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to what extent they can claim to live "sustainably"
Both you and the people jumping into these fashionable band wagons are asking for simple answers to complex questions.
The simplest answer for anybody who really wants a minimal ecological footprint is suicide. Next in line for people without the courage of their convictions is to be so poor that they can't afford to consume any more than the bare minimum required for survival. Economic activity is a pretty good proxy for environmental damage - the more you spend, the more wreckage you leave in your wake.
Once you go past that, most people enter into self-serving calculations to show that their particular middle class posturing is better than somebody else's. These calculations are always based on guesswork, wrong assumptions, and deliberately ignoring inconvenient factors. -
Isn't this the same with people living on boats too?
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Interesting discussion starter.
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In my leftie/liberal bubble I am increasingly often crossing paths with small house enthusiasts and those hipsters who refurbish old vans and school busses into mobile homes. Their aspirations to some kind of virtue annoys me anyhow, but the more particular question I am putting to you guys in this thread is to what extent they can claim to live "sustainably".
It's the same people in the "say fuck it and go travelling" crowd. It's a lack of awareness that most people don't have daddy's bank balance to fall back on.
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I recall a discussion earlier in this thread earlier, where Tester and others showed how crossing the Atlantic with a cruise ship isn't greener than flying as you need to factor in the fuel used to transport all the fixtures needed on a longer journey. I.e. cabins, restaurants etc.
The main reason for preferring slow travel to fast is that the volume goes right down. It's the constant, everyday grind of planes blasting off, because everybody thinks they ought to be able to go to the other side of the world at the drop of a hat, that's the main problem. In themselves, as tester says, operating large ships is very environmentally damaging, e.g. in the (pre-COVID, although I expect it'll go back to how it was before pretty quickly once we feel we can live with the virus) burgeoning cruise ship industry, but if you keep their number down and intercontinental travel by boat is small in volume, it's better. Too many ifs, and equally obviously, people will resent any such curtailing of their modern 'freedom'.
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In my leftie/liberal bubble I am increasingly often crossing paths with small house enthusiasts and those hipsters who refurbish old vans and school busses into mobile homes.
Their aspirations to some kind of virtue annoys me anyhow, but the more particular question I am putting to you guys in this thread is to what extent they can claim to live "sustainably".
I recall a discussion earlier in this thread earlier, where Tester and others showed how crossing the Atlantic with a cruise ship isn't greener than flying as you need to factor in the fuel used to transport all the fixtures needed on a longer journey. I.e. cabins, restaurants etc.
Surely, driving around willy nilly in an old diesel powered vehicle transporting your bed, kitchen and livingroom furniture everywhere you go surely is a similar fuck you to the environment?
As for small houses, I guess I can’t criticise them to the same extent, but it’s not as if they will be using public transport much. My main worry is that they will spearhead a greater suburban sprawl out into hitherto sparsely populated areas. While the initial flag bearers of small housing may be spotless in their environmental conscience, I would assume that if this catches on the standards will slip and the result will be a chaos of small house dwellers all over the place without sensible arrangements in place for rubbish disposal, sewage, water etc.