Abundance or Sufficiency?

Here's a summary of a lecture where I am critical of so-called abundance agenda.

Everybody is talking about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. I have written two posts addressing points made in the book, countering it with discussions of sufficiency. I have been clarifying my thoughts and preparing a talk about sufficiency, which I am presenting at noon EDT on Monday, 2 June (sign up here) titled “Planning and Designing Housing within Planetary Boundaries.”

The Abundists Klein and Thompson write:

“We seek a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world. We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction. This is a story that must be built out of bricks and steel and solar panels and transmission lines, not just words.”

I also recently read Timothée Parrique’s marvellous new book with the dreadful name Slow Down or Die, where he writes:

“The challenge ahead of us is one of less, lighter, slower, smaller. It is the challenge of restraint, frugality, moderation, and sufficiency.”

The problem with the abundist approach is that it ignores the planetary boundaries we have already breached. We can’t keep making bricks and steel or the kind of housing that we have been building.

It’s getting harder and harder to find the materials we need; there is less copper in a tonne of rock dug out of a copper mine today than there was left in the overburden of mines from a hundred years ago. (More on copper in my recent post We won’t have enough copper supply to meet demand within the decade. What do we do?). Readers point out that we keep finding more copper and more lithium, but it becomes more expensive and environmentally harmful squeezing it out with lower concentrations.

The Abundists say more, more, more, housing and energy and construction, but I quote engineer Will Arnold and say “use less stuff.” Or as architect Kelly Alvarez Doran notes, “Less is Less.” Fix and repurpose what we have before we build new.

I call for less car and more micromobility- you can make 300 e-bikes from the material and batteries that go into one Rivian pickup truck. See Just Being Electric Doesn't Make a Giant Pickup or SUV a Good Thing: “We need smaller, more efficient vehicles that take less energy and carbon to produce and run. Just because it's electric doesn't give it a free pass.”

Less sprawl, which benefits from massive federal subsidies for road infrastructure and fossil fuels;

Less height, where tall skinny buildings often have higher emissions per bedroom than single-family houses; See How tall should a building be: How not to build in a climate crisis.

Less floor area/person and more missing middle/ Goldilocks density housing and multifamily designs as are common in Europe. I look at the new Canadian initiative to build small, low, woodframe multiple unit buildings that have a quarter of the carbon footprint per bedroom of single-family houses.

Less energy consumption and greater efficiency with the Passivhaus standard, as seen here in a cohousing project in Dunedin, New Zealand. See Cohousing is hard, but the results are worth it.

Less upfront carbon and more straw and biogenic materials, as seen in Juraj Mikurcik’s house built of Ecococon prefab straw panels (More: The three little pigs got it wrong)

But also less wood, using it more efficiently and sparingly. See What's the Best Way to Build in Wood? Optimize for form, for grid, for minimizing fibre.

Less complexity. More simplicity. As architect Andrew Waugh recently summarized: “Simple forms. No cantilevers. Not too tall. Use wood.” See Radical Simplicity and Sufficiency are no longer fringe.

Less consumption and more fairness and equity. We can’t have abundance in North America when it affects everybody everywhere. See New OXFAM report goes after the billionaires

And finally, as the Take the jump people say:

The Abundists say we can build more housing by eliminating regulation. I would counter that we need more regulation to ensure that we build more efficient housing with lower carbon intensity at higher densities, with sufficiency in mind, along with equity and joy.

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Previously on this subject:

Sufficiency vs abundance: Less is more vs Less is a bore

How to build a world around sufficiency or "frugal abundance"

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