Ivan Illich, “Dwelling,” in In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990 (New York: Marion Boyars, 1992), 55–64.
Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (Great Barrington, MA: Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 1993).
Donella Meadows, “Give Me Feedback and I Will Change the World, Or At Least My Own Habits,” The Global Citizen, May 4, 2000, ➝.
In fall 2022, in response to changes in global energy management triggered by the Russo-Ukrainian War, the French government’s then Ministry of Energy Transition issued the first phase of its “Plan for Energy Sobriety,” mobilizing citizens to adopt energy frugality gestures; see ➝. This governmental initiative followed the work and recommendations of governmental and public think tanks over the past decades, such as the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), the Association NegaWatt, the Working Group III contribution to the sixth assessment of the IPCC report “Mitigation of Climate Change," among many others, see ➝.
“This video is bad for climate change: Thank you for watching!” posted July 1, 2019, by The Shift Project, ➝.
Since the late 1990s, many high-energy society environmentalists have promoted the pleasures of “frugal abundance” (Serge Latouche), “happy sobriety” (Pierre Rabhi), “epicurean simplicity” (Stephanie Mills), “frugal hedonism” (Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb), “post-growth hedonism” (Kate Soper) and their associated benefits, individual as much as collective and societal. More recently, IPCC AR6 author and Science Po Paris professor Yamina Saheb launched the World Sufficiency Lab, the first think tank dedicated to sufficiency studies. In contrast to voluntary sufficiency, the French Energy Code restricts energy expenditure in many areas. For example, it requires that in residential, institutional, or office buildings—unless qualified for exemption—indoor heating should not exceed 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) (Article R241-26) and that cooling systems not be turned on below 26 degrees Celsius (79 degrees Fahrenheit) indoor temperature (Article R241-30), with a further recommendation that the indoor temperature be set to 26 degrees Celsius only once the outdoor temperature exceeds 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), see ➝.
George Perec, Species of Spaces (London: Penguin, 1974), 45.
It has since been translated into English: Christophe Blain & Jean-Marc Jancovici, World Without End: an Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis (London: Penguin Books, 2024).
To pretend that it’s a harmless question of preference—that there are those who enjoy powered machines, and those who prefer passive systems—is to disregard how these daily preferences add up to, and locks us in, high-energy ways of life—ingrained habits, practices, and corresponding infrastructures, educational institutions, and economies—with severe externalities. Cf. Ulrich Brand & Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2021); Stephan Lessenich, Living Well at Others’ Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019); and Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022).
Kiel Moe expands on this in Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2014).
Managing humidity and condensation requires daily ventilation after meal preparation at the cost of losing a few degrees. Once a day, especially when the sun hits the facade, I would put on an extra sweater and open wide all of the windows for five to ten minutes.
Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979), 21.
Many have emphasized the need to narrow the rift between high-energy societies’ metabolism (rate of energy dissipation cycles) and that of nature, in order to restore daily rhythms aligned with natural cycles. Cf. John Bellamy Foster, “Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405; Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023); and Vandana Shiva, The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change (London: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2024).
Many have written about the history of the Western world’s “war on subsistence,” as Ivan Illich phrased it. It seems important to recall how recent and manufactured the glorification of wage labor actually is. Cf. Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981); Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy (London: Zed Books, 1999); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004); Geneviève Pruvost, “Considering ecofeminism: Subsistence feminism and vernacular ecofeminism,” Travail, Genre et Sociétés 42, no. 2 (2019): 29-47; and Katarzyna Szopa, “Ecofeminism and Social Reproduction: Towards Subsistence Economies,” in Gender and Energy Transition, ed. Katarzyna Iwińska and Xymena Bukowska (Cham, CH: Springer Nature, 2022), 19–36.
That said, there are still utilities to be paid, and despite having drastically reduced the need for trash collection, I’m not yet ready to forego communication network subscriptions. Also: property taxes can’t be paid through bartering…
Many have written about the impact of remote work on urban real-estate, especially following the COVID-related rural retreats, but at a more fundamental level, scientists (physicists to agroecologists) have pointed out that the high metabolism of massive urbanization has passed its optimal scale and peak efficiency for managing resource flow, leading to diminishing local returns. Furthermore, as the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) declines, hierarchical urban concentrations—particularly megacities—formed during an era of abundant cheap energy will undergo rapid phases of disaggregation. For further information see Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (Potomac Associates, 1972); Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Howard T. Odum and Elizabeth C. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008); David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (Victoria, Australia: Melliodora Publishing, 2002); and Sébastien Marot, Taking the Country’s Side: Agriculture & Architecture (Polígrafa, 2025).
July 27, 2025 update: In a meeting with President Trump, European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen has pledged to spend $750 billion to “replace Russian gas and oil with significant purchases of U.S. LNG, oil and nuclear fuels,” in order to secure a 15 percent tariff rate for European exports—under the threat of a much higher rate. Aside from the fact that these figures nearly match the totality of European consumption, annihilating any efforts towards autonomy, they also surpass the surplus of US production beyond domestic use, implicating a reliance on Canadian imports. As a result, the two most affected entities will surely be Planet Earth’s physical environment and the people of the United States, for whom the costs of imported goods and energy continue to climb. See “Statement by President von der Leyen on the deal on tariffs and trade with the United States,” European Commission, July 27, 2025, ➝.
“Proposition de loi visant à favoriser le respect de l’Accord de Paris sur le climat en mettant fin à la consommation de gaz de schiste en France,” Assemblée Nationale, February 13, 2025, ➝.
