|
 believe
we each need to have a sense of hope about the world and our place in
it, but we also need to acknowledge and wake up to the challenges we
face, unprecedented in human history. These challenges can’t just fix
themselves if our current, high-impact lifestyle continues. I believe
that we Americans do have the tools, the insight, and the courage to
tune up our culture so it delivers twice the satisfaction for half the
resources – about what an average European consumes. If we turn off the
TV, stay out of the malls, talk politics with our neighbors, spend more
time with the children, and respond to nature’s urgent alarm right now,
we can still pull this game out.
From the time I
was four through about thirty years old, a grizzly bear invaded my
dreams whenever my life felt out of control -- at least a few times a
year. And whenever he lumbered up the stairs toward my bedroom, there
wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. But thankfully, somewhere in my
late twenties, I began to get a grip. One night, I leaped onto the stage
of my own nightmare and decided to try tickling the bear. Miraculously,
it worked! He chuckled, like a huge, shy, department store teddy bear,
and bumbled out of my life forever. My unconscious mind had put me in
control of my own life, asserting my right and power to live fearlessly
in the light. I had that I’m safe because I’m solidly in the universe,
and I’m not likely to fall out.
Tickling the
bear became a life strategy. Wasn’t it preferable to create my own life
rather than let it be created by pop culture and pop media? If I knew
who I was and what I wanted couldn’t I avoid being mangled by a
hyperactive American Dream, which was what the bear represented? I
propose that we use a similar strategy as a culture: take control of our
economy, become citizens again rather than just consumers, and make the
market give us what we really need. (I was amused to see that in federal
data about what we use, American homes are now referred to as, “consumer
units.” Don’t we want something grander than that?)
In my teenage
years, the bear was queasiness lurking amidst the euphoria of the 1960s.
Everything was becoming automatic, comfortable, and “convenient;”
everything was up for sale. People’s skills and crafts were suddenly
expendable. It felt to me like the whole country had inhaled laughing
gas. We were becoming junkies, literally -- consuming more junk but
enjoying it less. A lot of money and effort was spent to fill every
moment with a product, leaving little time for healthy food, great
relationships, or learning new skills. Because real wealth like this
makes us feel content, you don’t see many ads for small houses,
backpacking, potluck dinners, or other experiences and products that
reduce the GDP but elevate our gladness to be alive!
My message
today, and in the book I’m now working on, is that it’s biologically,
psychologically, geologically, and economically impossible to continue
consuming at this frantic, destructive pace. Life in America has become
an all-you-can-eat cafeteria in which the rules have suddenly become
sinister: now it’s illegal to stop eating, because consumers are
three-fourths of the economy. But the truth is, many Americans feel like
we just can’t eat anymore, and I’m one of them.
The story I’ve
been telling for the last twenty or thirty years, in nine books and
countless conversations, is that our economy as currently designed is
like a huge movie screen positioned right in front of reality. We want
and need to experience life directly; to celebrate it with the plants
and animals who also live here, but the big screen gets in the way,
booming sexy commercials and endless stories of rags-to-riches
entrepreneurs, or heroes who never said die but died anyway. Meanwhile,
behind that movie screen, the drilling rigs, combines, cranes,
chainsaws, and conveyor belts are hungrily converting materials and
energy into profits… and monstrous piles of waste.
Everything we
consume has a story. For example, in GooYu, China and villages
throughout Asia, thousands of laborers work for $1.50 a day, scavenging
precious metals from electronic waste. This is where our mountains of
recycled computers, cell phones, and TVs end up – in scavenge heaps on
the other side of the world.
In Guiyu,
laborers burn plastics and smash hard-drives, wearing no protective
equipment. They breathe in bits of a thousand different chemicals and
compounds, many of them toxic. (One of the computers is probably my old
IBM – I can imagine bits and bytes of articles and book chapters,
smashed unceremoniously as circuit boards are drenched with acid to
extract tinctures of gold and silver.) The lead in cathode ray tubes is
scavenged from monitors, and leftovers are thrown in a pile or into the
nearby river where water samples contain up to 190 times the acceptable
level of pollutants allowed by the World Health Organization.
