Giving up culture? // When is energy saving going too far?
The more I think about the methods of saving carbon that are reaching deep into social issues and your physical substance itself, the more ambivalent I am towards them.
Energy saving in every part of your material life is making severe cuts in those aspects of life that Arne Naess (”founder” of deep ecology) would describe as having “inherent value”. This term describes a certain quality for life itself, that is not dependant on growing life-standard.
For me, examples for these are music or a simple cup of tea. These are already relatively “low Impact” if you look at them from a footprint point of view. So the little energy you save by not listening to music or making tea, is still taking a big part of life and therefore culture away from you.
And if you go further: Other activities from those life-quality things include such normal ideas like having a nice talk, playing games, social activities all together. But if the act of talking itself is considered as a potential source of saving emissions, things get really complicated.
This is all theory of course, but to think through these steps of having a currency that is carbon and looking through the lense of this carbon currency at everything, reveals a lot of what it means to be human.
