Unlearning Abundance: Suburban Practices of Energy Descent

Abstract

This chapter reviews a range of household and community practices that can reduce the energy and resource demands of the suburban way of life. By decarbonising and reducing household energy consumption through solar, biogas, and behaviour change; disconnecting from fossil energy supply; practicing voluntary simplicity and relocalising economy through home-based production; cycling; embracing the ‘non-monetary’ sharing economy; reducing waste streams; etc.—how far can these grassroots strategies sow the cultural seeds of a new post-capitalist economics and politics? Alexander and Gleeson also show that current societal structures (political and economic as well as cultural) make low-impact suburban living far more difficult than it needs to be, suggesting that personal action alone will never be enough. At the same time, they argue that there will never be a politics beyond growth until there is a culture that demands it, pointing to the dialectal relationship between culture and structure that informs their theory of suburban transformation.