-29/low-tech-living-as-a-demand-side-response-to-climate-change-and-peak-oil)


Image above: Achieving a low-tech simpler lifestyle within the framework of a failing high-tech culture. The art work of Ethan Hayes on display. From (http://inhabitat.com/ethan-hayes-chutes-quirky-wooden-shacks-are-a-delightful-hodgepodge-of-found-materials/found-wood-installations-ethan-hayes-3/).

Abstract:  
Energy is often called the ‘lifeblood’ of civilisation, yet the overconsumption of fossil energy lies at the heart of two of the greatest challenges facing humanity today: climate change and peak oil. While transitioning to renewable energy systems is an essential ‘supply side’ strategy in response to climate change and peak oil, the extent of the problems and the speed at which decarbonisation must occur means that there must also be a ‘demand side’ response. 

This means consuming much less energy not just ‘greening’ supply, at least in the most developed regions of the world. In that context, this paper provides an energy analysis of various ‘low tech’ options – such as solar shower bags, solar ovens, washing lines, and cycling  – and considers the extent to which these types of ‘simple living’ practices could reduce energy consumption if widely embraced. We demonstrate that low-tech options provide a very promising means of significantly reducing energy (and water) consumption.[1]

1. Technology Fetishism
All problems have hi-tech solutions. This is one of the defining assumptions of our technocratic, industrial civilisation, and yet it is an assumption that seems to be failing on its own terms. As the world continues to celebrate the most ‘advanced’ and ‘profitable’ technologies, we find our ecosystems being degraded and our communities fragmented more so now than ever before.

Unfortunately, it seems that technology often just helps us get better at doing the wrong things, or the right things in unnecessarily harmful, energy-intensive ways.

Without denying the obvious benefits of many advanced technologies – such as the Internet, medical procedures, labour-saving machinery, etc. – humanity must nevertheless develop a more critical understanding of the costs of our technologies, costs that are often hidden or indirect, escaping our notice as we marvel at the latest invention. It is naïve to think that advanced technologies can solve all societal problems, and yet this naivety permeates contemporary understandings of what ‘progress’ and ‘sustainable development’ mean (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011).

The most pernicious consequence of this blind faith in technology is that it deflects attention away from the need to rethink our lifestyles, our economic structures, or our systems of governance, because it is assumed that technology will solve our problems without the perceived inconvenience of having to change the way we live. In this light, technology becomes an ethical void, one in which our societies are expected to become just and sustainable, without us having to live justly or sustainably ourselves. Even ethical problems are assumed to have hi-tech rather than behavioural solutions. This is techno-fetishism.

But what is technology? Technology can be defined simply as any tool, invention, technique, or design that assists in achieving certain goals. It follows that even the most primitive human societies were, in a sense, technological.

The prehistoric tribes that used fragments of stone to create axes were developing technology, just as the engineers that design spacecraft today are. Technology is a broad term, therefore, and so it makes no sense to be either for or against technology without stating what types of technology are being considered. Moreover, technology can only be judged according to some goal or end that the technology is supposed to help us achieve.

A technology may be very good at achieving a certain goal, but if the goal is dubious or comes at too great a cost, then the technology’s appropriateness is questionable, no matter how effectively or efficiently it achieves that goal. In fact, when the goal is misconceived, the effectiveness or efficiency of a technology is more of a flaw than a feature.

Technology, in short, is a means to an end. This calls on us to assess the ends that our technologies are serving, and not merely get lost admiring the often dazzling means. As Henry Thoreau said: ‘Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end’ (Thoreau, 1982: 306).

Granted, we have become very good at cutting down rainforests and emptying the oceans in the pursuit of economic growth and more affluent lifestyles, using machinery and techniques that would have amazed earlier generations. It is not clear, however, whether all such inventions have been a positive advance. Just because we can do something does not mean that we should.

Have our communities, for example, been enriched by Facebook? Or is there more alienation today than ever before? Should the development and refinement of ‘fracking’ techniques be considered progress? Or are they merely feeding an addiction to fossil fuels and hastening climate disruption? Instead of saying that all problems have hi-tech solutions, perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that many of our greatest problems have hi-tech causes.

At least, advanced technology has allowed our misguided ethics to devastate the biosphere in unprecedented ways. As we continue to degrade our planet ever more efficiently, and live in the shadow of nuclear weapons that still threaten to turn on us, homo sapiens may come to be described as the species that was more clever than wise; the species that chose to destroy the foundations of its own existence, spellbound by its own technological power but lacking the maturity to wield it responsibly.

Despite the ominous dark side of many of our inventions, many people still think that the problems we face are not because of too much advanced technology, but too little (see, e.g., Nordaus and Schellenberger, 2011).

Entranced by the many wonderful inventions that have genuinely advanced the human situation, techno-optimists think that all our problems therefore must have hi-tech solutions (for a critique, see Alexander, 2014a).

Geo-engineering is perhaps the most perverse example of this techno-fetish – a so-called ‘solution’ to climate change that risks causing greater problems without necessarily stabilising the climate (see generally, Hamilton, 2013). But geo-engineering is merely an extreme example of a more insidious and generalised zeitgeist.

The underlying assumption, once more, is that we do not need to change our ways of living or capitalist structures to solve our environmental and social ills. Instead, it is assumed that we must simply get better at forcing nature to do what she is told through the application of technology within a market-based society.

In an age so enamoured with hi-tech thinking, any consideration of low-tech solutions – which are the focus of this essay – will immediately be dismissed by some as being ‘Luddite’.

