Time to go on the record

[GliderGuider]

71. Well, I'm not actually saying that.

I'm not saying that many people in the overdeveloped world should want to move out of their cushy, consumptive lifestyles - we all prefer what we're used to, after all. I'm just saying that there is no lack of happiness in lower-tech living arrangements. As long as basic living needs are met, happiness doesn't correlate well with consumption levels or average lifespan, let alone with the level of technology in a society. If we end up in a situation where "more" is not an option, people will keep on being happy, just as we always have.

I'm also not saying that we should be driving ourselves into low-tech lifestyles. That would be a response motivated at least by guilt, if not by fear. I'm saying that if low-tech lifestyles become inevitable through resource shortages, ecological exhaustion, climate change or social breakdown, that we don't need to fear them. In fact, 70% or more of the world already lives this way.

We have been culturally conditioned to the imperialistic view that the planet and its other inhabitants somehow owe us a 5-planet lifestyle, no matter what it costs them. Once that conditioning breaks down, we will find that most of our fears of a "life of less" are nothing but paper tigers.

What interests me most is watching what happens as the crisis unfolds. From that perspective, floating balloon gardens for buffalo grass are no more or less interesting than watching the polar ice melt - though the fact that the latter is actually happening while the former is not makes ice-watching a far better spectator sport. I watch the antics of James Inhofe with no more or less amusement or amazement than those of James Hansen. Both are expressions of the zeitgeist, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, to swipe a phrase from the Bard. They both create wonderful theater.