Image courtesy of Shutterstock. Style, as a concept, really just refers to the particular way in which a person does something. An author’s style is their word choices, their structure and use of punctuation. A fashion designer’s style is their drape, fabric preferences and silhouette. An architect’s style can be as distinctive as the stripes of a zebra — think of a Frank Gehry building, all crumpled up in seemingly impossible ways. Indeed, even people who are not creative have personal style: the manner in which they dress, the cars they like to drive, the food they serve at a dinner party. When we say that somebody has “no style”, like my family often says about my father-in-law, what we mean is that their style is chaotic. My father-in-law would wear a moth-eaten football jersey to a wedding if it was the only thing clean in his wardrobe.
My own style of dress tends to be fairly conservative. Button-downs or plain T-shirts (prints only rarely), dark jeans and boots. As a writer, I like semicolons and long, syntactically convoluted sentences that are almost like a puzzle. I will serve you fish if you come to my house for a meal, and probably pavlova, regardless of the season. My furniture is midcentury modern, my plants numerous. I have hundreds and hundreds of books, and I make no effort to organise them. I prefer tea to coffee.
Recently, though, I have noticed that my style has begun to change. And the reason for this is the increasingly dire news about climate change. Many of the world’s leading climate scientists now expect global temperatures to rise by some 2.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. This year alone has seen record after record broken in alarming ways. My response has been low-grade depression, and occasionally — when I see pictures of the melting Arctic Ocean, or read a book like “Fire Weather”, by John Vaillant, about Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray fire and its relationship to oil sands — despair.
My response has also been to change the way in which I do many things in my daily life, from drinking oat milk (which has a relatively low greenhouse footprint when compared with dairy), to getting around town on a bicycle.
In this, I know, I am not alone. When I did need to buy a car a few years ago, I decided it had to be hybrid, if not outright electric. The thought of driving a traditional full-petrol car made me squirm with discomfort. Here in the US, where I live, the demand was so high that I was forced to go on a waiting list. I had friends who owned a hybrid car who were getting calls from dealers offering more than they’d originally paid to sell the cars back to them. Hybrid sales grew by 53 per cent in the US in 2023. In Australia, the situation is lagging behind but quickly catching up. Almost one in four cars sold in May was a full electric or hybrid vehicle. What was once a novelty is now becoming a norm. A major reason behind the rapid adoption is not doubt financial: hybrids save on petrol, after all, which means less spending at the pump. But it is also a question of style. Increasingly, many drivers prefer a car that reflects their environmental consciousness.
In terms of fashion, I find myself buying less, buying vintage and wearing things for longer. When I pull a cotton T-shirt out of my drawers, I am sometimes reminded of the fact that it took 3,000 litres of water to make it. Fast fashion is convenient and affordable, but the real bill is being paid elsewhere. According to the UN, the fashion industry is responsible for up to 10 per cent of annual global emissions. Knowing that fact doesn’t mean I will stop buying clothes, but it does make me more mindful of what I purchase, more inclined to ask myself, “Do I really need this?” It makes me more interested, too, in the creative solutions designers are coming up with these days: Petit Pli, for example, a team of “aeronautical engineers, neuroscientists and designers”, is turning plastic bottles into children’s clothes that expand as the child grows. The Smithsonian Magazine called it “one part Japanese avant-garde, one part medieval armour”.
By far the biggest change to my personal style has to do with the way I travel. Five years ago, if you had asked me what I did for a living, I would have said “travel writer”. I travelled constantly, zigzagging through multiple countries on a single trip. These days I mostly write about other things, and when I do travel it is slow and immersive — one location for an extended period of time. I no longer fly to Switzerland to report on wine for the equivalent of a long weekend. I return to Australia once a year, at most, and stay for a month if I can manage it.
In changing my style of travel, I am inspired by friends who have taken things even further. A writer I know, Louise Southerden, who also built her reputation on travel, had not flown for four and a half years until very recently. “I still have a lot of climate guilt about all the travel I have done over my career,” she tells me (a feeling I know all too well). But aligning her work with her values has brought unexpected benefits. “Not zipping off to somewhere far away every few weeks has grounded me in my home place, the community and the natural environment, the seasons where I live,” she says.
Where Southerden lives is in a “very small house”, a beautiful wooden dwelling on wheels with a floor space of just 25 square metres. In her new book, “Tiny”, she describes her own evolving sensibility, the personal shift that has led her to adopt a lifestyle of considered restraint. Her shower water flows into the garden. Her kitchen sink was salvaged from an op-shop. “I have lots of windows,” she tells me, “and thought long and hard about where to position them to maximise cooling breezes in summer.”
That level of thoughtfulness — literally paying attention to the flow of the breeze — is exactly the kind of style I aspire to achieve for myself. It is the kind of style, I think, that we should all be adopting on our perilously warming planet.
