23 Mar What If?

Awhile back an interesting question occurred to me. The same question has probably crossed some of your minds.

And that question was: If we were to discover a renewable, nonpolluting energy source in infinite quantity, would we have any incentive to improve the design of our homes, streets, cities, and other human systems?

I mean, right now a lot of us are being motivated by the "sticks" of pollution and global climate change, right?

So what would we do if we suddenly stumbled on more energy than we could possibly use, in a nonpolluting form? And let's say there was so much of it that it was dirt-cheap. "Too cheap to meter," as the old Reddy Kilowatt character used to promise.

Would we start thinking it was OK again to ship apples from Chile to Texas (with a trip to South Africa in between to get them waxed)? Would we stop worrying about the footprint of our airline travel, and make cross-country trips any old time we wanted without thinking about it?

Would we all live in houses even bigger than we have now, filled with even more stuff than we have now? Would we drive even faster and more than we do now, on roads even bigger than we have now?

Since energy would be so cheap, it'd be cheaper to make new stuff than it would be to expend the human energy to riffle through our existing stuff looking for something, right? Would it become a crime, or at least very eccentric, to prefer bicycling to driving; to prefer a tiny shack to a mansion?

This might seem like a rather silly train of thought, but I think there's something here worth pursuing.

it has occurred to me that it takes a lot of self-discipline, or stubbornness, or eccentricity, or something, to cling to a simple, small-scale life because, well, you PREFER it to the default mode. When the world around you is awash in cheap energy and cheap stuff, and you prefer a smaller dwelling (or a dwelling shared with more people), containing only things you love and use, you are considered downright crazy. Maybe even dangerous.

The main thing that drives our design tends to be resource constraints (whether the resource is energy or money). For the past few decades, cheap fossil fuels have allowed us to operate virtually free of resource constraints. If my little sci-fi scenario were to come true, and we were to find an energy source that was cheap like fossil fuel, and that was also RENEWABLE and CLEAN, would the world be free of pollution? Or would there just be pollution of a different kind: even more hideously bad design and even more social isolation than we have now, enabled by the total absence of constraints on energy?

Which leads me to another question: Are ecological constraints actually a blessing in disguise? Personally, I think so. In the past, when we've have too much access to cheap resources, we don't always have the self-discipline, or the courage, or whatever it is, to stop and ask ourselves what kinds of buildings and streets WE really consider beautiful and lovable; what we really want. 

Then again, maybe universal access to ultra-cheap energy would allow the artist in all of us to flourish, and everything right down to toothpicks would be embellished with little carved roses and stuff. Maybe we'd suddenly feel we could afford to be "impractical" in a good way, shifting our emphasis from mass-scale "practicality" (funny that use of the word) to aesthetic quality and community and the other elements that go into creating a deep sense of well-being.

No great revelations in this blog entry — just musing on an interesting question that popped into my mind one day out of the blue and has never entirely left me.

So, What do YOU think would happen to the design of our houses, streets, and other human environments, and on the design of our LIVES, if the constraint on energy were somehow suddenly lifted?