Allow me, dear others of you, to tell you that the discussions on consumption that we had during the Christmas meal gave me something to juggle. And in my juggling, I was surprised to discover a level of reality hidden behind, and explaining, our very visible, undeniable and all-consuming consumption of goods and services: what we consume at an increasingly crazy pace , and unbearable, and for a long time, it would not be so much goods and services as space and time.
Our wonderful gadgets, from the smallest to the largest, are simply tools serving our inordinate appetite for space and time. A space and time that do not belong to us as they belong to the Earth that welcomes us.
We constantly consume more space when we all live in increasingly larger houses in which we live in ever smaller numbers: alone, as a couple, as a small family. We consume the work spaces reserved for us, in the factory or in the office, and of which COVID, teleworking and empty offices in city centers have allowed us to estimate the extent.
It is also space that we consume for our leisure with all these hotel rooms that await us, all these cinemas and performance venues, all these restaurant tables, all these ski slopes and these seasides. who spend long weeks or months waiting for our messianic coming.
Space again and again: space for movement too, an increasingly large linear space to get to a job that we do further and further from home, to get ever more supplies far in essential and useless goods, which reach us further and further away, space finally to go skiing in the highest mountains, to bathe in the most beautiful seas, to be ecstatic before the seven wonders of the world multiplied by thousand.
And all the storage spaces for goods, used or not, that we own, that we have owned or that we will own: all these parking spaces which everywhere await our cars, all these landfill spaces which await our waste, all these factories and warehouses devoted to goods that we do not yet have, but of which we will dream tomorrow. All these places of extraction… All this rarely in our backyard, very often in the backyards of neighbors, of our neighbors at the end of the world. How much space we consume!
Fragmented lives
We are consumers of space, but also of time. We need time, our own and that of others, to build and maintain our large homes and their surroundings. How many washers, slow cookers and lawn mowers do we need? We need it, time, and bicycles, cars, liners and planes, to transport us from one place to another: from home to work, from home to the grocery store, from home at the chalet, at the ski center, at the tourist complexes at the end of the world.
It takes time and resources to travel, to telesupply ourselves from Amazon, Alibaba, Uber Eats or Wayfair, and to meet remotely on Zoom and FaceTime. We need time, ours, that of others and that of the Earth, we need resources, renewable or not, and energy, clean or dirty, to satisfy our thirst for space: our thirst for large interior spaces, our homes, large intermediate spaces, those that we set up as boundaries between each of our fragmented lives: between the self of the only known self and the multiple selves, public and semi-public, that we have become , between our few basic needs and the countless desires that we substitute for them with the help and complicity of sellers of small and great joys sold individually or in lots.
Less and less expensive in dollars, more and more expensive in space, and in time, and in planetary resources. Space first, then time, then resources, materials and energies, and even lives.
Planet
Our needs for space and time are increasing. And the planet is getting smaller and smaller. Of course, we consume better and we plant trees here and there to replace the forests which we otherwise suffocate and destroy. But all this is very little. Otherwise nothing. All this is in vain.
We consume too much, that’s all. And what we consume, we see, is much more than increasingly sophisticated products and services, all as disposable as they are essential. And it is not by replacing them with others, even more sophisticated and just as disposable and essential, even if they are electric, that we will be able to consume less.
It is our fundamental consumption, our primary consumption that we must reduce: our consumption of space, first and foremost. Spread the word ! We need to reduce our space requirements: residence space, circulation space, transition and leisure space… And everything related to it. In doing so, we will reduce our consumption of time and, as a corollary, our consumption of goods and services, our consumption of energy, of whatever nature. And perhaps we will thus be able to reduce the rate at which we despoil the planet and the poorest men and women who inhabit it for a longer time, a shorter time than we think.
If we, the 10% who monopolize space to such an extent that we force others to migrate, if we do not reduce our consumption of space, the Earth will take its revenge and time will defeat us. We lose everything by waiting. But how to do it ?
This is where, dear you, our discussions of December 25 took me, in which I participated little, at least in lively words, my certainties are rare and my thoughts on the matter are mainly made up of questions. But as time goes on, it happens that these questions develop into what look like answers, although these answers are in reality only other questions to which, it is said in thought, I give the form of firm opinions and well-defined, which in reality they are not. Like I did here.