How much space do we consume!

Let me, dear others of you, tell you that the discussions about consumption we had over the Christmas meal gave me something to play with. And in my sorcery, I was surprised to discover a level of reality hidden behind, and explaining, our highly visible, undeniable, all-consuming consumption of goods and services: what we consume at an increasingly insane, unbearable pace, and over a long period for a long time, there will never be so many goods and services as place and time.

Our wonderful gadgets, from the smallest to the largest, simply serve our inordinate appetite for space and time. A place and time that do not belong to us as they belong to the land that welcomes us.

We are always taking up more space when we all live in increasingly larger homes and live in ever smaller numbers: alone, as a couple, as a small family. We are consuming our allotted workspaces, in the factory or in the office, which the coronavirus, remote working and empty offices in city centers have allowed us to estimate.

It is also the space we consume to spend our leisure time with all these hotel rooms waiting for us, all these movie theaters and performance venues, all these restaurant tables, all these ski slopes, these sea beaches, spending long weeks or months awaiting our messianic arrival. .

Space again and again: a space for movement too, an increasingly large linear space to reach a job we do far from home, to get more supplies away from basic and useless goods, which reach us further and further away, finally a space to ski up the mountains, to swim in The most beautiful seas, to feel ecstasy in front of the seven wonders of the world that multiply by the thousands.

And all the places to store goods, whether used or not, that we own or have or will ever have: all these parking places waiting for our cars everywhere, all these landfills waiting for our waste, all these factories and warehouses devoted to goods we don't have. Yet, but we'll dream about it tomorrow. All these places of extraction… All of this rarely happens in our backyards, and more often in our neighbors' backyards, in our neighbors' backyards at the end of the world. How much space do we consume!

Fragmented lives

We are consumers of space, but also of time. We need time, ours and other people's time, to build and maintain our great homes and their surroundings. How many washing machines, slow cookers and lawn mowers do we need? We need it, time, bicycles, cars, boats and planes, to take us from one place to another: from home to work, from home to the grocery store, from home to the chalet, at the ski center, at the tourist complexes at the end of the world.

It takes time and resources to travel, to fuel ourselves remotely from Amazon, Alibaba, Uber Eats, or Wayfair, and to meet remotely via Zoom and FaceTime. We need time, our time, other people's time and the Earth's time. We need resources, whether renewable or not, and energy, clean or dirty, to satisfy our thirst for space: our thirst for large interior spaces, our homes, and large medium spaces. Those that we place as boundaries between each of our fragmented lives: between the single known self and the multiple selves, public and semi-public, that we have become, between our few basic needs and the innumerable desires that we desire. We replace them with the help and complicity of sellers of small and large weddings sold individually or collective.

Less and less expensive in dollars, and more and more expensive in space, time, and planetary resources. Place first, then time, then resources, materials, energies, and even life.

planet

Our needs for space and time are increasing. And the planet is getting smaller and smaller. Naturally, we consume better and plant trees here and there to replace the forests that we have been choking and destroying. But all this is very little. Otherwise nothing. It's all in vain.

We consume too much, that's all. We see that what we consume is much more than increasingly sophisticated products and services, all of which are as disposable as they are necessary. We will not be able to consume less by replacing them with more advanced, disposable and necessary ones, even if they are electric.

It is our primary 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: residential space, commuting space, transportation and leisure space… and everything related to them. By doing so, we will reduce our consumption of time and, as a corollary, our consumption of goods and services, and our consumption of energy, whatever their nature. Perhaps we can thus reduce the rate at which we are destroying the planet and the poorest men and women who inhabit it for a shorter period to come than we think.

If we, the 10% who monopolize space to the point of forcing others to migrate, do not reduce our consumption of space, the Earth will take revenge and time will defeat us. We lose everything by waiting. But how do we do that?

This is where I have taken me, dear among you, our exchanges of 25 December, in which I have participated little, at least in lively words, my certainty is rare and my thoughts on this matter consist mainly of questions. But in the course of time, it happens that these questions develop into something like answers, although in fact these answers are only other questions, which are said to be in thought, given the form of fixed and well-defined opinions, which in fact they are not. Just like I did here.

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