Time To Chill?

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Images  - © Financial Times


A couple of things from today's FT: the reassessment of work practice in a Covid-world; and passive cooling in an overheating climate. The former is a an essay by anthropologist James Suzman, which to summarise madly, proposes in a very circumspect way that we might, indeed should be taking our work/life balance cues from our hunter-gatherer forebears. It traces a path from a time when fifteen hours work a week would garner enough food and supplies to spend the rest of the time doing whatever it is you wanted. Enter the agricultural revolution and all of a sudden we are tied to the vicissitudes of the seasons and weather. No time to stop and stare here - dawn to dusk, seven days a week, well six if you observed The Lord's Day.

Many have prophesied a future where drudge work would be carried out by machines and leisure time would increase for all - no lesser figures than John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell for example - unfortunately, no; all mechanisation, automation and AI have done thus far is squeeze out the bottom part of the employment market: the opportunity to secure higher profit margins by ditching the human element altogether or forcing down the wages of those that businesses can't do without is the actual result of all this progress. The fact is that in work/life balance terms, Homo Sapiens was better off 300,000 years ago.

The second piece was about the cooling of buildings in the increasingly hot climate conditions we find ourselves in and have been culpable in creating, by guess what - cooling the buildings we are trying to shield from the very climate change we have created. Aircon: the most anachronistic and paradoxical technical solution to a problem we could possibly have invented: just use bog-loads of energy to cool poorly designed buildings, mostly in the International Style, and generate oodles of climate-altering pollutants in so-doing - genius.  A perfect circle of human idiocy, a triumph of blind capitalism over common sense and the common good. And the solution to this age-old problem has been used in the Middle East since at least 1300 BC. Passive cooling towers and appropriate use of building design and materials and buildings cool themselves - energy neutral. Glass towers and deserts don't mix, viz; Dubai: the most obscene misuse of money and technology imaginable; the narrative of climate armageddon perfectly enacted through the theatre of architecture.

The tragedy of all of this is that the only ones gaining any benefit in terms of leisure time and climate comfort are those very actors who are the root of the problem: we all suffering from the generation-deep greed of a relatively tiny number of people, whose attitude is to put it bluntly, '...fuck the rest of you, we're doing absolutely fine, thank you.'

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