I witnessed a
similar story in a village near Hanoi, Vietnam, where furniture makers
apply very volatile coatings to shoddy plywood furniture, right in their
own homes. When our team of environmental consultants toured the
factories, the air was hazy with fumes that settled onto open wood stove
pits in the worker’s kitchens. The workers held cigarettes in fingers
caked with toxic toluene, potentially contracting cancer from several
sources at once. Some wore aspirin patches on their temples because of
chronic pain caused by their work.
The truth is, we
saw broader smiles on the faces of the less “fortunate” Vietnamese,
whose yearly incomes averaged $400 a year compared with the furniture
makers’ $6,000. Every morning at 6, we’d walk past thousands of
low-income Hanoi residents doing T’ai Chi by the lake; or playing
badminton before going to work. Each small house or apartment in Hanoi
had colorful potted flowers in front, and most people seemed content
just to be alive.
Now, even the
most remote humans have joined the Industrial Revolution, but it’s too
late; the life of over-consumption that’s so familiar in our country is
now delivering diminishing returns on a global scale.
For example, cod
fishermen in the North Atlantic used to catch 5000 pounds of fish for
every 8 nets, but now it takes ten times as many nets to get the same
amount of fish.
Many farmers on
the eastern plains of Colorado are now forbidden to pump from the
disappearing Ogallala Aquifer, which effectively puts their wheat farms
and cattle ranches out of business. Worldwide, supplies of water are
becoming less accessible and far more expensive to pump and treat. Water
wars and desert refugees are becoming more common.
The oil industry
used to get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of energy that went into
the drilling and refining – now they get only ten barrels – one-tenth as
much. The real cost of energy is how much energy it costs, and how much
pollution the energy creates, which we’ll have to pay for.
Our most
poignant loss is the disappearance of the world’s species, going extinct
at rates not since seen since the passing of the dinosaur. We may as
well rename the Earth “Humana,” since, by weight, 97% of the world’s
vertebrate species (animals with backbones) are humans, human livestock,
and human pets.
Those of us who
are snorkelers have watched, sadly, as coral reefs in Mexico and Central
America fade from unbelievably brilliant colors to black and white as
rising water temperatures and disease kill off coral colonies that were
here when Columbus first landed in the Caribbean.
We used to get
more nutritional value from each morsel of food than we now do, because
conventional agriculture has mined the nutrients out of our soils.
Popeye would have to eat 200 cans of spinach to get the same amount of
iron as he got from one can 50 years ago. The question is, will an apple
a day -- with less vitamin A -- still keep the doctor away? Apparently
not: Americans have the cheapest food in the world, as a percentage of
income, but we also have the most expensive health care – what’s the
connection?
The bottom line
is that our production systems are on steroids: when we consume an iPod
or a cup of coffee, we are actually consuming something much larger: the
ecosystem it came from.
Another reason
that over-consumption can’t continue is that we haven’t been saving;
we’re in debt up to our eyeballs for college loans and interest-only,
adjustable rate mortgages on our houses; company pensions, 401-Ks, and
social security are uncertain; and our ability to rely on cheap fossil
fuels to manufacture, package, and transport our products is drawing to
a close. Very soon, demand for oil will exceed supply, and prices will
REALLY go up.
Our lifestyle is
not socially sustainable, either: In our frenzy to have larger salaries
and larger lawns, many face the paralysis of social isolation. A 2006
study by the National Science Foundation found that a quarter of all
Americans have no one they can discuss personal issues with, twice the
number of lonely people as in 1985.
But here’s the
good news: it’s not really stuff we want, anyway, but the values that
the stuff symbolizes. “People don’t need enormous cars, they need
respect,” wrote Dana Meadows. “They don’t need closets full of clothes;
they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and
beauty. People don’t need electronic equipment; they need something
worthwhile to do with their lives. People need identity, community,
challenge, acknowledgment, love, and joy.”
The assertion
that money can’t buy happiness is now being proven scientifically. Since
the 1970s, despite an economy that keeps expanding, and despite the
doubling of personal incomes, the number of people who report being
“very happy” has actually gone down. And these aren’t just subjective
responses; neuroscientists have now identified areas in the brain that
are active when people feel good, and when they feel bad. We can measure
whether or not a person who says he’s happy really is happy, using MRI
technology. What do the tests tell us? That it’s not stuff that makes us
feel happy, but trust, cooperation, and a sense of purpose.
