I think there’s a tendency to focus on particular small consumer luxuries and to panic about losing them, because those are the only luxuries most of us have, and so when we imagine losing them we don’t imagine anything replacing them.
And I feel that framing “you must give up cheap, ubiquitous oranges” as a lower-luxury life is itself kind of buying into the idea that that kind of small consumer luxury is what luxury is, and obscures the ways that a more sustainable way of living incorporates–must incorporate–things that a lot of people see as not just luxurious, but unattainably so.
I own one bespoke garment, a wool greatcoat. I saved up for months to afford it. It’s beautiful, and its materials and construction mean that I can continue to pay a tailor to mend and remake it until the fabric wears out. (Wears out at places that aren’t stress points, that is; I have already had silk facings added to the edges of the pockets, where it was starting to wear through, and had the cuffs turned; when the cuffs start to wear out again I will have decorative ones added in a contrasting fabric, and probably epaulets or another accent on the shoulders where my purse strap bites into the fabric. I have already squirreled away a vintage Persian lamb muff with the lining rotted away for possible use as cuff and collar facings. But I digress.)
Most people who don’t sew themselves, though, have never had even a single garment made to their measure and their specifications; when most people hear that we need to shrink our wardrobes, they don’t think about going back to a landscape of tailoring and bespoke clothing. They’re not imagining the three perfect dresses they’d commission from a dressmaker, and how comfortable and beautiful they would be; they’re not imagining having the stability to save up for a bespoke dress, without student loans or usurious housing prices sucking up everything they earn–they’re imagining Thanos snapping his fingers and leaving them with the same shitty clothes, just fewer of them, and not being able to replace them because they still have the same drains on their income, with no end in sight.
When you tell Americans that we need a future without passenger air travel, what we hear is you will never be able to go more than a day’s travel from home again; you will never again see your family 900 miles away–because it’s almost impossible to imagine having the leisure time to travel by a slower method.
So. I entirely agree with
consider replacing “Environmentalist demand X is problematic as fuck because it’ll impact group Y” with “Environmentalist demand X is probably necessary as part of a profound reorientation of how we distribute resources internationally, but it’ll impact group Y: what are the options we can start working on now to minimise or prevent that impact.”
But I think we need to start, not even with Environmentalist demand X would trade A for B (fast fashion for small bespoke wardrobes; fast air travel for slow sailing ships, fewer oranges but more rewilded blight-resistant chestnuts) but with Why are group Y’s lives so constrained and miserable that cutting down on some consumer goods feels like the apocalypse, and how do we fix that?
