I was listening to the radio and they were talking about the music business, that LA is where most of today’s big popular music is being preduced. The guy said: “I’ve always wanted to live in LA or San Diego – they have the perfect, Mediterranean climate, beaches and everyone lives in houses”.
And it made me furious.
Why did it make me so angry?
The music journalist is allowed to have his dream, he probably lives in Stockholm in a small apartment like the rest of us. But this ideal, of living in southern California, in a house, promoting it on the radio, it just makes me sick.
Southern California has no water, it’s a completely artificial landscape to be living in, and they’ve completely drained the Colorado river, just to mention one thing.
And these growing, wide-spread suburban communities around major cities, where LA could be seen as the king of urban sprawl, are incredibly bad for the environment. They require so much space, land that is turned into residential areas with lawns and swimming pools, decreasing the areas of “natural” vegetation, and therefore also decreasing biodiversity for every new house that is being built. And all this space creates huge distances, forcing most people to travel everywhere by car instead of walking, biking or using public transportation.
Of course living in a house, in a warm, sunny climate sounds like the perfect life, but I can’t help thinking about the consequences of such a lifestyle. And when influential people on the radio talk about it like that, without even the smallest hint of criticism, I just … no. It makes me want to write an e-mail to him and call him an idiot.
These things that annoy me. So incredibly misdirected. I should put my energies into changing things instead.
Katja Malmborg 