Downsizing, the film by Alexander Payne, which follows Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) as he decides to shrink himself to 5 inches tall and moves to the downsized colony of Leisureland, had great promise as a conversation starter about sustainability, and in some ways it succeeded, but in many ways it reinforced the same myths society regularly perpetuates.
The film starts as Norwegians successfully shrink living things to just a percentage of their size. Why? It turns out—as the lead scientist Dr. Andreas Jacobson explains in his lecture “Human Scale and Sustainability”—the experiment was conceived in the 1950s in order to deal with overpopulation. They determined that downsizing was the “only practical and humane solution to humanity’s greatest problem.”
First off, there’s the classic problem of the rebound effect. If a person moves to an area where he can sell off his car and get around by bike, his ecological footprint will shrink. Except, now that he spends less on transportation, he ends up spending those savings on other goods, and in the end may have an even larger ecological impact. This is known as the rebound effect.
In shrinking down to 5”, we’re talking about a reduction in consumption by a factor of 14, assuming Paul Safranek started at about 5’ 10”. This is even better than the Factor Ten reduction called for in the 1990s. Of course, that’s the ideal, not the reality. As people shrink down, their desires grow significantly—in part primed by the marketing of becoming small in order to live large.
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