Telling Research

Anthropology and sustainability

Sustainability raises uncomfortable questions about altruism for anthropologists. Notions of altruism are difficult for all disciplines and especially a culturally relative anthropology. Environmentalism quickly gets into a debate about what is fair, what is enough and what is too much; what is a ‘want’ and what is a ‘need’? Debates around what is fair, what is necessary and what is a luxury takes place in households in the UK everyday, sometimes for reasons of cost, but also for moral reasons. The development of practice theory in anthropology has been influential in showing the importance of households in making decisions, a key part of how people work towards sustainable living. The negotiation of household consumption is part of the daily practice of establishing social relations, identity and power. Power imbalances have also characterised international environmental summits as political leaders point out the difference in the nature of “survival emissions” from the South, and “luxury emissions” from the North. Anthropologists have traditionally argued such categorisation as well as against any universal definition of standards of living yet environmentalism would seem to necessitate a widespread agreement about how to slow consumption and lower expectations.

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Wistful weather

OK, it's Christmas coming up. All those images of robins on snowmen and Father Christmas on a reindeer pulled sleigh are deluding my three year old that it always snows in winter here. Heavily. Mmmm, not so. Perhaps I am still living with the disappointment of this realisation myself and that's secretly why I am concerned about climate change. The weather has never quite lived up to my childhood expectations. What about skating on the Thames? What hot summer days messing about in boats? In fact, perhaps our hideous household carbon footprint is a national conspiracy to change climate back to the good old days of hot summers, freezing winters and all the proper rituals inbetween. Sadly I know that climate change actually means climate chaos and it will make us even more nostalgic for children's storybook seasonality. Behold a generation of confused children arriving somewhere near you circa 2050. 

Plot taken? Sustainable housing and space

 

Aspirations for housing, it has to be said, are not particularly sustainable.  We don’t want to be overlooked.  A big house, somewhere in the country.  I recently did a project interviewing a wide range of members of the public about their ideal homes and it did seem to be the case that the more drastically remote people long to be, the more personal problems they tend to have experienced in their lives.  Crofts in remote Scotland seem a particularly strong desire amongst ex drug addicts or foster care leavers.  I’m not sure about the psychology of this but I do know that if everyone got what they wanted housewise, we’d need about a hundred planets to accommodate everyone.  It does seem to be one of the cruel ironies of modern life that the more apparently countrified a house is, the less likely it is to be sustainable in terms of land use or fuel consumption. 

If you frame the question in a different way, and say well, you can’t have your absolutely dream home, but you could improve things where you are, what would you change?

Parking, is the answer.  More parking.  There is nothing that makes me want to slit my wrists more than these conversations.

                “Any family worth their salt has three, four or five cars” was one memorable verbatim from a villager in rural Cambridgeshire complaining about low parking allocations for new build properties.

                “They should make people pave over their front gardens” was one woman’s thought from Croydon. 

One thing I have noticed however is that people are becoming more tolerant of smaller spaces.  Through my work interviewing people I’ve visited a lot of people in smallish homes and mostly people are refreshingly uncomplaining about it.  Children share rooms and families are more creative with how space is used.  Increasing numbers of people live in unconventional households of extended family members.  Yes, people do want more space, but once they are living in a small space, they just seem to stop noticing it.  I don’t think we are looking at Tokyo style living just yet, just that having a room entirely dedicated to the ironing may be a thing of the past for most families.

A recent report by CPRE argues that close proximity living does not have to mean urban high rises.  Cosy villages with walkable centres and a close knit community are about as sustainable as you can get, and there are scores of them up and down the country.  They argue that refurbishing existing properties and developing within communities should be prioritised above dispersed new build developments.  Certainly there is lots of evidence to suggest that people who know their neighbours and who walk more are happier and healthier than those who don’t.