By ‘low-tech’ we refer to things such as cooking with solar ovens, showering under solar shower bags, drying clothes on a washing line, keeping warm with a woollen jumper rather than a heater, even using a bike instead of driving.

Regrettably, it is often considered an affront to human ingenuity to think that we cannot solve all problems with technological innovation and application. Low-tech is reproached as being primitive or ‘just for hippies’.

But could it be that various low-tech options are actually more civilised, all things considered, than some of their hi-tech replacements?

Could ‘advancement’ or ‘progress’ today actually involve a move toward, rather than away from, some low-tech alternative technologies? These are some of the questions we explore in this essay by attempting to assess the potential energy savings of various low-tech options. By doing so we hope to understand the extent to which a society could reduce its energy consumption if various low-tech options were broadly embraced.

It is important to point out at once that the following review of low-tech options must not be interpreted to be a blanket rejection of appropriate hi-tech options. The key word there, of course, is ‘appropriate’ (see Schumacher, 1973). There is surely a place for hi-tech innovations like solar PV and wind turbines, and arguably computers should or could be a part of the good, sustainable, interconnected society (although let us not forget that life went on well enough without computers not so long ago).

Without doubt, many medical treatments are genuine ‘goods’ also, and the list could go on. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But this essay attempts to examine with some analytical rigour the question of whether, or to what extent, various low-tech options provide an effective and available means of reducing energy demand. In an age when the overconsumption of energy underlies some of our most pressing problems – climate change and peak oil, in particular (as outlined below) – it should be clear that this analysis is about looking forwards, not backwards.

2. Living in an Age of Limits
Before beginning the substantive analysis we wish to outline the broad context in which this analysis takes place. First and foremost, this means acknowledging that we are living at the ‘limits to growth’ (Meadow et al, 2004; Turner, 2012). If once we lived on a relatively ‘empty’ planet, that planet is now ‘full’.

There are now more than seven billion people trying to live on a planet that has declining biocapacity (Global Footprint Network, 2013). Indeed, we are living in an age frequently described by scientists as the Anthropocene, signifying the first geological epoch that has been induced by human impacts on the planet. Geological timeframes are normally measured in millions or tens of millions of years, but the Anthropocene refers merely to the last three hundred years of industrialisation.

During this geological blink-of-an-eye, humanity has degraded Earth’s ecosystems in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented speed. Among a host of other ecological aberrations, this has induced what has been called ‘the sixth great extinction’ (Kolbert, 2014). Over the last 40 years we have destroyed over 50% of Earth’s vertebrae wildlife (mammals, birds, reptilians, amphibians, and fish) (WWF, 2014).

As George Monbiot (2014) asks: ‘Who believes that a social and economic system which has this effect is a healthy one? Who, contemplating this loss, could call it progress?’ Strangely, the last few decades are in fact widely considered a time of great progress, despite this continuing holocaust of biodiversity. It seems the dominant conception of progress is deeply flawed.

Humanity’s impact has been so devastating because fossil fuels have given us extraordinary powers, at a time when our ethical vision has been narrow and short-sighted. With this one-off inheritance of dense, stored, non-renewable energy, we have been able to use machines and other technologies and techniques to do things we simply could never have done without a cheap and abundant supply of energy.

But this power has come at a devastating ecological cost. Not only is global capitalism destroying the ecological foundations of the planet’s declining biodiversity, but the vast amount of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere is destabilising the climate in ways that is threatening the viability of the planet for human civilisation.

urrent trends suggest we are facing a future 4°C hotter or more by 2100 (Potsdam, 2012; Christoff, 2013), which climate scientist Joachim Shellnhuber argues could reduce the carrying capacity of the planet to below one billion people (Kanter, 2009). This presents us with a foreseeable moral tragedy almost unfathomable in its enormity. We may try to understand this scenario intellectually, but it is doubtful whether there are any among us with the emotional capacity to truly absorb the meaning of it (Gardiner, 2011).

In international climate negotiations, it has been agreed that humanity must avoid a temperature rise of more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2011). For this goal to be achieved, however, it has been shown that the wealthy ‘Annex 1’ nations need to decarbonise their economies by 8-10% p.a. over coming decades, starting immediately (see Anderson, 2013).

The problem is that historically, long term emissions reductions of more than 1% p.a. have been associated with recession (Stern, 2006), and while surely greater reductions could be achieved if we seriously planned for decarbonisation, it nevertheless seems clear enough that reductions of 8-10% year on year are incompatible with continued economic growth (for the details of this argument, see Alexander, 2014b).

The basic reasoning here is that decarbonising by 8-10% p.a. will mean a significant reduction in overall energy consumption, and given the close connection between energy and the economy (Ayres and Warr, 2009), an economy cannot continue growing in terms of GDP while also reducing energy consumption so significantly.

Therefore, effectively responding to climate change means transcending the growth paradigm that has defined industrial civilisation and embracing ‘degrowth’ strategies of planned economic contraction.

Not only does this mean transitioning to renewable energy systems and producing goods and services more efficiently, which can be understood as ‘supply side’ responses. It also requires that the most developed regions of the world simply consume less energy and resources, which is a ‘demand side’ response that must supplement ‘supply side’ strategies.

As well as climate change, there is also the looming problem of peak oil (and other peak resources). Peak oil refers to the point at which the rate of oil production cannot be increased (whether for geological, economic, or political reasons, or some mixture of such reasons).

