Architects Brenda and Robert Vale believe sustainability begins at home

The focus of much current thinking about sustainability is flawed. There is a belief that we can have our cake and eat it — that we can all continue to have more in a sustainable future; we just have to buy “green” products.

Secondly there is the idea that the only behaviour change we have to make is to take a cloth bag when we drive to the supermarket, and all will be well with the world.

In architecture there is an exaggerated focus on details, such as materials choices, and a loss of focus on the big issues, such as energy demand and size of houses. At the same time there is altogether too much focus on buildings. Although it is often forgotten in architecture, buildings are for people, and over the years we came to realise through analysis that it is much more effective to reduce greenhouse gases or ecological footprint through how we use buildings rather than through how we design them.

When we were approached by Thames & Hudson to write a book on what people can do to behave more sustainably we chose to look at the environmental impact of our whole way of life.

The book covers a very broad range of the choices we make in areas such as food, transport, buildings, possessions, work, pets, sports, hobbies, weddings and funerals. Some things we discovered surprised us, like the impact of pets. A big dog has a much bigger ecological footprint than a big four-wheel-drive, and bigger than an average citizen of many countries such as Vietnam. The book title was chosen as a result of the things we discovered while writing it. We are not actually saying that you should eat your dog, but we are saying that we need to know the impact of the choices we make. At the same time we also want to express the fact that if we really seek a sustainable future we will need to make choices that are not easy —choices that are as hard as deciding not to have a dog or metaphorically eating it.

However, a section of the book is about buildings, dealing in life cycle analysis of the environmental impact of choices like having a small house rather than a big one.

We are not convinced that architects, who could be leading the way, are doing anything like enough when it comes to sustainability. For example, all buildings should be zero energy, full stop.

Buildings have a life of around 100 years, and the buildings we build today will be there long after the demise of oil and gas. Sadly too much of what passes for sustainability has just become a question of box ticking, because this supports business as usual and no-one wants to change their way of living based on consumerism.

At the same time there is a belief (and it is no more than faith) that advanced technology offers a solution. In our own buildings we are trying to achieve the best we can with the least use of resources. Research shows clearly that technology does not necessarily result in better building performance, although many architects believe that it does, because they enjoy technology for its own sake and are fascinated by novelty.

We are also always conscious that we want our buildings to last for several hundred years, and so we rely on their basic construction to achieve their performance, because we know technology will not last, and will need constant replacement. The use of passive, non-mechanical means of making buildings comfortable is far more reliable, and in practice it seems to offer higher performance and simpler operation for the users.

The sustainability debate has not moved forward since we wrote our first book in the 1970s. The big issue is often thought to be to stop countries like China and India polluting, but that is just another way that we in the wealthy world try to avoid change by passing the buck. There needs to be far more emphasis on changing our behaviour. We can’t criticise China and India when their footprint per person is so much less than ours. Nor can we rely on purchased “indulgences” in the form of carbon offsets. There are insufficient carbon sinks in the world for this to happen.

If this all sounds hopelessly apocalyptic, it is salutary to think back to the 1970s book The Limits to Growth, which used computer analysis to predict the collapse of civilisation by 2050 as the result of population, pollution and resource depletion. The research was dismissed by economists at the time, and society subsequently voted for leaders like Thatcher and Reagan, choosing greed over green. Last year a scientist working for the Australian government’s CSIRO looked at what had happened since the 1970s and compared the real data with the Limits to Growth predictions. He found that we are currently right on track for the collapse of civilisation by 2050. On this reckoning, Time to Eat the Dog? does not seem too extreme a choice of title.

Bucking the trend on climate change

Brenda Vale admits to being taken aback by the “vicious hate mail” after the publication of Time to Eat the Dog? This is mainly because of the proposal that household pets should be edible or shared.

The authors of Superfreak-onomics, Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, were also attacked for the book’s chapter on climate change where they said that “even the most sophisticated climate models are limited in their ability to predict the future”. Their solution — a “stratoshield” which involves the controlled injection of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool ground temperatures — was ridiculed by environmental groups and the authors were labelled “climate deniers”. The authors responded on the New York Times website but the attacks continued. And publishers warn that authors who try and question the difficult and complex subject of climate change can expect to be attacked.

The most recent book in this genre, The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker, was dismissed by the Observer last weekend as unscientific “bunk”.