It may be that the key to sustainable housing is less about the house itself and more about our attitudes to the communities they are situated in.  A couple of years ago I interviewed a man in Essex who had recently installed a wind turbine.  He had received 33 objections – before it was even built.  I visited him at his house, in the middle of a field, and I don’t think he even had 33 neighbours.  One suspects that these neighbours were not objecting so much for themselves, but because they were worried it would affect the price of their property.  Perhaps in a new climate where property is regarded more as somewhere to live rather than an asset with which to make money - sustainability initiatives such as shared facilities, energy efficiency and car-pools will receive greater support.  Living in sustainable communities will help us all sleep easy in our homes, no matter what size they are.

Living on less

I have a deep seated fear of things running out.  Felt tip pens have an inbuilt horror for me.  I am disturbed by the onset of ageing tips, squeaky with dryness, even when they are still fresh and new.  As a child I even stopped using certain pens in an attempt to preserve their life and avoid their consignment to the rubbish bin. 

These days I like to justify my frugality on the basis of avoiding the embedded carbon involved in the manufacture, transport and disposal of any consumer item.  But the truth is more complicated than that.  At University I did not know terms like ‘embedded carbon’ and my paucity of material possessions had much more to do with genuine financial hardship, a generous mean streak and a haughty middle class disapproval of having too much. 

The sad fact is that these days I have many more possessions that I used to.  When I got married we had over four hundred pounds worth of spanking new, wedding list items delivered to our door by John Lewis in sturdy cardboard boxes.  When we last moved not everything would fit into the van that we had hired for the occasion.  I’ve gone from having no kettle to having had three in the last three years.  Sometimes I wonder, and worry, about what my own personal landfill site would look like. 

Some people are very good at taking care of their things, keeping them neat, clean and in good repair.  My sister is one of those people.  Nowadays my sister’s house is full of relics from our childhood that are still part of her life.  Her children colour with crayons that we ourselves were given as children.  Plastic picnic tubs from the 80s are used for leftovers or as plant stands.  Even the decorated pins on the pin board have not changed for over twenty years.  I have duplicates of many of these items, because of course as sisters we were given many of the same things.  But my things have been lost, broken or have somehow aged much faster than hers.  I hope the same will not be true of me. 

So many of the older rationing generation are better with their things than I am.  My Auntie melts left over bits of soap to make one big new soap.  Washing yoghurt pots and reusing bits of paper is second nature to people of my parents’ generation.  But whilst the babyboomers might have more respect for things they also seem to have more desire for them.  My parent-in-law’s favourite shop is Lidl where they can buy handy household gadgets at knock down prices.  But this dual ability for preservation and acquisition means that their house is full to bursting point with trinkets and consumer goods.

How can we become a more frugal nation?  I have great hopes for the generational backlash effect.  As the babyboomers have become bargain hunters against a backdrop of wartime austerity, might the younger generation shun overconsumption just to be different from their parents and grandparents?  It hasn’t happened yet so my imagination falls back on nanny-statism.  A tax on rubbish and a monthly waste collection?  I would almost relish the inevitable outcry like a haughty schoolmarm who knows she has the moral high ground.  What about ‘bring out yer dead days’ –a modern take on rag and bone men already in operation in some parts of the country.  I’d like to see good second hand stalls at tips and roving electrical consultants in charity shops to mend and make safe donated items.  Street ownership log posters which enable neighbours to source and borrow household items such as lawn-mowers, tools and other equipment could also reduce consumption.  But none of these things would reduce landfill by as much as we need.

One suggestions is that once shipping containers have arrived in this country and been relieved of their contents they should be returned full of waste to countries such as China for sorting and recycling.  Whilst this seems the moral equivalent of allowing your dog to poo in a neighbour’s garden, it might actually improve people’s lives by giving them jobs and valuable raw materials.  International economic trends will have the greatest effect on our landfill sites.  Worthy, environmental campaigns will be made irrelevant by the current recession as a whole generation of people, perhaps for the first time, pause at the supermarket shelf to wonder if they really need it.  And as I solemnly replace the lids of my two year olds abandoned felt tip pens, my heart softly sings at the possibility that my austere habits may finally be in touch with the times.

