the average college dorm room today is radically different from one hundred years ago. In those days a student might have three or four changes of clothes, and two or three pairs of shoes. Students took the train to college instead of arriving in cars, trucks, and vans pulling U-Haul trailers. The amount of stuff was limited, more or less, by what you could carry—or what you could fit into a steamer trunk. Furnishings were Spartan, both by necessity but also by choice: College was a place where—freed from the clutter of the material world—a student might think clearly about the purposes of life. And surprisingly enough, many of them survived their studies without lofted beds, designer lighting, or shag carpets.
All the stuff in dorm rooms today is a testament to the social construction of necessity. In a prescient 1962 essay titled “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” poet Randall Jarrell identified the shifting nature of necessity:
As we look at the television set, listen to the radio, read the magazines, the frontier of necessity is always being pushed forward. The Medium shows us what our new needs are—how often, without it, we should not have known!—and it shows us how they can be satisfied: they can be satisfied by buying something. The act of buying something is at the root of our world; if anyone wishes to paint the genesis of things in our society, he will paint a picture of God holding out to Adam a check-book or credit card.
Because marketers and manufacturers need us to need, they work hard to create new necessities both in college and American life, “upscaling” yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities. And so the “buyosphere” expands over time, but the biosphere, by nature, does not—and that’s a problem.12
The Landscape of a Dorm Room
Jo and Joe College never think about it this way, but a dorm room is a natural landscape. It’s not sublime, like the Rocky Mountains or the pounding ocean surf. It’s not picturesque, like the winding paths in parks or the rocky outcrops on the most attractive college campuses. But it is an environment, the habitat where students spend a large part of college life. Like a landscape painting, it’s also a cultural composition of nature, revealing the relationships of people to the natural world. In this landscape, we can see how people shape nature for their own ends, including aesthetic aspirations. To some extent dorm rooms are a museum of college life: Each of the artifacts on display has a story to tell, and all of the stories together add up to college culture.13
Biosphere and Buyosphere
| Biosphere: Sphere of Life | Buyosphere: Sphere of Commercial Life |
|---|---|
| Ecosystems | Eco(nomic)systems |
| Ecosystem services | Business services, consumer services |
| Inhabitants | Consumers |
| Organisms | Organizations |
| Photosynthesis | Faux syntheses, chemical concoctions |
| Plants and animals in habitats | Habits in a habitat of consumption |
| Resource flows | Resource extraction |
| Gift economy | Market economy |
| A small world, after all | A mall world, after all |
| Environments intact | Environmental impacts |
| Evolution, natural selection | Fashion, cultural selection |
| Life | “The good life” |
| Natural cycles | “Progress” |
| Waste=food | Waste=waste |
| Commodious | Commodified |
| Solar-powered | Fossil-fueled |
| Self-sustaining | Unsustainable |
| The biosphere is the thin and fragile layer of air and land and water that supports all life on Earth. From space, it’s a thin strip of vitality on the Earth’s crust poised between an otherwise dead planet and the dead expanses of space. If the Earth were an apple, the biosphere would be no larger than the apple’s skin. The buyosphere is the lively sphere of commercial life that conditions much of the consciousness in the developed world. Sometimes, therefore, it seems like it’s a mall world, but the buyosphere is really just a small world inside the small envelope of the biosphere. |
The Extensive Ecology of Stuff
A few of the artifacts in a dorm room make explicit allusions to nature: Posters of landscape art express our Romantic affection for nature, screensavers display natural scenes, and there are photos on the shelf from vacations to the beach or cabin. There may be goldfish or a houseplant or two, but all of the artifacts in the room tell stories of nature converted to culture. The textbooks are trees. The computers are silicon and hydrocarbons and metals. The clothes are cotton and leather and oil.
Everything in a dorm room is also embodied energy, which generally comes from sunshine stored in oil, coal, wood, or biomass. Embodied energy is the amount of power used to make a product and make it available, including the energy of agriculture or extraction, processing or production, distribution, and marketing. A T-shirt, for example, is made of cotton, so it embodies energy in the oil burned in growing the crop, including planting, tilling, and harvest. The shirt embodies the petrochemical energy in fertilizers and herbicides, and in manufacturing and shipping. Sooner or later, this T-shirt will be a rag—but it’s always energy incarnate.14
There is also disembodied energy in this room: Alarm clocks, TVs, stereos, coffee pots, computers, chargers, refrigerators, hair dryers, and vacuum cleaners are all grafted to the power grid. In apartments or in dorm suites, stoves and dishwashers, washers and dryers devour electricity, too. Electronic devices even consume as much as 50 percent of their electricity when they’re not in use, sucking “vampire power” or “phantom load” in standby mode. Mostly, though, unless we’re reading about Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison, we don’t think about electricity because it’s cheap and we’ve learned to focus only on its applications. Growing up in a culture of cheap energy, we have come to have what Wendell Berry calls “cheap-energy minds,” with expectations of electrical appliances constantly in our lives.
Planned obsolescence: The art of designing products that don’t last, either functionally or fashionably, so that manufacturers can increase sales. Disposable products are good examples of functional obsolescence, while fashion trends and the annual model change in cars are good examples of stylish obsolescence. On college campuses, new textbook editions create obsolescence as well.
Though it all seems solid and permanent, almost all of the stuff in a dorm
