A reader asks: What motivates me?

I struggle to answer.

Me in my 1989 Hudson scull. Photo: Kelly Rossiter

A reader recently asked:

I was surprised to hear you had left Treehugger, but then no, not really... So I will also get straight to it. What motivates you to write or get involved with an organization these days? What makes it a good day in the new world of Lloyd Alter and in the context of the world of sustainable construction? What ambitions are left to achieve beyond the mundane?

It was the last sentence that got me, “What ambitions are left to achieve beyond the mundane?” My first thought was that my ambitions were pretty mundane, the top one being to get my two laps around the lake every morning below 40 minutes.

I should note that I did not leave Treehugger; it left us, dumping all the full-time writers on the same day. Katherine Martinko was one of the others laid off and wrote on her substack:

“To go from having a job in the morning to being told at noon that I'd be done by the end of the day—computer locked, work email deleted, Slack channel inaccessible—was a mental and emotional whirlwind, especially since I'd worked for the site for 10 years. I woke up the following morning at 5:30, like always, and lay in bed feeling utterly disoriented.”

I woke up at 5:30 the next day and started writing this substack. I didn’t know what else to do. People can earn a living doing this, and I have been blown away by the unsolicited pledges and subscriptions. But I feel these are a contract with the writer, and I had to find out, can I keep this up and honour my side of the bargain?

Katherine and the others laid off from Treehugger were young and ambitious; Katherine says she applied for 85 jobs. I am not young. I did not apply for any jobs and threw myself into the Substack and finishing my second book, The Story of Upfront Carbon, coming from New Society Publishers early next year.

Some jobs came looking for me. Green Building Advisor asked me to write a bi-weekly column. Azure commissioned an article. I am contributing to a podcast, Zero Ambitions. I am doing a bit of consulting. I start teaching my Sustainable Design class at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in the fall, so I have lots to motivate me. But mostly, I think about my book and how I spread its message.

The subtitle of my new book is “How a life of just enough offers a way out of the climate crisis;” I use the word “less” a lot and discuss its pedigree:

"Less is more," the phrase popularized by architect Mies van der Rohe comes to mind, but he didn't say it first; that was Robert Browning in an 1855 poem. And Mies didn’t practice what he preached; his minimalist details were often expensive and impractical. Bucky Fuller defined ephemerality as “doing more with less.” Degrowth advocate Jason Hickel titled his book “Less is more: how degrowth will save the world” and writes that “degrowth begins as a process of taking less.” Architect Kelly Alvarez Doran rejects Mies and gets back to basics: “less is less.” And that's really what this is all about: using less stuff.

But it doesn’t just apply to buildings, and it doesn’t apply to everyone. It is important to recognize that the majority of people on this planet don’t have enough.

The shocking stats from the Financial Times show that the richest 10% are responsible for almost half of emissions and, more importantly, 46% of the growth in emissions. The richest 10% probably includes everyone reading this, and this is where we have to start. As Pogo famously said on the first Earth Day, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Will Arnold tells us: Use less stuff.

All of which brings me back to the reader’s questions. When it comes to “the context of the world of sustainable construction," I have four “radical principles” that I have been teaching my students at TMU and will keep hammering away at them:

Radical Decarbonization: Design to minimize Upfront Carbon Emissions and eliminate operating carbon emissions.

Radical Sufficiency: What do we actually need? What is enough?

Radical Simplicity: Design to be as simple as possible, using as little material as possible.

Radical Efficiency: Design to use as little energy as possible, whatever the source.

These all come under Will Arnold’s much shorter manifesto: “Use Less Stuff.”

When it comes to “What ambitions are left to achieve beyond the mundane?” I have a book to sell! Likely for the near future, I will be writing about Upfront Carbon in everything, from buildings to burgers to bicycles.

That’s mundane, but it is the best I can do.

Writing this has helped me decide to flip the switch on subscriptions and pledges as of September; having a contract with readers is a good incentive to keep going, and earning a living is nice.

In the meantime, I’m going to go row that boat.