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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.
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gbj_tester
dancing james
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.