When this happens, and while oil demand continues to grow, the price of oil will inevitably increase. In fact, this is the dynamic we have seen unfolding since the mid-2000s, when the growth of conventional crude oil began to plateau (Alexander, 2015), forcing producers to extract unconventional oils that are far more expensive due to their lower energy returns on investment (Murphy, 2014).

Oil, however, is often called the ‘lifeblood’ of industrial economies, and when it gets expensive, everything dependent on oil (which is pretty much everything) gets more expensive too. This begins to suffocate oil-addicted economies, as there is less and less discretionary income to spend paying back our debts, or to consume in ways that help grow our economies. And when debts do not get paid back, and when growth-based economies do not grow, life begins to fray in undesirable ways (see, e.g., Tverberg, 2012).

Many analysts think that this process of civilisational deterioration is already underway (see Heinberg, 2011; Gilding, 2011; Greer, 2008), a process that is likely to intensify in coming years as oil becomes scarcer; as climate change worsens; and as the broader limits to growth tighten their grips on the global economy (Turner, 2012). In this broad context, the notion of ‘deindustrial’ civilisation can be better understood. It refers to an industrial civilisation in the process of deteriorating or collapsing as the supply of cheap and abundant fossil energy comes to an end, fundamentally changing the conditions of development.

Deindustrialisation can also refer to the voluntary process of building a new, low-carbon civilisation as a means of dealing with energy descent and turning crisis into opportunity. That latter definition can sit within the former, and this paper is based on the view that low-tech living will become increasingly necessary as industrial civilisation continues its inevitable decline.

There is one point deserving of further emphasis. In response to the problems of climate change and peak oil, many people naturally hold up renewable energy as the salvation of civilisation, arguing that all we need to do is transition to renewable energy and the problems of peak oil and climate change will be resolved.

The problem is that it is highly doubtful that renewable energy will ever be able to sustain a growth-orientated, industrial civilisation. Although it may be technically feasible from an engineering perspective, the problems of intermittency and storage make renewable energy supply much more expensive and problematic than most analysts think (see Moriarty and Honnery, 2012; Trainer, 2013a; Trainer, 2013b).

Even if electricity could be affordably supplied by renewables, electricity only constitutes about 18% of final energy consumption (IEA, 2012), meaning that there is still around 82% of energy to replace, including oil used for transport, pesticides, and plastics, etc. If we try to produce that remaining segment of energy with biofuels, the production of biofuels would compete with land for food production, a conflict that also seems to be already underway, despite the relatively low levels of biofuels production today (Timilsina, 2014).

Biofuels also have a very low energy return on investment – between 1 and 3 (Murphy, 2014: 12), suggesting that they will never be able to sustain an industrial civilisation, as we know it today.

What all this means is that responding to today’s energy, economic, and ecological crises is not simply a matter of transitioning to renewable energy systems, necessary though that is. It also requires that we (in the developed world) simply consume far less energy.

Given the close relationship between energy and economics, a radical reduction in energy consumption implies embracing a post-growth macroeconomic framework and materially sufficient but non-affluent ways of living (see Alexander, 2013a; Trainer, 2010).

Again, this radically new way of life should be understood in a context of deindustrialisation, which involves trying to retain the best parts of the existing civilisation, and creatively using its existing products and waste streams, while eliminating (or letting wither away) those parts that simply cannot be sustained in an energy and resource constrained world (see Holmgren, 2012; Greer, 2009).

While this will involve using the most appropriate forms of advanced technologies to help us decarbonise our economies, the equally important but neglected part of the equation involves a deep behavioural shift away from high-consumption, energy-intensive ways of living.

We do not, however, assume that mere ‘lifestyle’ responses to climate change and peak oil are enough to address those problems. The subtext of our analysis is that the revolution that is needed must begin with individuals and communities prefiguring a ‘simpler way’ to live and beginning to build the structures that support that way of life (Trainer, 2010). The relevance of low-tech living therefore goes beyond its immediate energy and water savings, significant though they are.

Low-tech living can also play a part in creating the cultural conditions needed for the fundamental structural transformation of our economies to take place (Alexander, 2013b).

For present purposes, the essential point can be summarised as follows. Addressing the world’s problems cannot simply be solved from the ‘supply side’. That is, we cannot just transition to renewable energy and more efficient productive processes and expect the growth model of global capitalism to persist more or less as usual. Rather, we also need to consume far less energy and resources – that is, we must confront our problems from the ‘demand side’ too. This is the essential framework within which the following analysis takes place.

Low-tech options are being considered in this paper as a means of reducing energy consumption from the ‘demand side’. It will also be seen that low-tech options can lead to significant water savings, which, along with energy savings, is a necessary part of a sustainable way of life (for a justification for water conversation, see Brown, 2011). We show that low-tech options are full of potential and should be receiving far more attention than they do. They also provide paths to increased resilience – the ability to withstand shocks – in ways that will be explained.

3. A Review of Low-Tech Living
Having outlined why energy consumption must be reduced, the analysis will now explore various low-tech options that have the potential to assist in that critically important societal goal. This is particularly relevant to the energy-intensive lifestyles prevalent in the most highly developed regions of the world, but they are also relevant to the poorer parts of the world.

With respect to the latter, the argument is not so much that they need to reduce energy consumption so much as they should embrace low-tech as one means of escaping the conventional development path that is in the process of ‘locking’ them into high-carbon, industrial modes of existence.

