Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience

This excellent wee book by Liz Shove has had my mind a-whirring recently. In it she talks about the way we consume energy. It's a much wider definition of consumption than I'm used to, more than just what we buy, also what we use.

She claims that we don't actually consume energy, or anything else (washing machines, air conditioning, fridges) rather what we consume is one of comfort, cleanliness or convenience (or some combination of these). What we think we consume is just the means of our acquiring and using one of these three C's. More than that she claims that global standards of C, C & C are converging towards some global norm, and also that as this happens demand for evermore comfort, cleanliness and convenience is being ratcheted up.

It's a very persuasive argument. She talks at length, for example, about the change we have undergone in impressions of what is the suitable level of cleaning we need to have, to be socially acceptable. How this has changed from an annual bath, to the Sunday bathtime, to now having a daily shower been seen as the 'norm'. This obviously has great impact on our demand of environmentally significant resources, in this case water and the energy needed to heat it.

It's a very useful book for me, when thinking about how do we shift away from the very Carbon intensive lifestyle that we in the UK lead. What we need to focus on, is not the surface levels of consumption, fridges etc. Rather it is the deeper underlying need of comfort, cleanliness and convenience that we, as social creatures, desire.

As our demand for these is increasing (not least because demand is being created for it in us through advertising, marketing, etc.) what is needed is either some way to achieve the same levels of comfort, cleanliness or convenience without demanding so much of our environment, or some way to step-out of such escalating demand we see in our society, which Shove doesn't mention.

There are no answers here, but there is a full analysis of many of the deeper, tacit factors in our gross over consumption. For that Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience is well worth a read.