Not driving

At 17 I refused to learn to drive.  I cannot remember a single other person in my class at school who took the same decision.  Even now people express surprise on learning that I can’t drive and a lot of people still ask when I am going to learn.  I will never learn, not now.  I thought at one stage I might give in, as everyone seemed to think I would.  I was even offered a car as part of a job once.  But I still never learned and now I am pleased and surprised by my own steadfastness. 

Where I grew up in affluent rural Cheshire, driving was considered essential in order to gain any kind of independence and freedom.  Parents regarded teaching their children to drive as one of their final duties.  It was perhaps one they approached with more enthusiasm than the others because it made them feel like experts and it released them from the taxiing role they had played for so long.  So integral was driving to the idea of freedom that one of my friends intended to steal the family Volvo as soon as he passed his test and drive it to Russia, where he had a female pen pal, and then return it by boat once he was firmly ensconced.  My Dad offered me lessons but I never took a lesson, I never took the test and I found my freedom in other ways.

I had a number of reasons for not learning to drive but environmental concern was the main one.  Even a child can see how the car makes neighbours strangers to one another, causes noise and danger and stifles nature with great long ribbons of grey tarmac.  The smell and the smoke coming out of car exhausts made my childish but not wholly inaccurate mind worry about the end of the world.

My family was also a reason for me not to drive.  Although Dad offered to teach me and pay for some lessons I did not really feel like taking him up on the offer.  I had had enough of Dad’s amateur mathematics tutoring to put me off the idea of him ever teaching me anything again.  When I heard about how much lessons cost I thought it seemed like an incredible waste of money.  In fact my penny pinching streak has played more of a part in many of my environmental decisions than I might care to admit.

The final straw was watching my elder sister go through the process of learning.  The tortuousness of her lessons with Dad and the battles she fought once she had passed it, mainly over when she could have the car, what for, and whether she could drive it out of the narrow garage by herself.  My sister has unknowingly fought and won many battles on my behalf.  The one for which I am most grateful is not having to wear an ‘A’ line skirt to school because S fought furiously, and finally successfully, against it for herself to the point where our mother didn’t even try to make me wear one.  But the battles over her learning to drive were so awful and were so close to the point of us leaving home that I decided not to even enter the fray.

On having made the decision not to drive, I watched my contemporaries, one by one, learn and take the test.  Amongst my peers there was a huge amount of rivalry over who could pass first and with the fewest number of lessons.  Gradually I began to sit as a passenger in my friends’ cars, a habit of freeloading that continues to this day.  One of the good things about never learning to drive is that I am blissfully unaware of how good or bad particular drivers are so I am never able to fear for my life, even when there is cause to. 

One thing I did become painfully aware of is how being behind the wheel turned my friends into people I did not know.  Whilst Mr Toad was amusing and loveable in his glee over his ‘poop-pooping’ motor car, my friends were loutish and frightening.  Even my gentlest friend M can swear like a Tourettes sufferer behind the wheel.  Not only that they became terrific motoring bores.  My sister, like me, married a man she had met and got to know as a young teenager.  As 17 years old this was the most thrilling and romantic time in their relationship yet what seemed to animate them more than anything else was in-car conversations about three point turns and other such mysteries. 