The following review will consider such low-tech options as solar shower bags, hand-washing clothes, washing lines, simple warming and cooling techniques, cycling, solar ovens, non-electric fridges, composting toilets etc., in the attempt to understand the extent to which these options could help achieve the goal of minimising energy consumption, if they were broadly embraced across a culture.

Low-tech can also refer simply to behaviour change, as opposed to relying on technological solutions of any variety. While much has been written on low-tech or alt-tech options, the following analysis represents the first attempt to quantify with some analytical rigour the potential energy savings of a range of such options. We hope that over time these tentative figures and analyses can be refined, updated, and expanded upon.

A few words on methodological issues are required. As will be seen, some of the low-tech options below are more or less effective depending on weather conditions. For example, a solar shower bag will be more effective (and much more pleasant!) in warmer months or regions, and non-electric fridges may be more effective over a longer period in cooler months or regions.

What this means is that an analysis of low-tech options is ultimately context-dependent, and this means universal statements cannot always be made with much confidence. Nevertheless, by clearly stating the assumptions of the analysis, we provide the methodological framework for this type of analysis to be applied in various contexts.

Furthermore, although this type of analysis is ultimately context-dependent, there will obviously be much overlap between contexts, insofar as most regions of the world, to varying degrees, have something resembling the four seasons. Indeed, we have chosen Melbourne, Australia, as the case study for the following analysis precisely because it is a good example of a region that has four seasons (and also because it is our home region, which means we have been able to personally test and apply the following low-tech options).

Finally, the fact that different regions of the world have different weather patterns does not mean that the final energy conclusions from the analysis are only relevant to Melbourne. This is because there is something of a balancing effect that flows from different weather patterns.

For example, a region that has more hot days each year than Melbourne might allow solar shower bags to be used more often, while this warmer region might not be able to use a non-electric fridge so effectively; similarly, a region much cooler than Melbourne may be able to use a non-electric fridge for more months of the year (or all year), but find it more difficult to use solar shower bags. Not only that, several of the low-tech options (e.g. composting toilets) are not usually linked to weather patterns at all, meaning that the analysis is more or less universally applicable.

For these reasons, we would argue that the analysis below, while often shaped by a particular context, is of more general significance. As will be seen below, each of the low-tech options considered also requires more specific methodological assumptions, which will be stated as the analysis proceeds.[2]

We begin our investigation by calculating a baseline ‘reference’ scenario for each of the technologies discussed; that is, what might be considered the ‘typical’ use of the conventional technology in the Melbourne area today. Our reference household is a unit or semi-detached dwelling situated in the inner-northern suburbs and has two occupants, the most common occupancy rate in greater Melbourne.[3]

We conduct our calculations using publicly available data on appropriate usage metrics related to each technology under consideration (discussed on a per-technology basis below). We then develop multiple scenarios representing varying levels of adoption of the low-impact technologies discussed, and calculate the energy and water consumption under each scenario. These ‘alternative’ scenarios range from moderate to radical levels of low-tech adoption, which are also described on a per-technology basis.

Finally, we compare the reference and alternative scenarios to calculate the potential water and energy savings afforded by adoption of the various low-tech options.

The following analysis is intended to be illustrative of potential solutions in a general sense. We will, however, present our assumptions and the sources used to inform them.

3.1 Showering
The conventional method of showering is to heat water with electricity or gas. But using electricity or gas is unnecessary on warm days when water can be heated directly from the sun. Most readers will be familiar with ‘solar shower bags’, often used when camping, which are black plastic or canvas bags that are filled with water and heated in the sun. After a few hours in the sun the water is warm enough to use for a comfortable shower, without requiring energy inputs other than free, zero-carbon sunlight. But why should solar shower bags only be used when camping?

In the reference scenario, based on conventional methods of showering, we assume an average shower duration of 5.6 minutes[4] and an average flow rate of 6.5 litres per minute[5] (L/min), giving us an average of 36 litres of water use per shower. In line with actual observations, we assume occupants shower 5.6 times per week on average.[6]

A reasonable estimate is that half (18L) of the water used for showering is heated.[7] Assuming the household hot water system must heat water by 45 degrees Celsius to reach the set thermostat temperature of 60 degrees,[8] and that the water is heated with a ‘task efficiency’ of 73% (using an electric storage system),[9] we estimate that the end-use energy consumption for a single shower is 1.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh).

In terms of the alternative scenarios, we also make several assumptions. We suppose, firstly, that 20L is a sufficient volume of water when using the solar shower – a reasonable estimate based on personal experience.[10]

We recognise that weather conditions can render a solar shower either uncomfortable or impossible on some days, so we consider only days between October and April (the warmer months in Australia), with a maximum temperature over 22 degrees Celsius, and with more than 4 hours of sunlight, as suitable for the purposes of solar showering. According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, these criteria yielded 108 suitable days for solar showering in Melbourne over the 2013-2014 period.[11] For simplicity, we assume that whenever a solar shower is possible (108 days), it will be taken.

The reference scenario yielded a result of 21,199 litres of water and 851 kWh of energy consumed by our two-person household annually. Five alternative scenarios are described as follows:

· Moderate 1: Reducing shower time to 3 minutes with no use of a solar shower.

· Moderate 2: Using a solar shower, when possible, but showering regularly otherwise.

· Strong 1: Using a solar shower, when possible, and reducing shower time to 3 minutes otherwise.

· Strong 2: Using a solar shower, when possible, otherwise reducing shower time to 3 minutes, and reducing shower frequency by one-third (equivalent of showering around 4 times per week).

