How we build our houses and infrastructure is deeply important. Today we build like it’s going to last forever. But nothing lasts forever. Everything is impermanent. Earlier, humans constructed buildings in a way so that it was easy to fix, easy to repair what was broken from a big storm or what had endured its time. They built with local materials that was easy to access and simple to build with. Today it’s the complete opposite.
Building and construction activities is at the core of the destruction and violence in the world. It’s about the story we subconsciously tell ourself of how we want to live in a household. The modern civilization wants bigger and more comfortable houses which fits every luxurious need we desire in search for pleasure. Hot showers, drying machine, vacuum cleaner and all kinds of smart technology.
It’s all about our basic human need to have a roof over our head. We have complicated this need so much. From the roof over my head, we have built roads to your roof, we have made cars to get to our public common roofs, like supermarkets and football stadiums. We have made airplanes so that we can visit roofs on other continents.
We build more and more at an increasing speed. We extract the resources from all over the world. We ship it around the globe. We clearcut forests to get timber and to plant new timber, we pollute rivers because we extract minerals from the earth, we demolish mountains to create cement, we destroy oceanic life because we drill for oil.
The biosphere is breaking down because of us. Animal species go extinct every day because of us. Couldn’t this be avoided if we believed in alternative stories of what kinds of roofs we want to live under? Together, building and construction activities are responsible for 39% of all carbon emissions in the world.
Because of the stories we now believe in, with big comfortable houses created in the conventional modern way, we need to extract a lot of recourses. A lot!
All this extractions of resources creates jobs, which creates money to buy houses, houses brings opportunity for new products which can be bought with money, money which is earned from jobs which creates products and services people can consume. Suddenly we have created a lot of buildings and infrastructure. And in the manner of how the modern civilization does it, we have created a great deal of destruction, not only in the natural world, but in the lives and relationships of humans as well. 1400 migrant workers have died in Qatar, building world cup football stadiums. People all over the world flee their farms because of polluted groundwater and rivers, they flee to cities because they can’t do healthy farming anymore. They move in to big monoton concrete house blocks where it’s cheap to live. The new life in the cities gets difficult in many aspects. Maybe fear and hate rises, or ignorance, because of using all their energy on working and earning money. Maybe they start blaming other groups of people for their misery. Maybe they elect leaders who goes to war with other countries, with a mission of taking natural resources, for then to create material welfare in their own country.
All this because we believe in the stories we tell ourselves of how we should construct our buildings and how we should live in them. But the stories can change. There are alternative stories to believe in. Which will make ecosystems and human community blossom and not wither. It all comes down to the questions of why do we humans exist? What is our purpose? What makes us truly fulfilled and in harmony?
There are answers to these questions.
We just need to
slow down,
look around
and listen.
-Henrik Lande Andersen
