Lessons on Energy Sobriety

Neither ridicule nor psychiatric diagnosis will make the unpluggers go away… Their own experience tells them that they enjoy the art of living which they recover by dwelling more than they enjoyed the comfort they left.1 
—Ivan Illich, “Dwelling” (1984)

One way to effect change would be to introduce a second major into our universities and colleges. Right now there’s only one major: upward mobility. It’s the major which accommodates the original set of assumptions we settled the continent with, the mind-set that fuels the extractive economy. The new major would be “homecoming.” It would educate people to go back to a place and dig in.2  
—Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to this Place (1993)

Environmental scientist Donella Meadows once wrote that three weeks of feedback provided by her new hybrid car transformed forty years of ingrained driving habits. “I didn’t have to change my values,” she said, “I just had to see how my actions did and did not conform to my values.”3 The car’s instrument panel monitored her miles-per-gallon fuel consumption in real time, responding to changes in her driving and motivating her to drive ever more efficiently. One wishes buildings offered such feedback, or came with instruction manuals for low energy living habits. To be clear, I am not longing for more apps that assess my energy consumption or my addiction to technology—trusting a screen to wean me off excessive screen time might be a misdirected endeavor. In my ongoing attempt to correlate my dwelling practice with my values over the last few years, I have found that theoretical information imparted by building experts can complement—but not replace—the essential embodied knowledge yielded by experimentation feedback.

My “values” are easily summed up. Informed by years of reading and teaching degrowth literature, which calls for a radical downscaling of material and energetic resources for those who consume more than their planetary share, I have been keeping an eye on my own energy consumption. As long as the extraction of non-renewable resources keeps increasing to meet soaring global demands in energy, I will keep trying not to exceed the sufficiency measures recommended by environmental agencies.4 I would rather my comfort not be at the expense of others, human or not.

Some daily life recommendations are much easier for me to follow than others. I am not much of a consumer (I find repairing or mending my worn-out possessions the surest way to forge them into treasured ones). I’m happiest as a pescatarian. I don’t spend hours streaming videos (especially not on cellular networks).5 While far from unplugged, I avoid AI when I can opt out, and am mindful of choosing the lowest energy consuming software, browsers, or even operating system. Other than a small fridge and old laundry machine, I mostly live without a host of electric-powered appliances. This is, however, increasingly challenging: mechanical appliances are increasingly pricier and/or harder to find than their plugged, rechargeable, or battery-powered equivalents. Kitchen examples abound: scales, grinders of all sorts, thermometers, choppers, egg-beaters, etc. 

Adopting an energy-frugal mode of living—a voluntary way of life that resists the anesthetic effects of easy comforts provided by abundant cheap energy, rather than a subjection to governmentally imposed constraints—has been described as a philosophy.6 For me, it mostly taps into long-lost yet still familiar gestures acquired growing up in the south of France in the 1970s. As a three-generation household that had collectively lived through two world wars and the Russian Revolution, a deep-rooted memory of scarcity was embedded in our everyday habits. Despite decades of acquired comforts living in the United States (and its attendant significant increase in energy expenditure), my progressive return to a more energy-aware lifestyle over the past twenty years has been much less painful than expected, and a rather joyful relief. Mindfulness is the best antidote to alienation, and too much comfort can certainly be numbing. Choosing the quietness of sweeping floors or hanging laundry over vacuum cleaners or tumble dryers isn’t exactly hardship. And the latter aren’t all that conducive to the pleasures of humming. 

That said, following the French Agency for Ecological Transition’s recommendations of a maximum 18 degrees Celsius (64.4 degrees Fahrenheit) indoor temperature in winter has been a whole other story. I emphasize here that I spent my childhood in the very south of France, followed by a decade in southern Arizona (in a non-air-conditioned home). When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for graduate school, I learned to layer underwear and hold an umbrella. I have the metabolic rate of a lizard. If I let myself sit still for too long behind a computer, only a very hot shower will calm the shiver in my body and re-saturate the pallor of my skin. An 18-degree-Celsius indoor temperature demands from me more than a bit of attention, discipline, and effort: it sets the stage (read: battlefield) for a deep confrontation between my willpower and my fear of death, between my values and my capacity to function. But in 2022, everything changed.