On the other
hand, says psychologist Tim Kasser, “People who believe materialistic
values are the most important tend to report more distress, have poorer
interpersonal relationships, contribute less to the community, and
engage in more ecologically damaging behaviors.”
If our current
lifestyle is in decline, what do we do now? We pay attention, and get
greater value out of each moment, each molecule, and each unit of
energy. We’ve been taught to think that wants are somehow superior to
needs—that as we progress from the basic needs of food, shelter,
affection, and community to “loftier” goals like speedboats, second
homes, or Beluga caviar, we are increasingly happy. However, my
take-home message is that our needs are not being met well. There are
too many side effects in the way we eat, sleep, shelter and transport
ourselves. Basic needs remain unmet because of design flaws, waste, and
misplaced priorities. As a result, we feel physically and
psychologically deficient, and we try to overcome these deficiencies by
consuming more defective goods and services. When we learn how to meet
needs well again, many of the wants that are destroying the planet will
melt away.
We need food
that delivers health and vitality, but instead we settle for junk food
that delivers lethargy and diabetes. We need houses where each room is
used each day, but instead we inhabit McMansions two and three times
larger than European homes, that require constant maintenance. The
average size of an English house is 800 square feet (some of our
multi-car garages are almost as big), but that small house always has a
colorful garden, and is usually located near public transit. The average
Irish house may be 930 square feet, but the Irish are well known for
spending much of their time away from their houses, at the neighborhood
pub or in the park, listening to lively music.
We can find our
way out if we study successful innovations already implemented in
various cities, states, and countries. A lifestyle that delivers twice
the satisfaction for half the resources is about livable, walkable
communities; a diet with one-third less energy-intensive meat; less
paper and plastic packaging and more refillable beverage containers;
more local growing and buying; renewable energy that’s generated right
on our roofs and in our neighborhoods; highly efficient appliances,
houses and cars; and inspired policies that guide an economy in a
sustainable direction. Sweden, for example, has reduced income taxes and
increased taxes on gasoline, electricity, automobiles, and other
energy-linked products. They hope to the world's first oil-free economy
within fifteen years.
Denmark,
Germany, and Spain are world leaders in wind-generated electricity, with
Denmark now meeting one-fifth of its electrical needs from wind. In
fact, wind generators already power 40 million European homes. Israel
leads the world in the efficient use of water; the U.S. is expert at
stabilizing soil, having reduced our soil erosion by 40% in less than
two decades. The Japanese are world leaders in the production of solar
cells; and in the Netherlands, 40% of all trips are on bicycles.
Rather than
being dominated by stuff, stress, and insecurity, we can move forward to
a more satisfying way of life. 18th century Japan was faced with similar
constraints: their forest resources were being depleted, and minerals
such as gold and copper were suddenly scarce. So the Japanese
deliberately invented a new lifestyle. The material things were seen as
passé, while the advancement of crafts and human knowledge became lofty
goals. What the Japanese earned became less important than what they
learned. Knowledge-based arts fluorished, such as fencing, martial arts,
the tea ceremony, flower arranging, literature, painting, and skillful
use of the abacus. The three largest cities in Japan had 1500 bookstores
among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care,
and the necessities of life, further enriching a culture that employed
very few resources per unit of happiness.
Can we Americans
muster the courage of our convictions to make a similar transition? Can
we align our economy with genetically programmed values like trust,
cooperation, and kindness? I think of Americans as airplane passengers
who now need to make other connections. The flight we’re now on is
beginning its descent, and though it may be inconvenient, we need to
arrange alternative transportation to a future we can live with. Our
children’s’ children are counting on us, and so are the world’s species.
The other day, a whale was tangled up in fishing lines and crab traps in
San Francisco Bay, and a crew of divers came to her rescue. After hours
of tedious, potentially dangerous work, the whale was free. She swam in
joyful circles, then she gently nudged each diver gratefully. We humans
have the capacity for such compassionate greatness. Why let the ship go
down when we have so much time and effort invested? Why not just change
course and head for sunnier shores?
Wrote poet Gary
Snyder, “In the next century, or the one beyond that are valleys,
pastures. We can meet there in peace if we make it… To climb these
coming crests, one word to you – to you and your children: stay
together, learn the flowers, go light.”
|