The sixth form common room was full of similar conversations.  One girl seemed genuinely traumatised that she had failed her test for the third time after driving through a large puddle.  Despite living through all these tedious technical conversations my lack of knowledge about cars and motoring is so complete that it is actually a little debilitating in adult life.  My mother, who is partially deaf, often adopts a safely neutral expression when pretending to have heard something that she hasn’t.  I use the same tactic when people use motorways and junction numbers to describe geographic locations.  I have no idea where any of the ‘M’s’ are no matter how often they might be mentioned in everyday life.  I have no idea how much cars cost.  No even roughly.  There seem to be a bewildering number of car brands and makers on the market and I can’t tell the difference between any of them.  I couldn’t tell you the make or indeed the colour of any of my friends cars, even if they’ve been driving the same car for years, and I certainly couldn’t locate the car in a car park, even if I’ve got out of it five minutes before.  I don’t know what the clutch is or the difference between a handbrake and a footbrake and the only reason I know what a gear is is because bikes have them too.  The only thing I know about cars is that if someone has got one I think them less of a person for it which makes me unhappily superior to the rest of the population.

The best thing that not driving gave me was cycling, a habit initiated by my cycling proficiency test aged 11.  There are few childhood memories as wholesome as cycling on my brown shopper to St. Lukes church to sing at choir practice with our charismatic vicar and our cheery and rotund choir mistress.  Being able to do something so dangerous by myself gave me a thrilling sense of space but also centredness.  I was once stopped by the police for cycling without lights whilst coming back home in the evening time.  I developed a habit of cycling on the pavement which I’m afraid I still do.

By the age of 17 cycling was already such a habit that I didn’t consider the independence offered by driving as that important because I was already free.  This freedom was partly about the ability to get from A to B under my own steam, but it was also about cycling fast down steep hills.  I love the feel of my body falling whilst freewheeling a downward plummet.  Cycling was such a large part of my early life that walking still feels like travel at the wrong speed.

How have I managed without driving?  In the early years it was cycling.  Later at Durham it was the train.  Train to see M at York, train to St. Andrews to see D and S, train home to Manchester, platform 13, or Crewe, platform 1.  Not once did my parents drop me off or collect me from University.  I do not say this as a statement of resentment, but as one of curiosity as it was unusual then and probably even more so now.  I arrived and left Durham with what I could carry and consequently acquired very little during my time there, or indeed afterwards.  This is an example of one environmental good deed leading to another.  I arrived as a young graduate in London with a single suitcase and immediately was no longer an oddity because no one else drove either.

A secret of my car free status is that I am a happy accepter of lifts.  There is a certain type of older gentleman who will always give a lift to a younger lady rather than see her walk.  Another one of my guilty secrets is taxis.  I love to sit in the back of a plush London cab.  Without a seatbelt, slipping a bit on the smooth seats, watching the scenes of picture postcards and history books appear like a movie through the windows.  During my ten years there I never tired of this and I now tip with more confidence and panache than anyone I know. 

Taxis are of course expensive.  I travel a lot through my work as a researcher and it wouldn’t be unheard of for me to pay £40 for a single journey.  I spent a fortune on taxis whilst pregnant.  My mother in law would balk at such extravagance but in my experience the people who are least shocked by the suggestion of a taxi and indeed who would know the number and book one for you, are those people who don’t have much money and fully appreciate how expensive it is to own and run a car.

Public transport is uncomfortable but easy in London and I use it elsewhere as well.  Even the most remote and improbable places have train and bus services, tourist information boards, taxi offices and friendly people to show you the way.  You could drop me anywhere in the country and I would get home safely.

As I’ve got older I’ve begun to worry less about the environmental apocalypse that I fear is coming, and started instead to look forward to the time when other people live more like me.  I am hoping that after decades of increasing car use and ownership the trend will reverse during my lifetime.  Sometimes I look forward to this promised land where I will be old but my ideas will be as fresh as paint on a new, quieter world. 

