McKibben speaks

The Problem With Christmas: Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday?

Bill McKibben, Grist, Nov. 20, 2007


If you poll Americans this time of year, far more of them regard the approaching holidays with dread than anticipation. It has long since become too busy, too expensive, too centered around acquiring that which we do not need. In fact, it's the perfect crystallization of the American economy -- the American consumer experience squeezed into a manic week, a week that people find themselves hoping will soon end so that on Jan. 2 they can return to the mere routine hecticity of their lives.

From that central truth, a few propositions follow:

• Replacing regular stuff with green stuff isn't getting very close to the root of the problem. If for some reason you need to give someone a motorized spice rack, then a motorized spice rack with a more efficient motor is quite clearly better. But it's also quite clearly beside the point.


• Stuff itself is a problem less because of its environmental toll (though that is quite high) than because it's increasingly meaningless. Think of your friends. Are many of them lacking in stuff? Or is the first question that forms in their minds when a new gift arrives from under the tree: "Where am I going to put this?"


• But this pleasure gap allows for a concentrated opportunity to begin rethinking our economic life. If stuff isn't valuable anymore, what is? Time, clearly. A gift of time -- a coupon for a back rub, or a trip to the museum, or a dinner prepared someday in the future -- is a gift whose exchange rate is figured in a stronger currency (if you're an economics major, think euros vs. dollars). Or gifts can come embedded with time already spent: a jar of homemade jam, a stack of firewood in the back yard.


• Gifts can also be reconfigured to remove some of the hyperindividualism that marks our consumer society. Ask yourself what you'd rather receive: another thing, or a homemade card saying that, say, a cow had been purchased in your name and was now providing milk for a Tanzanian family that hadn't had milk before. (Note: this line of reasoning is probably especially strong for those of us who are Christians, and recall that the occasion we're celebrating is the birth of a man who said to give all that we had to the poor.)


• Since Christmas has long been in the business of baptizing consumption, it's a good place to start eroding consumption's allure. Newfound pleasures from a simpler holiday -- some silence, some companionship -- suddenly start to seem attractive. Maybe that attraction will remain with us yea even unto February.

Continued here.....

GetSat events this Saturday (12/1)

For our friends in the Los Angeles and New Haven, CT areas, get set for a couple of special Get Satisfied events. (For other events, check the end of this post.)


Saturday, December 1, 2007 - 3:00 to 5:00 pm

GET SATISFIED HOLIDAY PARTY
Celebrate The Satisfaction of Enough during the holidays!

Magdalene Cultural Arts Center
4822 Vineland Ave.
No. Hollywood, CA 91601
(just north of Lankershim Blvd., street parking) Map/directions

For further information, call or email Michael Beck at 818-246-3661 or michaelbecksc@yahoo.com

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Saturday, December 1, 2007 - 7:30 pm

Special screening of the new movie "What Would Jesus Buy?" Joint event with Morgan Spurlock's production company (of "Super Size Me" fame), Warrior-Poets.

Simple Living America hosts a Q&A with director Rob VanAlkemade, Get Satisfied publisher David Wilk and Get Satisfied co-author Katherine Hauswirth following the show.

Criterion Cinemas
86 Temple Street
New Haven, CT 06510 Map/directions

For further information, contact Carol Holst at 1-877-Unstuff

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For more info on ongoing Get Satisfied events around the country, click here, and for locally organized house parties (including a downloadable discussion guide), click here.

People matter

From an Ezra Klein op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. (Also posted at The American Prospect.)

Winning the rat race by quitting it

We're working ourselves silly thanks to the desire to have better stuff than everyone else.

It's always sad to see Thanksgiving finish. I don't attend Renaissance fairs, so it's the only time of year when I tear at giant legs of roast turkey. I'm also not an insane person, so it's the only time of year when I combine marshmallows and yams. And I'll just admit it: I like giving thanks. It offers an organizing structure within which to create a coherent narrative of the past year. And here's what I find, year after year: People matter. No matter how much cool stuff I purchase while waiting for the Earth to rotate around the sun, come November, all I remember, and all I mention, are people.

The emergent field of happiness studies backs me up. Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics and the author of "Happiness: Lessons From a New Science," puts it succinctly. "Family, colleagues, community," he's said. "We are basically social animals, and most of our enjoyment comes from other people."

