Let's Get Small

Slow food has evolved into slow cities, slow design and more; it is a useful meme for the idea that you take it slow, do it carefully, do it right and take the time to enjoy it. However I have come to believe that we need another movement, a new Small Movement, where less is truly more. In everything we do, smaller is cheaper, more efficient and has a lower carbon footprint. After my first inspiration from Steve Martin, I went to an earlier source: Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher. Back in 1974, Schumacher called the modern economy unsustainable, as natural resources were treated as expendable income rather than capital, so we would run out of them. He put forward an idea of "enoughness," a word to remember.

"Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

And Small.

A recent spate of articles got the small ball rolling:

The Small House

Small houses have been growing as of late; in last week's New York Times article on Jay Shafer's Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, Stephen Kurutz called it a movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one's footprint -- structural as well as carbon -- by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept's time has finally arrived."

The Tumbleweeds are not the only design around but they get a lot of attention because they are so very small and so very cute. However there is a small modern movement happening as well, with the Micro Compact Home,

and we certainly have trowelled on the pixels for the Sustain Minihome. It isn't just about frugal living; it is also about taking up less space, using fewer resources and significantly reducing our carbon footprints. It is about building healthy and building well instead of building big.

It isn't just cabins in the woods, either; Max and Kate of Apartment therapy demonstrate how a family of three can live comfortably in 265 square feet if it is well-designed.

More on the Small House:
Tumbleweed Tiny House Company
It's a Small House After All
Very Small Homes : TreeHugger
Sometimes , Less is just Less : the 250 SF Condo for $279K : TreeHugger

The Small Car

Andy Revkin of the NY Times then wrote about the automotive equivalent, the small car. Like the small house, they use far less fuel, take up less space, and take less material to build.

I have certainly been promoting these, along with lower speed limits, as a way of drastically reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. "We don't need hydrogen cars and new technology, we just need better, smaller designs, lower speed limits and no big SUVs on the road to squish them."

More on Small Cars:
Toyota iQ: The Smallest Four-Passenger Car in the World : TreeHugger
Small Cars "Almost Cheaper Than Walking" : TreeHugger
Smart Car : How Smart Is It? : TreeHugger

I would add a number of other categories to the small revolution:

Small Food

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently suggested that because the production of meat is so carbon intensive, cutting back on it would be a very effective way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. "Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there."

However there is perhaps another way to cut back without cutting out meals, that would lead to a much healthier population: eat the recommended portions for good health- eat small. Kelly Rossiter answered the question on Planet Green: How Much is Enough to Eat?

"So let's take a look at dinner and build of plate of what you should be eating. Let's start with the protein. Most people decide what meat they want to eat and then build their meal around that. That's fine, but bear in mind that the meat should always be the smallest thing on your plate. Dietitians have figured out all kinds of mnemonics to help people visualize what the portion size should be. With meat, think of a portion which is no larger than a deck of cards. 3 ounces of lean meat (or chicken or fish) is one serving."

That's small, but as Schumacher might say, it has enoughness. A small food diet is cheaper, healthier, has a lower carbon footprint and we are all slimmer and better looking. What's small about that?

More on Food Portion Size and Waste
Britons Waste $20bn Worth of Food a Year
Foodprint: The Surprising Ecological Footprint of a Little Meat
UN Expert Says Eat Less Red Meat To Reduce CO2 Emissions

The Small Mart

Michael Shuman explains how much better the Small-mart is for us and our neighbours. He describes LOIS, or Local Ownership/ Import Substitution:

LOIS businesses are long term wealth generators where the money mostly stays in the place where it is generated;

LOIS businesses are smaller, so there are fewer destructive exits. When your town is dependent on one big company and it leaves, goodbye town economy.

LOIS businesses have higher economic multipliers- in one study comparing two bookstores in Austin, economists found that 13 dollars out of every hundred spent in Borders stayed in town, whereas in the local bookshop, 45 dollars circulated in Austin.

Shuman lays out a plan that consumers should consider to support LOIS, and points out that you will not spend more but less money. Drink local craft beer and wine; find local entertainment; eat out locally rather than in the chains; cut auto use; get your mortgage from a credit union. Think Small and local.

Seth Godin noted that small, clever, honest and real businesses and ideas will succeed; big is slow, boring and broken. When it comes to doing business, if we want our communities to survive and even thrive, Small is the New Big.

Small Cities

Jim Kunstler writes in Freakonomics

"We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future. I believe our big cities will contract substantially -- even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead."

When we run out of oil, it will be useful to have agricultural areas convenient to where we live. It will be more comfortable not having to climb twenty flights of stairs to our freezing glass apartment. It will be convenient to have shopping on a main street that is within walking distance.

Even if it does not get as bad as Kunstler suggests, the smaller cities and towns may well be the more comfortable and energy-efficient places to live. While New York may now use the least amount of energy per capita, that calculation doesn't take into account the inputs, the energy necessary to get everything into New York.

We have noted many times that smaller cities in the Northeast of the US have rail, canal and road infrastructure that is unmatched in America. It has water, great agricultural land and people don't need air conditioning. People are even moving back to Buffalo.

A Small Life

Sarah Susanka notes that the "bigger-is-better idea that triggered the explosion of McMansions has spilled over to give us McLives." She proposes the not-so-big life, and suggests that it is not such a big deal to accomplish.

