Between efficiency and sufficiency

Last week Wolfgang Sachs gave a lecture at Roskilde University where he talked about prosperity in a post-growth economy. He had a number of interesting and imaginative ideas on how to change the concept and expectations of growth in order to strive for a sustainable society.

I would make no sense if I tried to explain all his points, for this you should read some of his many publications on these issues – and for those of you who also read German, there is even more to choose from.

Just to give you some idea, he talked a lot about being imaginative using things in a more clever way, for instance being energy efficient or water efficient. And he claimed that it is often new business that goes for these kinds of solutions. Important here is not to mistake imagination with technological fixes, which seems to be the way forward today when expansion at any cost means investing in new risky technologies. Some of them even not new ones – like nuclear power. His utopia was small but connected which links to smart grids redistributing from energy+ houses and so forth.

The interesting thing for me was the idea of shifting focus from ownership to access. How come that we feel that we need to own everything we use in everyday life; cars, computers, refrigerators and so forth? Instead of placing the sustainable responsibility on consuming, it should be placed on producing like for instance deciding that all refrigerators produced should be AA energy marked.

To take this point even further, he linked to the idea of slowing down speed which would lower both production costs and energy use when producing and using… Interesting – is this in any way realistic – I guess Virilio would definitely say 'no'.