What if solar panels aren't the right way to go?
Some of you might know that we bought a house about 6 months ago. We bought what some would say “the worst house on a good street.” Having said that, coming from living standards further south in Europe I'm not quite sure what is so bad about it. Yes it isn't huge, the floors aren't exactly the same in every room, there are no folded doors out to a beautiful patio, and granted the farmer that built the house originally had his own methods. As we moved into the house we had grand plans and kept saying ‘yes it is a good house but it needs work’ to everyone that came over for a house tour. Fortunately (or unfortunately), depending on how you look at it, we bought this house in peak war, acutely high electricity prices, rising inflation & interest rates, and don't get me started on material costs.
However, here is the blessing- we were forced to stop and truly think about what we wanted to do. So instead of thinking of renovating and expanding we started thinking of saving and sustainability. We started looking at solar panels- started calculating costs, energy we could save, and how we would build our new roof for it to make sense with the solar panels. Then one day I was talking with a friend and we were comparing how much energy we had used that month- when I confessed our usage my friend blurted out “WOW does anyone even live there?” That is how little we used. Why? Because our house isn't large- that is the honest answer. For some reason that hit me like a ton of bricks. We are doing it all wrong. We so desperately don't want to change our behaviors that we now find sustainable excuses for them. We build bigger houses but we put solar panels on the roof, we buy a new car but it is an electrical one, we fly to the Maldives for two weeks but we climate compensate. These behaviors- do we really love them that much? Are they ours? Or someone else's?
Planting a tree with David Attenborough and the Perfect World Foundation in 2018.
This brings me to the work of the French polymath René Girard. “According to Girard, humans don’t desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic―we imitate what other people want. This affects the way we choose partners, friends, careers, clothes, and vacation destinations. Mimetic desire is responsible for the formation of our very identities,” Luke Burgis writes in his new book “Wanting: The power of mimetic desire in everyday life.”
He goes on to tell the story of the first three-starred Michelin chef to walk away from his Michelin Stars for this very reason. In the year of 1999, British chef Marco Pierre White, said “I had three options: I could be a prisoner of my world and continue to work six days a week, I could live a lie and charge high prices and not be behind the stove or I could give my stars back, spend time with my children and re- invent myself.” The stars were not his wants.
What if part of getting out of this never ending world- crisis is actually digging deep into what we actually want. Could it potentially save our sanity, wallet and planet?
Written by:
Alexandra Nash