Kevin McCloud’s 43 Principles of Home: Enjoying Life in the 21st Century. Kevin McCloud
also frustrated, having worked as a designer and maker, by how little craftsmanship and the sweat of labour are appreciated nowadays. How we all assume that everything around us is made by machines and computers, whereas the truth is that your dinner plate was probably made by just three people in Portugal who spent four months of their lives producing a range for a high-street retailer; and your mobile phone was assembled by one person over a morning of their life.
So I’m writing out of a passionate love for the built environment and a quiet anger over how it is passed over in pursuit of temporary diversions and virtual pleasures when it can offer some of the greatest pleasures of all. The result goes something along the lines of What do we want? A much better appreciation of the things around us so that we can cherish them, live a more sustainable life and enjoy a richer relationship with our world. When do we want it? Quite soon, please, and quickly. But not too quickly, because it’s all meant to be about lingering to enjoy the moment, isn’t it?
After the Slow Food movement, maybe it’s time for the Slow Living movement. That sounds dull, doesn’t it? In fact, ‘slow’ is the wrong word. It should be the Take Your Time movement (which is really what the Slow Food movement should be called). Take your time to appreciate what’s around you, to explore your environment, to savour experiences and to develop relationships with the objects around you—be they a car, a vase or a town—as examples of human brilliance and human energy. In fact I do have a name for this softer, richer, more fulfilling experience. I call it New Materialism. Sometimes I call it Contextual Materialism, which sounds even more pretentious. In truth it contributes to a wider set of values that the charity BioRegional calls One Planet Living, which sounds far more approachable.
You’ll have noticed that in the paragraph above I slipped in that slippery word ‘sustainable’. It doesn’t occur too often in this book because it’s a term already over-used, so tried on by so many people, institutions and companies that it’s stretched and gone all loose and floppy. Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. Politicians speak of sustainable economic growth (this is not necessarily ecologically or socially beneficial), which is not the same thing as growing an economy sustainably. Oil companies talk of sustainable oil exploration. My dictionary tells me that sustainable means ‘tenable’ or ‘able to be maintained at a certain rate or level’; also ‘conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources’ but also ‘able to be upheld or defended’ (nice one for the oil industry there).
I try not to use the S word too often, despite the fact that this book’s big theme is how we implement the culture change that is going to be necessary over the next 40 years, in order that a global population of what will be nine billion people (currently around seven) can still be sustained by this planet’s resources.
As long ago as 1998, commentators and academics were criticizing the overuse of ‘sustainability’ as a catch-all term for the durability of environmental, business, economic and social policies. Peter Marcuse, a planning professor at Columbia University, has pointed out that separate applications of the word to housing, planning, the environment and our use of resources can contradict each other: what is sustainable in the layout and organization of a community in a city may not be environmentally defensible, for example. Recycling our beer cans and working at home more will not deal with the problems of the over-exploitation of the planet’s resources and climate change:
The long run entails conflict and controversy, issues of power and the redistribution of wealth. The frequent calls for ‘us’ to recognize ‘our’ responsibility for the environment avoids the real questions of responsibility, the real causes of pollution and degradation. The slogan of ‘sustainability’ hides rather than reveals that unpleasant fact.
We should rescue sustainability as an honourable, indeed critically important, goal for environmental policy by confining its use only to where it is appropriate, recognizing its limitations and avoiding the temptation to take it over as an easy way out of facing the conflicts that beset us. 1
This is hard-hitting stuff. It pulls no punches. But it helps, because it pulls out from under the cover-all word the different ideas and problems that we face, and the appalling way in which they are confused. Every newspaper I read interchanges the terms ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ and ‘sustainability’ with a lack of thought bordering on abandon. We currently face big challenges and some big conflicts in a great range of areas, some of which are linked and some of which are not, and all of which, it seems, are down to the very large number of human beings on the planet all running to get a slice of the action and the pie: climate change as a result of carbon emissions; carbon dioxide-induced acidification of the seas; fair trade; deforestation of the planet’s ‘green lungs’; deforestation and the associated species loss; use of petrochemicals in fertilizers and biocides; food security; redistribution of wealth; availability of fresh water; empowerment of communities in the Third World; waste; a living wage; aerial and ground pollution; depletion of mineral resources; consumerism; ozone depletion at high altitude; ozone excess in cities at ground level; and Quite a Lot More.
But if there is one definition that explains sustainability properly, a definition that we should take seriously, it is that of the Brundtland Report of 1987, which describes sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.2
I’ll stick with that. Even Professor Marcuse sticks with that. Because this definition itself pulls no punches; it simply sets out what is required. You will notice that it does so with no reference to polar bears or pandas. It puts the survival of the human species at its very centre. The Brundtland definition is based entirely around the issue of resources and environmental stability. It is robust enough to defy any 21st-century attempts to kidnap the word for the unscrupulous use of industry and policy makers. And that’s because it is flexible and prescient enough to accommodate change.
The global shortage of clean drinking water was on the agenda in 1987, but today water is set to overtake oil in value on the world’s markets as a tradable commodity. The Brundtland definition, interestingly, still holds and in fact sets up a new resonant demand for water to be returned to humanity as a freely available resource. The importance and speed of climate change and the related issue of carbon emissions could only have been glimpsed in 1987, but Brundtland sets the stage for the fight against global warming by taking the long-term view and calling for a stable environment.
By comparison, studies such as the Stern report3 frame out many environmental issues, such as pollution, high-altitude ozone depletion, heavy metal infiltration of the food chain, water use and availability and food production, and instead focus intently on the one issue of climate change and its economic effects. They seize on the Big Story beloved of Al Gore, the only issue we apparently should focus on: our carbon footprint. We’re told we should stop gazing at our navel and look at the sole of our very big carbon shoe.
I hope it’s already clear that this book takes on more than the issues surrounding climate change; it points, I hope, to a wider culture change that could put value above status and story above sexiness. It suggests how we can fight current, exploitative, consumer behaviour—the way we shop indiscriminately for shiny goods made in Third World sweatshops—with a call for informed, ethical consumerism.
This book doesn’t deal with the fiscal or legal measures that will get us to a new ‘sustainable’ world, wherever that is. It suggests ways we can change ourselves that can make large differences. It doesn’t beleaguer you with carbon calculators; it doesn’t list fishing quotas or promote campaigns to save polar bears. You can join WWF or Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, or subscribe to treehugger.com, if you want up-to-the-minute accounts of campaigns and government initiatives. My job here is to persuade you of something