The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 December 2008
by Elizabeth Farrelly
We are a culture of consumption. (To live is to consume. But we are agreed that there are extremes that are variously healthy or destructive.) Our economy is based on consumption. We shop on the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday). Or we don't (Buy Nothing Day). The very health of our economy is based upon the first few hours of that day, extrapolated through the holiday shopping season and into the entire year. The year 2008, of course, wasn't a very good one. All measures of the economy are based on growth. How long can we sustain this? How long before we realize that the sphere that is the planet Earth is finite? How long before we realize, at heart, in our very being, that we cannot consume forever? By some measures, we're already far too late. We may be doomed. If not the species, then certainly the culture and maybe civilization itself. So, when we're standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart, looking at miles of plastic soda bottles, what choices do we make to make the world a better, safer and enduring place? Elizabeth Farrelly, an Australian architecture and urban critic, takes on this issue in this book. Her critique sprawls across the cultural illness that has us consuming ourselves out of existence. In Australia as in America, sprawl and rampant consumption has resulted in drastic reduction in individual and social well-being. People drive farther, addicted to "shelter lit", eat more and dwell in environmentally obscene McMansions, driving big cars and striding across the environment with Brobdignagian carbon footprints. We're fatter and slower. We take up too much space. (And yet books telling us how to live more simply are bestsellers.) We're pushing the wilderness into smaller and smaller corners of our landscape. Which may not matter, as studies show we're spending less and less time in touch with any nature at all. For eight years, president Bush systematically attacked the Endangered Species Act in the name of business and development. Our environment is more contaminated by chemicals than ever. Farrelly's story is familiar, maybe, but her portrayal is creative, often funny, sharp, biting, and full of inconvenient truths. She doesn't offer a lot of solutions to these issues, but she makes the problem vivid and demanding of our attention. She acknowledges that it may already be too late, that it will get worse before it gets better. And she lays the blame at the feet of some unconventional causes. But she also envisions the world in the coming decades, offering dark visions of climate change alongside dreams of an Australian civilization that has found some solutions. It is a measure of the optimism of this reader that the darker predictions sound more plausible than the upbeat ones. The book is fairly obscure, a critique perhaps read more by afficionadoes of urban development or design, but its almost panicked message must be heard by global consumers before the globe itself is consumed.