There would be some cars in this world, but all those smaller unnecessary trips will have been wiped out.  Hitchhiking will have become popular and acceptable, even for small distances, even for the school run.  Parents will ride trikes, with ingenious child seats and space for shopping.  Neighbours and work colleagues will be able to take part in hi-tech car pools where tracking devices show where cars are going and whether a friendly lift is on offer.  I think people’s social lives will change too.  It will become more acceptable to cull friends who live far away, rather than carrying out dutiful long journeys to maintain the relationship.  People will base themselves more permanently in their locality, live their lives on solid ground, live in the moment.  Where longer journeys are necessary, people will use budget car hires trading in second hand cars and bargain insurance deals.  The cars that are on the roads will be smaller and less polluting and a modern interpretation of the Robin Reliant is on the market.  Professional walkers accompany school children to school and help older people get to the shops. 

Will I ever live in this world I wonder?  The world moves fast but not as fast as our imaginations.  Perhaps my world is merely a fantasy recreation of the 1950s England for which I have great fondness but never experienced.  Perhaps by the time the traffic slows down and begins to fade away there’ll be bigger problems to contend with, like extreme weather, panic migration, and financial collapse. Perhaps I’ll die early and I’ll never know.  In the meantime I walk down the street taking my revenge in small ways, like glaring at drivers as they speed round corners and pressing the pelican crossing button even when I don’t want to cross.

Nappy natter

It's hard to imagine being in nappies oneself.  But it must have happened once.  My first contact with the reality of nappies was realising as a teenager that the cloths used in the washroom for general cleaning and mopping up spillages were in fact ex-nappies and undoubtably once used for me.  Urgh!  I never changed a nappy until I changed my own baby's in hospital. 

Of course I use washable nappies for my baby.  Washable nappies are so almost-back-in-fashion that they have not yet settled on a permanent name for themselves.  They are variously known as 'washable', 'non disposable', 'real', 'cloth' and also by their oh-so-cute brand names TotsBots, Fluffles, Kissaluvs, Motherease, Sam-I-am and so on.

The Women's Environmental Network and the manufacturing associations have been at war for some time over the environmental credentials, of lack thereof, of the two different nappy choices.  Clearly disposables are bad for landfill, but it is equally clear that washables are bad for water and energy use.  My understanding is that the science is hazy and it is inherently difficult to compare a paper/plastic/silicon/waste system with a cloth/energy/water system and come out with a definite answer.

So if the science is hazy, why do I use washable nappies?  Well, I believe that new, better scientific research will show more conclusively that washable nappies are indeed better for the environment.  Common sense just says so.  It is also easier to cope with the guilt of using the washing machine a lot (electricity is invisible after all) than the guilt of generating massive multiple stinking sacks of rubbish for other people to clear up and send in barges down the Thames.

I also like to support the underdog so I view myself and my baby as sort of pioneers of cloth nappies in a smug sort of way. The odds are really stacked against us.  They are expensive because they are not mainstream.  Clothes are not cut to fit over the wider bottoms of cloth nappied babies.  Mothers no longer have the knowledge of how to deal with real nappies.  It's a lot easier to throw something in the bin than work out what temperature to wash them at, how full to fill the nappy bucket with water, what to soak them in etc. etc.  Nursery staff are not keen on washable nappies and some don't know how to use them.  Some nurseries even provide pampers as part of the nursery fee.

There are also other beneficial side effects.  By my calculations there is a cost benefit which becomes a lot more significant if the nappies are used for more than one child.  There's also an instant camarardarie between mothers of cloth-bottomed babies which is a real delight.

Climate clinic

I am planning to go to the 'climate clinic' today at Labour Party conference.  It is so well branded, sounds so cool.  But of course it is just a hotel.  Organisations are fond of rebranding hotels for the period of conference.  I remember IPPR's 'illuminations' at Blackpool a few years ago and there is the 'inclusion hotel' in Manchester this year (Novotel).

The Worst Journey in the World

I've just finished reading this book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.  It really is magnificent and goes once again to show that it is only worthwhile reading books recommended by my mother.  I've had a lot of disappointing fiction reads recently (you know who you are Donna Tartt et al) and I think I'll stick to the world of fact for a while.  There's enough in the annals of Antarctic exploration to keep me going for some years I feel.