· Radical: Using a solar shower, when possible, otherwise reducing shower time to 3 minutes, and reducing shower frequency by two-thirds (equivalent of showering around 2 times per week).

The results, based on a two-person household, are summarised below in Table 1:

	Annual water saving (L)	Annual water saving (%)	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
Moderate 1	9842.6	46%	352.8	46%
Moderate 2	3542.4	17%	281.8	37%
Strong 1	9734.6	46%	503.8	66%
Strong 2	13556.2	64%	589.2	78%
Radical	17377.8	< 82%	674.5	89%>

Table 1: Potential water and energy savings from low-tech showering practices

It is clear that changing our showering behaviour, in terms of shower duration and frequency, has an enormous impact on our water and energy consumption. Under the ‘radical’ scenario our two-person household is saving over 17,000 litres of water per year, and reducing shower-related energy consumption by nearly 90%.

An interesting point to note is that reducing shower time to 3 minutes, without using a solar shower, actually saves more water and energy than simply replacing conventional showers with a solar shower, when possible. Nevertheless, the low-tech solar shower bag clearly provides a way to save significantly more energy and water when combined with taking shorter and less frequent showers.

3.2 Heating
Conventional heating methods involve using gas or electricity to heat living areas. Low-tech alternatives can reduce the need for such energy-intensive heating methods by wearing woollen clothing, insulating one’s home well, and, when heating is deemed necessary, heating fewer spaces.

Our reference household is equipped with a wall-mounted gas space heater. A commonly accepted value for average household heating demand is 0.1 kW per square metre,[12] which we adopt in this paper. We assume heating is required in an area of the house with a floor area totalling 60 square metres. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics most Victorian households use heating for more than 3 months, but less than 6 months, of the year.[13]

We take a baseline of 150 days (approximately 5 months) as our reference scenario and assume that the heater is in operation for an average of 8 hours on each of these days. In addition, based on SA government figures, we assume a heater efficiency of 75%. We acknowledge that insulation varies greatly in housing across Melbourne, as does the health status of individuals, so we leave scope for the necessity of artificial heating in times of temperature extremes.

This reference scenario sees our household consuming 9,600 kWh of energy annually for heating, a figure that aligns closely with CSIRO estimates.[14] Three alternative scenarios are described as follows, all of which assume appropriate clothing:

· Moderate: Insulating house well, and halving the amount of time each day heating is used (i.e. 3 hours instead of 6).

· Strong: Insulating house well, heating only on days between May and September (Australian winter) with a maximum temperature below 15 degrees Celsius (41 days in total for 2014, according to the Bureau of Meteorology), and halving the amount of time heating is used on these days.

· Radical: Insulating house well, heating only on the 10 coldest days, and halving the amount of time heating is used on these days.

The results are summarised in the following table:

	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
Moderate	4800	50%
< Strong	8288	86%
Radical	9280	97%

Table 2: Potential energy savings from low-tech heating practices

From this analysis we see that we can save upwards of 90% of our energy consumption for heating space by simply adopting the humble sweater as our modus operandi in order to keep warm, rather than relying on energy-intensive heating appliances. This would obviously require a ‘reframing’ of our attitudes to keeping warm, but if that inner work was done (see generally, Burch, 2013) then staying warm in a low-carbon world would be achievable in many climates without hardship.

Well-designed, passive solar houses with good insulation would also assist greatly. Other low-tech heating options include highly efficient rocket stove thermal mass heaters, which could be especially useful in colder regions of the world. But the best place to start is with appropriate clothing (Havenith, 1999).

3.3 Cooling
The conventional means of cooling houses on hot days is to use air-conditioners, which are energy-intensive to operate. Low-tech and low-energy alternatives exist, such as closing curtains or blinds to keep the sun out, or using simple fans rather than air-conditioners. 

Data made available by the South Australian government suggests that ducted evaporative air conditioners consume approximately 1.5 kW of energy and 24 L of water every hour on average,[15] which we take as representative of the Victorian context also. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics almost half of all Victorian households use their air conditioners between 1 and 3 months of the year.[16] We take a point of 60 days as our reference scenario and, in addition, assume that the air conditioner is in operation for an average of 6 hours on each of these days.

For the low-tech scenarios, we assume a mid-range value of energy consumption for ceiling and portable fans based on SA governments data (0.0667 kW per hour). In calculating the use of fans, we assume our occupants require 3 rooms to be artificially cooled. We acknowledge that insulation varies greatly in housing across Melbourne, as does the health status of individuals, so we leave scope for the necessity of artificial cooling in times of temperature extremes.

The reference scenario sees our household consuming 540 kWh of energy and 8,640 litres of water annually to cool the house in hot temperatures. Three alternative scenarios are described as follows:

· Moderate: Using blinds as insulation from sunlight/external heat, and halving the amount of time each day air conditioning is used (i.e. 3 hours instead of 6).

· Strong: Using blinds as insulation and air conditioning only on days with a maximum temperature above 35 degrees Celsius (10 days in total for 2014, according to the Bureau of Meteorology).

·  Radical: Using blinds as insulation, and fans instead of air conditioning on days above 35 degrees Celsius.

The results are summarised in the following table:

	Annual water saving (L)	Annual water saving (%)	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
Moderate	4320	50%	270	50%
Strong	7200	83%	450	83%
Radical	8640	100%	528	98%

Table 3: Potential water and energy savings from low-tech cooling practices

We can see that, by significantly increasing our reliance on blinds to keep out heat and restricting our reliance on air conditioning to days when temperatures soar, we can reduce our cooling-related energy and water usage by well over three-quarters. Moreover, if we choose fan cooling instead of air conditioning on such days, we eradicate nearly all cooling-related energy and water consumption.

