Will costs really force a change?
21 April 2008 3 Comments
The price of gas is higher than it’s ever been.
The cost of rice went up 141% last year.
The cost of wheat went up 77% last year.
The ABC World News spot that prompted this post, not the first of its kind on this blog, played interview footage of a Texas man who is now using the bus. He used to put gas in his automobile seven or eight times a month — which is unimaginable for myself — and is now down to three fill-ups. I try and bike to the office as much as I can, although I’m not forced into this mode of transportation as much as I have been in the past. In truth I prefer to bike; the car is just too convenient.
My wife tagged along to Wal-Mart with me last night and couldn’t believe the tiny amount of food we got for $70. I usually do the shopping in our household. Most all of what we bought fit in the child seat of the cart. $20 of the bill went towards meat and cheese from the deli, and I don’t buy the most inexpensive of the turkey. Further, local sales tax — yes, we pay sales tax on food — is quite high. Our checkbook is feeling the pain.
Will the financial strain actually change the way we live? Will we be, if I can put it this way, a more reasonable culture? Will we forgo the debt and consumerism that enslave so many of us? Will we adopt a more sustainable way of life all around?
Adding: A couple snippets from a book review by David Taylor:
The enemy to this vision is Suburban Sprawl. Call it the Anti-Urban Experience. Bess reckons it a manifestation of fallen modernity: a functionally secular, therapeutic, individualist, technologically enamored vision driven by an oppressive demand for novelty and the “bottom line.”
Suburban sprawl, Bess contends, dissociates daily communal life from physical place. It is environmentally unsustainable and unjust; it makes people slaves to their cars. Usually it is also ugly; useful and mostly durable, yes, but architecturally unbearably dull.
I might contest the “usually durable” comment, but that depends on the exact part of automobile-slash-suburban culture we’re talking about.
I am currently reading the book you refer to – “Till we have built Jerusalem” by Philip Bess – and it has some very good reasoning. It is helping me see the bigger picture beyond individual home/building design. One of his points is that it is within a culture of faith that we are most likely to produce and experience a rich communitarian form of life enhanced by the surrounding built environment.
That was an interesting aspect of Taylor’s review that I hadn’t ever thought of before, the relationship of faith and community living. I believe I’ve heard of the book prior to now, but being in the middle of about five other it’s not likely I’ll be getting to any new ones in the near future.
Pingback: Continued observations on petrol pains « The Aesthetic Elevator