I was living in a late eighteenth-century Parisian building when the decades-long gas disputes between Russia and Ukraine escalated into a full-blown energy crisis following Russia’s invasion in 2022. Gas prices in Europe surged by a few thousand percent. While the French government rushed to dispense advice on how to prepare for both winter and power outages, news reports documented the closing of bakeries and rising cost of bread. Every day, as I walked up to my flat, I thought of George Perec’s advice to look at apartment buildings and “ask yourself why it often says ‘gas on every floor.’”7 My building proudly featured one of these nineteenth century enameled plaques. My stove, water heater, and radiators were all gas powered. Dwelling in 36 square meters (380 square feet) soon amounted to more than €100 in gas per month—a fourfold increase from earlier bills. I paid the cost of staying warm, relieved that I had not desired to live in a more spacious apartment.

Meanwhile, in Appalachia, work on the long-delayed Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline was restarting. By 2023, two-thirds of US exports of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) were headed to Europe, replacing Russia as its main supplier. Prices dropped back from their astronomical record (despite US exporters charging prices four times higher than those in the domestic US market). This apparent return to normal felt distressing, and the lesson crystal clear: as long as there is demand, supply will follow—regardless of the social costs and toxic waste. The short distance between the comfort of a hot shower and global geopolitics had never struck me so palpably.

Aside from a good number of homeowners benefiting from governmental subsidies on insulation retrofits and photovoltaic panels, it would be difficult to measure the impact of the 2022-23 winter on collective energy awareness in France. But one metric does stand out. In late 2021, graphic novelist Christophe Blain, in collaboration with climate scientist Jean-Marc Jancovici, released a graphic novel detailing the historical role of energy in our societies. A humorous, if at times arduous, read, the authors could never have suspected that World Without End would become the greatest hit of 2022 across the country in all book categories and genres, selling close to one million copies.8 Along with most of its readers, I was deeply struck by it. The excessively high metabolism of the metropolis and blatant opulence of dissipated energy became hard to unsee. The nineteenth-century capital of luxury and fashion became unbearable.

By the end of winter, a targeted bulk email from Orange, the French telecommunications corporation, ignited an opportunity for me to try something different. It announced the long-awaited arrival of fiber-optic cable service to the disinvested rural valley of Burgundy, which my paternal grandparents had left for the capital a century ago. Although the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an urban exodus two years prior, leading to soaring rural reinvestments, my ancestors’ dying village had missed that fleeting lifeboat: the old cellular and DSL networks were too saturated for video conferencing, so fleeing remote-working Parisians invested in better connected townships.

I had the keys to my great-grandmother Marie’s home. Her youngest sister Victorine had been the last full-time dweller of the seventeenth-century farmhouse with its pigsty, outhouse, chicken coop, water well, and wood-burning cookstove. She lived there (without hot water) until her final month in 1978, at 96 years of age. Neighboring relatives (descendants of Marie and Victorine’s brother) would occasionally air the indoors and light the stove, but for the most part, the house sat empty—the common fate of hundreds of thousands similar stone houses dispersed throughout the country’s deep rural areas. Their lack of real estate value tracks a lack of locally available work, interest, and demand. Since Victorine died, the village has lost half of its population. The neighborhood is marked by permanently closed shutters and slowly crumbling walls. 

In the early twenty-first century, my parents invested in repairing the building’s caved-in roof, adding a bathroom, toilet, and hot water heater in the process, but there has never been central heating. This once self-sufficient homestead was incrementally connected to electricity in the 1930s, to water in the 1950s, to the telephone landline in the 2000s, but was never hooked on gas. Self-sufficiency, or autonomy, is not the same as autarky. If the latter entails a restriction on all exchanges outside a bounded structure, the former denotes the capacity to choose and renewably manage a system’s dependencies—from the scale of a household to that of a nation. As paradoxical as it seems, linking to the fiber broadband network severed me from the gas one. I called Orange and relocated to Burgundy. My logic was simple: if my great-grandmother Marie was able to live in these walls without plumbing, I should assuredly be able to survive, given all of the comforts since acquired. I naturally imagined that an old vernacular structure predating fossil-fuel reliance should capacitate self-sustenance with minimal energy consumption.

It hasn’t been quite that simple, but it also hasn’t been too far-off either. We are often struck by the difference between pre-modern and modern buildings. But what is equally, if not more significant is the difference between pre-modern and modern human beings. I didn’t foresee how the experiment would mostly change me—my habits, desires, perception, attention, and most extraordinarily, my sense of comfort. 