3.4 Drying clothes
The conventional way to dry clothes is to use an electric clothes dryer, which is very energy-intensive. A low-tech alternative is to use a simple washing line to dry clothes outside.

According to Sustainability Victoria, the average dryer use by Victorian households is 78 cycles per year, or 1.5 cycles per week.[17] Taking a mid-range approach to their energy data, we calculate an average per-cycle energy consumption of 4.6 kWh, and an annual energy consumption of 359 kWh, which represents our reference scenario.

Three alternative scenarios are described as follows:

· Moderate: Reducing electric drying to the four coldest and wettest months of the year, and using a clothesline otherwise.

· Strong: Running the dryer for only five cycles per year (say, on the wettest and coldest days), and using a clothesline otherwise.

· Radical: Using a clothesline only throughout the year (some days may necessitate indoor clothes drying racks).

The results are summarised in the following table:

	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
Moderate	239.2	67%
Strong	335.8	94%
Radical	358.8	100%

Table 4: Potential energy savings from low-tech clothes drying practices

The decision to dry clothes by clothesline rather than electric dryer can save a significant amount of energy, up to 100% if adopted as a complete replacement. From experience we know this can be achieved without hardship in Melbourne. At most it requires some planning in winter to ensure that washing is done on sunny days.

3.5 Television
The conventional way to spend leisure is to watch many hours of television each day, often on large, energy-intensive plasma screens. The low-tech alternative is to turn off the TV and spend leisure in ways that do not depend on energy-intensive technologies (e.g. reading a book, playing the guitar, talking with friends, doing craft, etc.).  

Our reference scenario assumes two televisions in the household, reflecting the national average[18], both of which are 32 inch LCD screens (the most popular TV in terms of sales in 2009).[19] The average number of hours of TV each occupant watches in the house also reflects the national average: approximately 3 hours per day.¹⁷ Energy consumption for a TV in use is estimated at 0.15 kW,¹⁷ and standby energy consumption is 0.001 kW.¹⁶

We have assumed the occupants watch 2 hours of TV together, plus one hour separately each day. This equals a daily total of 4 hours of TV operation. The reference scenario energy consumption therefore totals 235 kWh per year.

Three alternative scenarios are as follows:

· Moderate: Halving TV watching time, but keeping TVs in standby mode when not in use.

· Strong: Watching only 5 hours per week, and switching TVs off at wall when not in use.

· Radical: Removing TVs altogether (or watching negligible amounts).

The results are summarised in the following table:

	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
Moderate	108.77	46%
Strong	< 196.06	83%
Radical	235.06	100%

Table 5: Potential energy savings from low-tech (non-television) leisure activities  

It’s clear that reducing TV watching time is a much more effective energy-saving behaviour than simply ensuring the TV is switched off at the wall when not in use. Not only would this transition reduce energy consumption directly, it would also mean less exposure to consumerist messages from advertising that promotes energy-intensive lifestyles. This means there would likely be indirect energy savings too.

3.6 Driving
The conventional means of transporting ourselves to and from work and leisure activities is to drive in a private motor vehicle. In many parts of the world, however, there are public transport options available, as well as the option of cycling. Shorter trips could be walked.  

Perhaps the most involved analysis, the following calculations largely draw on ‘average usage’ statistics for private vehicles and public transport (PT) published by the Victorian Government Department of Transport and the Public Transport Users Association. Many of these details, while crucial to our calculations, are not vital for describing the various scenarios, and so will be included only in the Appendix.

There are several assumptions that we should note at this stage, however, to set the context for our reference scenario. We are first assuming that both our occupants are of working age, own a car each, and drive to work separately. We assume that each work trip is a 16km round trip, half of all trips made are shorter than 5km (corresponding closely with data for Melbourne published by Deakin University),[20] and of those shorter trips the average is 3km.

The total distance each occupant travels per day is 33 kilometres, 83% of which is by car and a further 12.5% by a mix of PT modes – bus, train and tram. Some trips are shared. We also assume that a greater shift to cycling and PT is feasible for the occupants of our household, which is not unreasonable for most inner-suburban residents in fair health.

The reference scenario for our household yields an annual energy consumption of 18773 kWh for transport, which is one of the largest contributors to household energy consumption.


Three alternative scenarios are described as follows:

· Moderate: Switching to public transport for all work trips.

· Strong: All trips under 5km are walked or cycled, a car is used for one trip per week (an average of 5km per week) by each occupant, public transport is used for all other trips.

· Radical: Shared car usage totalling 100km over the course of a year, all other trips are walked or cycled.

The results are summarised as follows:

	Annual energy saving (kWh)	Annual energy saving (%)
< Moderate	8361.6	45%
Strong	15504.0	83%
Radical	18659.2	99%

Table 6: Potential energy savings from low-tech transport practices

We can see that even with a modest change to our travel decisions – for example, shifting from private vehicle to public transport for work trips only – we can potentially save a significant amount of fossil fuel energy. By choosing the bicycle as our preferred mode of transport we are able to realise an even greater energy benefit.

3.7 Five Other Low-Tech Options (in brief)
The above analysis has demonstrated that low-tech options can lead to huge energy and water savings, depending on the degree to which they are adopted. 

We conclude this part of the analysis with a more conceptual discussion of several more low-tech options, which in the future could also receive the same type of analysis we have undertaken above.

