Blubberland by Elizabeth M. Farrelly

Blubberland
by Elizabeth M. Farrelly
MIT Press
March 2008, 219 pages, $19.95

Author Elizabeth Farrelly kicks off Blubberland with something of an extended mea culpa:

I, like you, drive too much. I buy too much—of which I keep too much and also throw too much away. I overindulge my children, and myself. Directly as well as indirectly I use too much water, energy, air, and space. My existence, in short, costs the planet more than it can afford.

Farrelly’s concerns here are spatial, aesthetic, social, political, and environmental, and the questions she delicately poses and answers at considerable length are poignant ones: Why do we First-World denizens insist on owning ugly houses and cars that we don’t really need? Similarly, why do believe that buying useless stuff will make us happy? Why won’t world leaders legislate in favor of sensible ecological co-existence with nature? Why are we so pathetically out of shape? Why are we so desperate to isolate ourselves from others, and how can we break the vicious cycle of narcissism?

Here, Farrelly, a University of Sydney adjunct architecture professor and Sydney Morning Herald columnist, supposes that , ‘Blubberland’ isn’t so much a place as it is a state of mind that champions an out-of control sense of self-entitlement. When it comes to suburban sprawl and energy conservation, she explains, governments are like overly permissive parents who allow their children (constituencies) to have whatever they want. Furthermore, she argues, this more-and-now mindset has us in a double-bind because parenting trends have followed a similar course in the last several decades:

This compulsion to desire-fulfillment has democracy in a trap. If we want to eat meat, with its huge eco-footprint, we do it. If we want to sprawl our cities across the landscape, live in a McMansion, drive an SUV, leave the lights or the hose or the TV on all night, we do exactly that. Even governments are intimidated to the point of being frightened to regulate. If it can’t be achieved by the market, they weakly presume, it can’t be achieved.

This culture of permission has spawned the notion that what’s unpleasant or painful about life can—and should be—surgically removed or made plain. Even places of worship aren’t immune, according to Farrelly: “Everywhere, under every log and rock, nice old churches are being melted down into imitation dry-cleaning shops, nightclubs, and ad agencies while the new, bursting-at-the-seams versions have the common-or-corporate look so down pat it’s hard to pick them from the general hight-street lineup.”

Farrelly envisions monotonous suburban sprawl as both key villain and deadening aftereffect here, a geographic phenomenon that encourages social disconnects by allowing us to be separate from one another and necessitating long, isolation-chamber drives to work: “Forget yoga. Forget acupuncture, hypnosis, and mindfulness therapy. Bested only by television and alcohol, the car is one of the most effective anaesthetics ever discovered.”

Drastic urban renewal, she believes, is the key to our selfish malaise, noting that life expectancy is higher in cities than suburbs and that city living encourages people to “share energy, share transport and share space to a degree that is inconceivable in any other situation”.

Blubberland‘s final chapter, however, imagines a Utopian future in which famines, oil shortages, and droughts confine masses to walled cities: everyone walks to work, on-break employees exercise on machines that help power their office buildings, everyone’s healthier because nobody can afford to drive. Farrelly may just be onto something there; whether or not world leaders will arrive at similar conclusions and act courageously before our selfishness hits a crisis point is an open question that’s almost too depressing to contemplate.