So you want to save the environment: do you realise what it will take?

Thus, there is no escaping the conclusion that the big problems cannot be solved unless there is astronomical change to radically different lifestyles and systems which enable us to live well on a small fraction of current resource consumption. For decades some of us in the simplicity movement have been explaining how this can easily be done… if that's what we want to do. But the first point to grasp is that it cannot be done in a consumer-capitalist society and it cannot be done without happy acceptance of far simpler lifestyles and systems in which there is no interest in getting richer. Too much to ask? Probably.

The solution?

The task is to enable large numbers of people presently working hard to produce and consume vast amounts of stuff, to shift to ways in which they live well without having to do that.

Dancing Rabbit ecovillage in Missouri is one place working to show how it can be done. Their per capita resource consumption is around 5-10% of the US average, while their quality-of-life indices are higher. My study indicated that Sydney outer suburbs could do much the same, largely feeding itself from within its boundaries, while cutting the paid work-week to two or three days. In poor countries there is now a largely unrecognized revolution underway, whereby literally millions of people are "turning away" from the capitalist "development" path to build their own alternative systems … for instance, the Zapatista, Ubuntu, Campesino, Swaraj, Kurdish and Catalan movements.

The crucial principles are, most people living in small highly self-sufficient, self-governing, and co-operative communities, running their own local zero-growth economies via citizen assemblies and committees, involving lots of co-ops and commons and small firms and farms (which can be privately owned) via mostly low-tech simple systems. This is not a "socialist "vision; it is classical "anarchism". The centralized state cannot implement or run such structures and processes; these must arise from the experience and desires of citizens who have come to realise that they must live frugally, in control of their own local systems.

That this has to be the way is made clear by our study of egg supply.The normal supermarket path involves complex international networks for agribusiness and industrial feed and fertilizer production, production of steel for factories, tractors, shipping, warehousing, battery farming, logistics, advertising, trucks, super marketing, IT, finance, consultants, packaging, waste removal, and expensive technical skills. However, eggs produced in backyards, community co-ops and local small farms eliminate almost all of these costs while adding benefits such as enabling "waste" kitchen scraps to become chicken feed, and "waste" chicken manures to go directly to methane digesters and soils. We found that that dollar and energy costs are typically around 2% of eggs supplied by the supermarket path.

There could also be a similar fishing industry in your neighbourhood, based on small tanks feeding into aquaculture systems. And closed-loop recycling of all nutrients can totally eliminate the need for sewers and the fertilizer industry. Humble but perfectly adequate new housing can be built from earth at a tiny fraction of the cost of McMansions. Leisure committees would ensure rich local substitutes for jet-away travel. There would still be an important though much reduced role for some more distant and large centralised institutions, such as universities and mass production, but many industries could be entirely phased out.

(For the detail see…)

Obviously our present political and cultural institutions are totally incapable of comprehending let alone implementing such a vision, so there's not much point in badgering Albo to close those mines. But the coming self-destruction of consumer-capitalist society will focus minds wonderfully. Meanwhile please join us in working hard to change the dominant suicidal growth and affluence mentality as quickly as possible. If you really want to save the environment that's what it will take.