For present purposes, we simply highlight some of the more interesting and promising options:

· Solar ovens / parabolic solar dishes: The conventional means of cooking food is with gas or electric ovens and stoves. Solar ovens and parabolic solar dishes provide a hugely promising means of replacing those methods, on suitable days, using free energy from the sun and without hi-tech PV solar panels.

· Fridge / Freezer: The conventional means of keeping food sufficiently cold or frozen is to use a fridge and freezer, both of which are energy intensive. However, in many parts of the world, including Melbourne, the winter months are sufficiently cold to keep food from spoiling too quickly without a fridge, and there are other low-tech options that can help keep food for longer even in warmer months and warmer regions of the world (e.g. evaporative coolers). Behavioural and dietary changes (e.g. eat less meat and dairy or purchase meat on the day it is to be consumed) can also make it easier to turn off your fridge/freezer. While this low-tech option may indeed find fewer supporters than the others, we nevertheless feel this deserves to be included because the fridge-freezer is a significant category of energy consumption in the household. This also challenges us to think through whether we could cope well enough even if something as seemingly indispensable as a fridge-freezer were not available. It can be helpful to remember that the fridge/freezer is a relatively new innovation, and many of our ancestors survived without one.

· Hand washing clothes and dishes: The conventional means of washing clothes and dishes is to use an electric washing machine. Dishes can be washed by hand, and clothes can be washed in a tub with a manual agitator, especially in the warmer months when a spin-dryer is not necessary.

· Organic food: Industrial methods of food production and global distribution are incredibly complex and energy-intensive. Local, organic food production – a low-tech option which was used throughout history – is far less-energy intensive, but does require more human labour. Any transition to a low-carbon world is going to require industrial and globalised methods to be replaced by local and organic methods (Jeavons, 2012).

· Composting toilets: Following on from the last point, in order to replace the fossil-fuel dependent fertilisers used widely in industrial food production today, we are going to need a huge increase in organic fertilisers. One promising low-tech option is to compost human waste for ‘humanure’ via composting toilets (see Jenkins, 2005). Currently most people conceive of human waste as a problem, but it could be part of the solution if we compost it responsibly. This would significantly reduce or eliminate the need for fossil-fuel dependent fertilisers as well as hugely reduce or eliminate the amount of water required in flushing toilets. As these systems become universally adopted, we would also lessen the need for complex and centralised sewage infrastructure that currently depend on fossil fuels.

4. Conclusion
Although the analysis above has much room for refinement and development in context and household specific ways, it has been demonstrated that what we have called low-tech options have the potential to significantly reduce the energy intensity (and water intensity) of our ways of living. 

Our personal experience practising all of these low-tech options at times, many of them often, and some of them always, also gives us confidence that the results above are broadly correct. Indeed, when low-tech ‘demand side’ strategies are applied in conjunction with hi-tech ‘supply side’ strategies (e.g. solar PV), our personal experience confirms that people can be net-producers of renewable electricity, provided ordinary consumption of electricity is significantly reduced.

Moreover, we know that this can be done without diminishing quality of life, although low-tech practices do often demand a greater time investment than their conventional alternatives, which can call for broader lifestyle changes to accommodate this increased time commitment.

Adopting low-tech options certainly requires a rethinking of conventional practices and attitudes, but if we are serious about a ‘demand side’ response to climate change and peak oil – which is a necessary part of any effective response – then these low-tech options are likely to be a critical part of any future adaptation to an energy descent context.

Many people will resist this conclusion, no doubt, and insist that we can universalise the conventional ‘affluent’ ways of living as well as create a post-carbon world. But this is an unjustifiable assumption, which may arise in part from a blind faith in technological solutions or perhaps from a natural human aversion to change. A post-carbon world, however, means a world far less energy-intensive than developed regions of the world, and transitioning to such a world probably implies, whether we like it or not, the embrace of some low-tech options.

Importantly, these low-tech options deserve consideration not just as a means of voluntarily responding to climate change and peak oil. They can also be seen as ways of becoming more resilient in circumstances of economic shock, recession, disruption or collapse, where it may be that the conventional ways of living simply aren’t available or affordable (see De Young and Princen, 2012). In other words, the low-tech options demonstrate ways to adapt to challenging circumstances, even if they are not freely chosen in advance.

Of course, it would be far better to begin working toward these low-tech options now, because prevention of energy crises would be more desirable than dealing with them when they arrive. Accordingly, we ought to be giving these low-tech options more consideration now, because energy and economic crises are already unfolding, and deeper crises seem to be on the horizon (Friedrichs, 2013; Turner, 2012; Gilding, 2011).

This analysis sits in the broader context of a world facing social and environmental crises that cannot be solved within consumer capitalism. Low-tech options are part of an alternative vision of progress that involves rejecting affluent lifestyles for environmental and social justice reasons, and moving toward a ‘simpler way’ of life based on material sufficiency, highly-localised economies, and self-governing communities (see Trainer, 2010; Alexander, 2012; Alexander, 2013a).

Our argument must not, however, be interpreted as a blanket rejection of advanced technology, which certainly has its place. Nor have we argued that the energy crises we face have mere ‘lifestyle’ solutions. There are a great many structural issues that must be addressed too.

But we hope this analysis helps provoke a broader conversation about which technologies are ‘appropriate’ for our times. When the humble washing line is compared with the electric clothes dryer, one can certainly sympathise with Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous decree: ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’

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Appendix
Some key assumptions in calculating transport scenarios are provided below for transparency.

