It absolutely can - but it isn't an easy reset. That is, most of the socio-cultural benefits you achieve work best if everyone in a given society is doing the same thing. So we have to lower economic standards of living with the promise of other returns later on (there are exceptions, but in general, for example, these changes work best on a societal level).

Again, I think we can do it - but while I think an articulation of quality of life benefits is important and useful, we should pretend that there's no cost involved to the people we're talking about. The simple truth, however, is that we don't have a choice.

Sharon

Someone had put it as shifting from a consumption-based lifestyle to an experience-based lifestyle. Collecting good memories rather than things.

Agreed. And there are organizations moving in this direction, such as New American Dream, among others (can other people provide more organization links?)

Sometimes it means taking a little longer getting somewhere, or being a little colder first thing in the morning during the winter, or warmer in the summer. If we compare how our grandparents grew up versus our lifestyle, we could recognize that there is much we can do without and still retain an equivalent (or even greater) quality of life. Both sets of my grandparents were farmers during the Great Depression, so my parents lived through some of the hardest of times, yet have endless fond memories of growing up without regard for their penniless state.

So when I'm huffing my way up the side of a ridge on a late summer's day, the heat is not the most pleasant sensation, but the physical exertion and the fresh air are remarkably mind-clearing and stress-reducing, so the benefits clearly outweigh the 'costs'. And when the dinner table is set with produce right from the garden, the understanding of where things come from brings understanding not only to our children, but to visiting friends as well.

So setting examples (as well as educating others on the impacts of resource limitations and climate disruptions) certainly is the most effective means of 'walking the talk', and doing so in a positive manner carries the greatest chance of being effective (as opposed to railing on people for driving SUVs, etc). One of my favorite examples is seeing a cyclist during rush hour with a "One Less Car" jacket on, which reminds the observer of several benefits of bike commuting in a non-indicting manner.

This subject would make for a intriguing TOD article, especially as a follow-on to Nate's addiction articles...

I do, however, think it's unrealistic to think that "society" or "government" will make this change for us--we must do it for ourselves individually.

This rejection of goverment makes no sense. Government and human society are inseparable. Even hunter-gatherer bands and neolithic villages had government. Not in the sense of elected officials, written codes of law, etc., but in the sense of a set of conventions that governed social and economic relations between the constituent members of society. The higher the degree of specialization of labor the more complicated such conventions have to be.

If you have a preference for greater material simplicity and less centralization that is all well and good. It may well be that the current national goverments will be largely ineffective instruments for bringing about a new social order. But if you believe that some new vision of what constitutes the 'good life' can be effectively implemented without rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard political work of creating the appropiate set of conventions and institutions which will support that vision, then you should find a new substance to put into your pipe.

I agree with this as a *portion* of the necessary project. But the reality is that we really do have strong reasons to do this faster than public opinion is likely to come around. That is, it isn't just the case that we can't eventually afford 8 billion rich people, but that material limits are banging up against us now, and we can't afford 1 billion rich people.

So while I agree that elegance of solution and redesign is part of the project, and essential to the creation of any larger structures to enable this, I'm not sure that I think that simply living our beautiful, deeply experiential, lower energy lives (as attractive as I find that idea) is sufficient, while there is the enormous opposition of advertising and an entrenched and institutionalized requirement for growth. That is, we're already seeing the way "simplicity" is marketed and thus the models perverted. I think modelling would be part of it - but it would also require a great deal of economic and social remodelling that would have to be done simultaneously, since 'twere best done quickly, from top down and bottom up, in both cases in a highly organized way.

Sharon

As I see it, there are two ways out of Jevons' Paradox.

One is that which you have identified: change our definition of "success" to one that is not proportional to resource consumption. No matter how efficient you are, if "better" requires more resources, then human competitiveness means that, in the end, you lose.

The other escape clause is the reason that there is an important difference between incremental (say, 5%-25%) efficiency and radical (50%-90%) efficiency. It is simply that radically reducing the resources required to perform a task opens up new options for supplying those few resources that are required. For example, a house that is 20% more energy efficient saves 20% on their energy bills (or is built 20% bigger, at the same energy price point). A house that is 95% energy efficient can have its energy needs trivially satisfied with a small PV system. It's also probably cheaper to build, and definitely much cheaper to maintain, because (at that level of efficiency) you have engineered out alot of the expensive, failure-prone mechanical equipment.

This effect is particularly pronounced in the context of energy, but it's also available in other realms: a radically efficient structural design may allow you to switch from steel to carbon fiber while saving money and embodied energy even though carbon fiber is expensive stuff. (However, IMO, the key to controlling the demand for non-energy resources is to design for 99% recycling through an industrial metabolism.)