Low-Tech, Passive Buildings

I thought I knew a bit about buildings. The scope of my ignorance only unveiled itself slowly. It’s as if we spent our lives on power boats, designing power boats, teaching students how to design spacious and elegant power boats. Climate-conscious research consists in optimizing motor efficiency. Going “passive” means planting a mast atop a power boat and deploying a sail whenever the wind happens to blow in the right direction. And when inheriting an old sailboat, we immediately retrofit it with an outboard engine. Realizing that the only way to wean myself off of questionably sourced energy was to board a motor-less sailboat, I would promptly realize that, although my education taught me about boats, I did not know how to sail. To learn, I would surely have to start with a good dose of technical knowledge, but I would eventually need to navigate through practice and expose myself to the fullest range of conditions. Eventually, I would discover the more significant teachings sailing offered: far greater than technical differences, a sailboat is a different kind of vehicle, even the outcome of a very different way of life.9 It’s not about destination, but about being in the flow. It’s not about comfort or convenience, but about physical engagement. Not about speed and accumulation, but about slowness and simplicity. Not about managing impatience and boredom while waiting to get somewhere, but about being attentive to the dynamics of life. 

This analogical detour illustrates my attempts to maneuver my family’s old farmhouse. Making every effort to barely maintain a mere 15-degree-Celsius (60-degree-Fahrenheit) indoor temperature during the winter incited a crash course in experimental physics. I condensed my entire life into the “living” room, turned it into a laboratory scattered with an array of thermometers, and conducted research. With the wood cookstove being my only source of heat, I also collected data on the many parameters of local firewood.

Subsidized energy, a growth-based economy that promotes standardization, and contemporary architectural curricula and modes of practice, have together privileged the use of insulation over working with thermal mass.10 Insulation demands an initial energy investment followed by basic thermostat regulation. Working with thermal mass, conversely, necessitates climate specific knowledge and longer planning cycles. It borrows initial energy from natural temperature differentials, such as between day and night or between summer and winter, and stocks it for later release. Thermal mass (inertia) is powerful, and can be as strong an ally as it can be a serious impediment to energy sobriety. I learned the hard way to start heating up the meter-thick walls in autumn, and that under no circumstances other than pure emergency is it worth leaving town for more than a few days in the middle of winter. It took weeks of stocking the wood stove day and night every few hours to very slowly regain lost degrees and stabilize into a more regular maintenance regime.

Thermogram, 2025. Watercolor by author.

Furnishings

If research in this energy sobriety laboratory began with the physical properties of enclosures, such as managing air leaks and condensation, furnishings soon revealed the range of their potential. In the attic, I located an old set of heavy velvet curtains custom cut for each window. The depths of the window frames offer tight insulating airlocks as thick as the walls. Winter carpets and wall tapestries were unrolled.11 New groupings of objects emanated. In a Borgesian reshuffling of categories, my chronological, stylistic, or sentimental classifications were replaced with a simple binary based on material properties: insulation or conductivity. After placing a hefty cast iron refractory fireback behind the stove, I concluded that no gains were too small to ignore. I reorganized all objects in the room according to a gradient of thermal conductivity: highest heat transfer capacity by the stove (like centuries-old thick copper and enameled cast-iron cookware), and highest resistivity against the exterior walls (I packed the coat racks and shelving with winter wear and blankets, and stacked firewood below). 

Temperature gradients also offer the benefit of experiencing the delight of relative heat: it only takes stepping out to the (10 degrees Celsius/50 degrees Fahrenheit) bathroom to feel the bliss of re-entering the living room (15 degrees Celsius/60 degrees Fahrenheit).12 The Sisyphean task of piling and re-piling firewood incrementally closer to the living room and into the stove invigorates the body and lets the blood flow. This basic activity dictates the rhythm of daily life. Over time, however, my sense of such seeming inconveniences has transformed. I now perceive them as opportunities for improved well-being; the outcome of healthier synchrony with surrounding cycles.13

Comtoise clock, 2025. Watercolor by author.

The Rhythm of Gestures

Once attuned to them, such cycles appear everywhere. I find them comforting. The old Comtoise clock needs to be wound once a week. It strikes the hour less than a minute before the church bell in the distance. The swinging pendulum beats a steady bass line that meters daily life. Its twisted brass rods alternating with steel ones are not simply decorative: they serve as a mechanical means to offset temperature fluctuations by utilizing the two metals’ differing coefficients of thermal expansion. The intricacy of the metalwork prevents the clock from speeding up in winter. 

