I’d like to read the entire study by Jianguo Liu which asserts that rising divorce rates are bad for the environment when it comes out. My interest is peaked because there is likely going to be a whole slew of “averages” that will weave a story about the lives and patterns of divorced households and more generally people living alone. Ultimately, these stories are going to be used by someone to make moral and ethical prescriptions that really have no concern for the goal of environmental sustainability but only serve their agenda.
My major concern here is that by simply analyzing the resource consumption levels of single-person households (divorced, single) vs multi-person (married) households, the study serves to distract attention away from the day-to-day consumption patterns of both groups that ultimately consume much more resources than “eco-friendly” patterns. “I live in a McMansion and drive 3 hummers, have a couple cottages, but hey, I’m married.” You know what I’m getting at here.
Basically, this study will say “sharing resources is good.” I hope that is truly the moral of the story, not just, stay married or get married and have a few kids. Sharing is great but when those resources are consumed at ever-increasing rates across the board, and in unsustainable manners, it doesn’t matter how many households can share them because ultimately our consumption is going to outpace natural supply and environmental resilience. It will be nice if the study points out that sharing of resources doesn’t just happen on a familial level but at a community, city and regional levels (public transportation being a great example if it is heavily used in comparison to individual modes).
I’d like to hold off judgement on this study but it really sounds like a sleight of hand, or rather a one-dimensional analysis that argues a single life-decision is worse than another for the Environnment, and solely responsible for ones environment impact. Maybe I’ll put together a study about how much ‘greener’ it is on average and in-total to live in a city versus the suburbs by analyzing the top 50 most populace metropolitan areas in the US. Whadya think? Hopefully Liu’s study will also analyze resource consumption along other dimensions.
Update: I just realized another great analysis would be how income wealth affects efficiencies of resource consumption. I bet if we analyzed those numbers it would turn out that it’s totally kick ass for the environment to be poor! So think about it, that is being poor.