The public transport mix used by our household occupants is assumed to be: 10% distance travelled by bus, 40% by train and 50% by tram. This appears to be a reasonable estimation based on local usage of these transport modes. Moreover, different PT mixes yield similar results in terms of energy savings due to the vast difference between private vehicle and PT energy consumption per passenger.

We have assumed zero energy consumption for walking and cycling. Of course, this is not strictly true, as our bodies require energy to undertake these activities. However, such activities consume an essentially negligible amount of energy when compared with fossil fuelled transportation.

Furthermore, we argue that as the body requires a certain level of physical activity to remain healthy, much of the energy consumption for these ‘manual’ forms of transport could be considered necessary and even beneficial for maintaining basic human health, and thus might best be excluded from such an analysis.

Some key figures drawn from the Department of Transport’s 2009 VISTA survey:[21]

Average number of trips per occupant per day = 3.2 trips
Passenger kilometres per person per day = 33 pkm/day
Percentage of total distance travelled for the purpose of work = 32%
Distance travelled by car as a percentage of total distance = 83%
Distance travelled by PT as a percentage of total distance = 12.5%
Key figures drawn from analysis by the Public Transport Users Association:[22]
Average car occupancy = 1.5
Energy per car vehicle-km (assuming are fuel efficiency of 12 L/km) = 4.1 Megajoule/kilometre (MJ/km)
Energy per tram passenger-km (conservative estimate) = 0.6 MJ/km
Energy per bus passenger-km (conservative estimate) = 1.1 MJ/km
Energy per train passenger-km (conservative estimate) = 0.18 MJ/km

[1] While our focus herein is on the direct energy and water savings of low-tech living, it is our view that prefiguring a simpler way to live has deeper significance too, in that it helps create the cultural conditions needed for a post-capitalist politics and economics to emerge, which we maintain is a necessary part of the decarbonisation project. In this paper, however, space does not permit any sustained engagement with those underlying political or macroeconomic issues.

[2] One final general point is that we’ve chosen to ignore the embedded energy in the alternative technologies we discuss, on the assumption that the embedded energy is likely to be negligible in comparison to the potential energy savings they provide. Most of the low-tech options we discuss can be made from recycled or salvaged materials, and others, such as a solar shower bag, have low embedded energy. In any case, low-tech options have vastly lower embedded energy than their hi-tech alternatives (e.g. washing machine compared to a washing line). This means that ignoring the embedded energy does not distort the following analysis in any significant way.

[3] http://profile.id.com.au/australia/household-size?WebID=260

[4] Average between winter and summer median duration: Redhead, M (2013), Melbourne Residential Water End Uses Winter 2010 / Summer 2012, Final Report June 2013, p24.

[5] Average between winter and summer median flow rates, ibid. p25.

[6] Average between winter and summer average frequency: Redhead, M (2013), Melbourne Residential Water End Uses Winter 2010 / Summer 2012, Final Report June 2013, p26.

[7] S.J. Kenway, A. Priestley, S. Cook, S. Seo, M. Inman, A. Gregory and M. Hall, Energy use in the provision and consumption of urban water in Australia and New Zealand, 10 December 2008, p19.

[8] Ibid. p19

[9] George Wilkenfeld & Associates Pty Ltd  (2008), Victoria’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005: END-USE ALLOCATION OF EMISSIONS, report to the Department of Sustainability and Environment, February 2008, p84.

[10] See also, Redhead, M (2013), Melbourne Residential Water End Uses Winter 2010 / Summer 2012, Final Report June 2013.

[11] http://www.bom.gov.au

[12] SA government, ‘Energy efficient heating, https://www.sa.gov.au/topics/water-energy-and-environment/energy/saving-energy-at-home/household-appliances-and-other-energy-users/heating-and-cooling/energy-efficient-heating

[13] ABS, ‘Heating and cooling’, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ 0/85424ADCCF6E5AE9CA257A670013AF89?opendocument

[14] CSIRO, ‘Zero Emission House’, available at:

http://joshshouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Zero_emission_house_ETF_factsheet-Standard-1.pdf

[15] SA government, ‘Energy efficient cooling’, https://www.sa.gov.au/topics/water-energy-and-environment/energy/saving-energy-at-home/household-appliances-and-other-energy-users/heating-and-cooling/energy-efficient-cooling

[16] ABS, ‘Heating and cooling’, available at:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/85424ADCCF6E5AE9CA257A670013AF89?opendocument

[17] Sustainability Victoria, ‘Washers and Dryers’, http://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/~/media/resources/documents/services%20and%20advice/households/smarter%20choice/fact%20sheets%20june%202014/rse017_sc_fact%20sheet_a5_washers%20and%20dryers_lr.pdf

[18] Energy Use in the Australian Residential Sector 1986-2020, http://industry.gov.au/Energy/EnergyEfficiency/Documents/04_2013/energy-use-australian-residential-sector-1986-2020-part1.pdf

[19] Baseline TV Power Consumption 2009, http://www.energyrating.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/Energy_Rating_Documents/Library/Home_Entertainment/Televisions/200919-tv-power-consump.pdf

[20] Deakin University, Environmental benefits of cycling:
https://www.deakin.edu.au/travelsmart/docs/theenvironmentabenefitsofcycling_fact%20sheet.pdf

 [21] Department of Transport 2007, Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity 2007, http://www.dtpli.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/220693/VISTA-07-Summary-Brochure.pdf

[22] PTUA, 2015, http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/energy
.