At night, I fill the brass hot water bottle I found in the old maie (dough trough) with a kettle full of boiling water. Not only do I use it to warm up the bed, it also replaces a night clock: I’ve fine-tuned the consistency of the ritual so that when I wake up, the surface temperature of its cotton sleeve reveals in the dark whether it’s time to get up or wiser to drift back to sleep. As coffee brews, I feed the sourdough starter, which will have doubled by early afternoon. Since the stove demands close tending, I prepare bread in the process. It doesn’t take much effort, but necessitates regular checking. Given the heat capacity of water, slowly simmering soups or stews help regulate room temperature. Our own animal bodies’ liquid consistency and homeothermic properties also provide non-negligible sources of heat, and sharing a small space with other 100-watt springs of warmth have come to define winter coziness. We add a few more watts in the form of warm-blooded pets. As many hands make light work, a larger household fractions both workload and energy expenditures. 

Central to daily life, the oversized solid oak table mutates with the different chapters of the day. Right now, it serves as a quiet space of study—more public library than coworking office space—with piles of books and opened computers contributing a few more watts in dissipated heat. Later, it will host a convivial dinner. Conversations will last late into the evening, further warming the atmosphere. 

Gaïa (sourdough starter) and finished bread, 2025. Watercolor by author.

Community

It became inadvertently clear that, as I awkwardly rediscovered the wheel one spoke at a time, this house has led me toward the very lifestyle it once accommodated and for which it was built. There are now chickens clucking in the yard, and I have been learning about soil and seeds. If I initially thought that low-energy living took a lot of time and made it hard to keep a nine-to-five job, even a remote one, my conclusion is that a more drastic unplugging would be a full-time job, one that could negate the need for wage labor altogether.14 As a communal-scale endeavor, it increasingly strikes me as imaginable. While it would be difficult for a single household to forego day jobs for full self-reliance, a diverse set of capacities, knowhow, and common resources (shared infrastructures, from tools to local forests and lakes) could liberate a collective from the yoke of salaried employment.15 

92-year-old Lucienne lives across the street, next door to her brother-in-law. Her sister’s widower, 86-year-old Raymond, helps Lucienne with firewood, which she uses for both heating and cooking. Since the village recently lost its last bakery and pharmacy, villagers drop off her groceries from the nearby town. The more the village’s population and services have dwindled, the more mutual aid has intensified. This enables the elderly to remain in their homes for as long as possible, which is better for their well-being (and for the national social security health budget). The elementary school is also at risk of closing. The mayor recently advertised the sale of €1 plots of land for young families to build primary residences. 

Witnessing acts of care as the local ethos, I look for ways to be of use. I bake larger-than-usual loaves of bread and share half with the neighbors. I text Raymond from town to see if they need anything from the pharmacy. He doesn’t respond, but later asks me if we’re interested in cultivating his plot; he’s become too tired to do so. He also gives me the address of his cordwood provider: €48 a stere, less than half the national average. That’s under €0.04 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the current €0.13 per kilowatt-hour cost of gas. Lucienne points out that we should have a two-year advance on wood, to let it dry for more efficient heat output. I am certain the whole neighborhood is entertained by my clumsy efforts to rediscover knowledge they never imagined could get lost. I won’t admit to them how many academic degrees I hold; their survival skills, general satisfaction with life, and natural benevolence obviously exceed mine. But I do spend time imagining how this specific kind of knowhow can make its way back into metropolises and into architecture schools, given the unsustainability of megacities and the anticipated phases of spatial reorganization predicted by scientists.16

I have always been an urban dweller and never dreamed of an off-the-grid, back-to-the-land lifestyle. I was just trying to manage dependencies, and reconsider my complicity in toxic fracking practices. (Don’t drill for me, America.) In 2024, France was the second largest European importer of LNG from the US. In early 2025, President Trump threatened to increase tariffs if Europe doesn’t increase its imports. European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen is eager to give in and trade any aspiration towards energy sovereignty for cheaper costs.17 In response, former French minister of ecology and National Assembly deputy, Delphine Batho introduced a bill to ban the use of shale gas in France, calling it an act of resistance.18 It certainly feels like an act of self-preservation. It’s a long shot, and collectively, we may not feel ready to give up manufactured ideas of comfort. But were it to be promulgated as law, I rest assured that, in the long term, more unsuspected well-being than suffering will emerge from the challenge.