Do you have internet access? If you don't, maybe your neighbour does, or your nephew or colleague. Pop over to their house, log on and google 'The story of stuff'. Then spend the next 20 minutes wide eyed, learning about the very basic moral fibre of our society: shopping. And how its going to be the ruin of us all.
It's a simple funny-but-scary behind-the-scene story of simple stuff, like a little cheap made-in-China radio: how the materials to make it are extracted, how it's sold, how it's used and disposed. It looks at the underside of our society's production and consumption patterns and exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues. It just may (unless you're Sarah Palin) just change forever the way you look at all the stuff in your life.
What a surprise the future turned out to be. All those movies and predictions and prophetic forecasting of how circling spotlights, airborne cars darting across the clouds, shimmery silver outfits and houses with spaceship-like interior design turned out to be all wide of the mark. The future we imagined three decades ago is not here at all. It was all pretty much fiction. We are now round the corner to the future depicted by the 80s movies such as Harrison Ford's Blade Runner (portraying life in 2019) or Michael J. Fox's Back to the Future (2015) and the world seems to be going in the opposite direction of all that we forecasted. Ironically the future seems to be more like a hobbit-world.
The glamorous, life-on-edge we liked to picture our future is not materialising. Rather, we're moving towards a 'back-to-basics' kind of life. Like Tolkien's hobbits the more we hear of the cons of carbon footprint, the more we are trying to appreciate our roots and care less for venturing further apart.
We're all having soul-searching moments and embracing rather calmer ways of greener, cleaner living. We are slowly but surely becoming fond of an unadventurous poetic life of home gardens, organic eating, and cosy socialising. After surviving years of furious debate in the UK, and some rather heated name calling, Prince Charles produced an eye-catching urban village, called Poundbury, in Dorset. Streets are narrow and many double comfortably as pedestrian paths. Most parking is off-street in rear alleys. The pedestrian experiences a surprising and charming variation in street width, textures, vistas, and open spaces. Charles' solution was to take a step back in time - to era depicted on the Quality Street chocolate boxes - when housing and communities were still a way of life, and adapted it to modern times.
Many are taking his cue. In a recent conference in London, global engineering firm Arup director Peter Head, announced that his company is building an environmentally-utopic city for half a million people in China. It will be based on industrial symbiosis: what is waste to one organisation is raw material to another. And it will be a city full of bicycle paths and street stalls selling organic vegetables. Blade Runner would feel totally out of place.
Except in Malta probably. Building sites seem to be sprouting everywhere. Terraced houses are constantly being pulled down to be replaced by a quick succession of flats. The owners all plan to keep the top one and sell the rest - a speedy way of making money.
The only problem is that everybody seems to have had the same idea and now all the owners are looking out of their top floor window, into the empty shells beneath them and twiddling their thumbs, and patting their cash-empty pockets. This is a result of the consumer mentality. It gives us quick-fix junk housing because we insist on treating housing as a commodity rather than as a way of life, or even a home.
We no longer follow our hearts, we are constantly chasing the money and that unfortunately means that gardens and yards will keep being trampled over to make way for another sad concrete block, until it is too late to go back. We need something which will bring us down to earth from the delusional futuristic sky scrapers. The 'The story of stuff' might do the trick.