The book is two inches thick and heavy going at times.  I don't understand how large, wooden sailing ships work and much of the detail in the account of the sail from New Zealand to the Antarctic is lost on me.  But if you can tolerate being a little baffled by the scientific description and concentrate on the heart of the book, which is about friendship, tragedy, great risks, scientific discovery and an awe of nature, this is one of the most rewarding reads you can ever imagine.

At the end of the book I was left feeling intensely sympathic towards the author who writes with a clarity and honesty which rises above the ideals of the day.  The men on Scotts expedition were heroic, patriotic and patriarchic in a way which seems misplaced now. Cherry-Garrard himself was all of these things yet was also full of doubts about them.  A young man desperate to prove himself (he paid to go on the expedition) he paid the price for his three years in the South with a lifelong overdraft and a series of nervous breakdowns.

One reason for his distress is widely supposed to be his preoccupation about the five men who died on their way home from the Pole.  He and another companion made up the last support party which laid depots for the returning Polar party.  He could never have known about it at the time, but Scott and his men died in a blizzard only eleven miles from the last depot Cherry laid.  It is a fruitless thought but what might have been different if Cherry had gone eleven miles further and laid even just a small amount of food and fuel under a cairn and a flag?  One of the fascinations with the story of Scott's Last Expedition is the 'if onlys' about how the men could have survived.  In fact the real wonder is why more men did not perish in the support party and the additional scientific expeditions - all of which took huge risks.

In his foreword to the book, Paul Theroux suggests that in contrast to the Antarctic "one of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing".  I certainly feel that this observation is true.  I sometimes feel I have even been to the Antarctic, whereas I never feel the same about outer space!  I have noticed further parallels in my recent work with Demos on the future of space travel.  One dilemma that The European Space Agency and others face is whether to focus their resources on one grand gesture - such as a manned mission to the moon - or whether to focus on a wider range of scientific probes which may be of practical help to life on earth. 

They may take some inspiration from history.  The goal of Scott's expedition was twofold.  To reach the pole and to carry out scientific observations and experiments on unknown terrain.  In contrast Amundsen's expedition had only one goal: to reach the pole for the glory of Norway.  Scott's expedition was a failure in its first goal but it captured the public imagination for its heroicism in a way that Amundsen's never could.

Pay as you throw

Microchips in wheely bins, compostable supermarket food packaging (as announced today by Sainsburys).  Sounds like the waste debate in the UK is moving in the right direction.  But what about flytipping?  Tightening up the existing laws don't seem to be tackling this endemic problem.

A recent article from the IPPR states that "fly-tipping must be made as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and smoking around babies".  But the fact is that flytipping IS already socially unacceptable, the problem is policing it.  Enforcement officers currently search through rubbish bags for giveaway address labels, but now the flytippers are getting wise to it and don't include old letters in their rubbish.  The incentives to flytip are high for some people (e.g. cost and lack of local knowledge) and these issues need to be dealt with.  But penalties are crucial.

One solution is to involve communities more in finding out who is behind the mess.  OK i t's a bit stasi-state but surely more worthwhile than the 'shop a smoker' hotline currently being planned by the government.  A residents association I've visited in Stockton on Tees have seen great reductions in domestic flytipping since they began weekly volunteer walks to monitor where the flytipping is coming from and informing the council about it. 

Do solar panels make financial sense in the long term?

Yes, in the long term, according to an analysis by Midsummer Energy, a firm selling solar panels designed for anything from a garden shed to a yacht.  As energy prices continue to increase, the pay back time is getting shorter but can still run into decades.  Interestingly, my research into the subject has found that many people investing in renewables for the first time are retired or even elderly people who may not see their investment pay off themselves.  But many of them told us that the feel good factor was more important to them than any financial benefit.  I suppose it is just the equivalent of buying a new motorbike or going on a cruise for green minded retirees!