It is a not-so-bad idea. Living the small life might be fun, cheap and a lot easier on the environment. It might even become a movement.

More on Living with Less:
Quote of the Day: Henry David Thoreau
Quote of the Day: No Impact Man on Selling Climate Change
The 100 Thing Challenge
George Carlin 1937-2008
A Story about Losing, Leaving and Buying It All Back

Follow Lloyd Alter on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lloydalter

Comments

[sheila]

SO WHERE IS THE SMALL, POINT OF USE RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM???

People need to get much more aware of the massive environmental devastation caused by Industrial Wind and Solar power plants and their lengthy transmission lines. Just because they use (some) wind or sun as fuel, that does NOT make them good for the planet. As an illustration, Google has a 1.6 MW solar generating system on its ROOF in Palo Alto. That would kill off nearly 100 acres of open space if T. Boone Pickens were to build it into one of his "wind farms." The Sierra Club's "roadmap" to a healthy planet starts off by immediately slaughtering 4 million acres of natural habitats for gigantic wind and solar power plants and the roads and transmission corridors which will force thousands of Americans from their homes, and millions more species from theirs. with friends like this, who needs GHGs??

All this can be avoided if everyone were incentivized to build renewable energy generation into their properties. more than 50% of residences are ideally sited for PV or microwind (many could be net exporters of power) yet far, far fewer than 1% have installed. why? because the Robber Barons of Big Energy have convinced their puppets in government to give them all our land and money, rather than offering feed-in tariffs, loans, grants and subsidies to real people like us, so we can participate.

LOCAL, POINT OF USE RENEWABLES ARE THE ONLY SUSTAINABLE SOLUTION! please support!

[Nolana]

Right on! One major problem with large, corporate-owned green energy projects is that the consumer is still beholden to the provider - just as we are now. You can put solar panels on your roof. Look into geothermal heating and cooling, and small wind turbines. Generate enough energy at home, and you can sell the surplus back onto the grid. I've heard about people having negative electric bills because of the power they sell back.

[rwe]

How about smaller GOVERNEMENT... that which governs best governs least..

[KillTheMessenger]

"by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept's time has finally arrived."

There is a significant misconception here. Just because a building is tiny does not mean it uses less energy than a building that is huge. It's not the size of single family homes that causes the problem, it's the fact that they are single family homes. The real savings in energy and natural resources come from stacking people in large apartment buildings. Urban density is nature's friend, not her enemy. It makes more than just low heating and cooling bills possible. Density is the precondition for public services like transportation and recycling. And it allows us to leave ares that have not been plowed under by developers untouched.

The homes shown are very cute and architecturally lightyears ahead of the typical McMansion development, but they are not environmentally friendly by a long shot.

[Nolana]

Good article. I'm going to pass it on to a bunch of people.

A couple of years ago I bought a 16'x20' cabin pretty cheap from a local garden shed builder who was thinning his stock. I am ever so slowly making it habitable - electricity, insulation, storm windows, etc. I'll install a wood stove and will tack on a shed behind it for a water tank, storage and a composting toilet. It has 240 square feet of floor space and an 8'x12' loft, and a 4'x20' porch to sit on and watch the moonrise. With well-designed storage, it will be a perfectly adequate dwelling.

Not quite the Victorian Italianate Gothic Mansion I always envisioned having, but better.

[framante]

There's no arguing that smaller is better. But, I doubt that we'll ever get there without without some real incentives. We'll go a long way in that direction the sooner the price of gasoline goes out of sight. Contrary to most people, I am happy to see the price of gasoline rise, whatever the reasons are, and I'm urging it on. I realize some people are going to hurt disproportionately, but the sooner we all hurt, the better off we will be. Only then will get serious about building high-mileage cars. They don't have small cars in many European countries for altruistic reasons. The price of fuel there is sky high. A high fuel price will no doubt have some long-term effects on compacting our cities and on the eat-local movement. In addition, I suspect it will raise our consciousness about energy consumption in general, whch can't be a bad thing.

[Wilbur]

Good post! To sum up what you wrote: "No pain - no gain!"

Wilbur

[January]

The motive for the American lifestyle is the history of not being able to get along well enough to live close together. Until now, we have had a continent where support was provided for spreading out.

So the issue is primarily not a matter of big or small but of learning to live together in a peaceful way. We don't need all the clap trap of capitalism being peddled in this advertisement as much as we need help learning to cooperate. Let's get honest. It is folks running away from each other who need to spend money and consume. Folks who work together are bad for the corporate bottom line.

Permit me an extreme example. It is offered not as a model but just to prove a point. Who is more dangerous to our future: the doper or drunk sitting on the bus bench enjoying (sic) his solitude? Or the guy who just wushed by in his $150,000 luxury car earned by selling junk of some kind? As with the rich investors whose greed has propelled us into an economy where the weakest and the poorest will suffer the most? Whose most likely to go to jail?

Or the journalist who peddles disaster capitalism? Yeah, sure, what we need is better marketing? Isn't that the point of this article? Physician heal thyself.

[fairwitness]

This is the way of the future--and it will produce healthier, smarter, more compassionate people in a developmental feedback loop. We are seeing the beginnnings of it even now, before the massive disruptions that are inevitable as a result of energy shocks and war-mongering that just intensifies as demand for resources becomes even more competitive.

Might as well learn now how to live better with less waste and clutter. And in so doing discover a greatly enhanced quality of life. For everyone. Finally.