Each Thanksgiving, our litany of gratitude suggests that, on some level, we know that. But in the time between each Thanksgiving, we prove, rather decisively, that we don't know it all that well. Because so much as "people" happiness tends to rule our memories, "thing" happiness, or at least the promise of it, has a habit of governing our actions. How else to explain the ceaseless march for more hours at work, for larger incomes, for bigger houses (that, as we're rapidly finding out, we couldn't really afford in the first place)? How else to explain the fact that the United States, alone among developed nations, does not guarantee its workers even one day of compensated vacation time (France, by contrast, guarantees 30)?

We are a country obsessed with consumption, which would be fine if we seemed to be fulfilled getting bigger TVs but having less time to watch them. But, in the aggregate, that's not the case. "The things that we get used to most easily and then take for granted are our material possessions -- our car, our house," writes Layard. "But there is lots of evidence that people underestimate the process of habituation." The amount of happiness we think we'll get from a new house, and the amount of happiness we actually get from a new house, are not the same.

continued here.....

Ezra also regularly blogs on political and related matters at www.ezraklein.com (It's one of my daily reads.)

GetSat

Katherine Hauswirth is but one of the Get Satisfied authors who relate their individual stories of finding satisfaction in our recently published book Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough. Each voice is unique..... as is yours. Wander on over to the web site to learn more and also share your experiences and insight.

Here's an excerpt from Katherine's story:

“Ignoring Walden”

As a writer, it is embarrassing to admit that I don’t much like Henry David Thoreau. Every nature book I pick up alludes to Walden, and I’ve read quotes by Thoreau that are singularly brilliant. Despite the reputation that precedes the book and its author, twice I’ve picked up Walden and twice I’ve found myself annoyed by the flowery language and by Thoreau’s entitled-sounding, all or nothing, breakaway attitude toward simple living. I am the first to admit that part of my anti-Walden impulse is just plain jealousy. I have fantasies of living solo in a cabin and writing my opus (although I would prefer not having to build the cabin). But there is more to my self-imposed exile from Walden Pond than green-eyed envy.

Radical simplicity—you know, the quit your job, grow your own food, live off the grid type of existence—works for some. But it scares most of us. It scares some of us so much that we even shy away from not so radical simplicity, where the move toward a simpler existence can mean very gradually weaning ourselves from the comforting teat of complacency while we awaken to the natural world. The start of this personal growth can be nothing more than happenstance—no manifesto involved. My first steps toward simplicity were more like stumbles in the dark. . . . .


I am no Thoreau. I doubt I will ever find myself alone in a cabin for more than a few days. Compared with Thoreau’s quest, my changes have been more timid, more gradual, and more accidental. But still, both my move away from suburbia and my rejection of my nursing career were departures from some very comfortable zones, and it would have been easier, at least in the short term, to avoid those choices. Each transition, though difficult at first, reflected my becoming more in tune with who I really was. I learned the first tenet of simple living: to think and act on one’s own. It feels good to live beyond musts and shoulds, to break from the status quo. My attraction to voluntary simplicity is an outgrowth of this gradual breaking away, of reappraising what is normal, what is enough for me, what I need to feel satisfied.

When I began to read about others who sought life beyond the treadmill of expectation, my explorations were isolated from action. I wanted to immerse myself in nature, but I didn’t want to get into environmentalism. I wanted a less commercial perspective, but I didn’t reduce my trips to the store. Only recently did I connect my disdain for material and mental clutter with what it represents: a turning away from any habit that obscures my deepest, truest priorities. I also started to connect my personal actions with a larger picture. I take pleasure in every opportunity to make decisions, knowing that each one ripples out beyond me, if only in small ways, to the world at large.

In truth, I am still in the stage where I am mostly thinking. I am not a vegetarian yet, but I am eating less meat and exploring the next step (fish only). I haven’t led any protests, but I have written to the government about our energy and foreign relations policies. I haven’t disposed of all my possessions, but I am increasingly likely to put off a new purchase and to share my wealth.

Observation is important to my lifestyle, and I reap tons of satisfaction from considering what’s before me, recognizing meaning and beauty within the seemingly mundane world. I wait for the wren who naps in my porch eaves every spring. I rejoice in the nature trail that’s hidden just beyond the highway, in the wriggly worms that my son Gavin scoops up from the asphalt after a storm. It’s not just nature, although nature is primary. It is also finding an inspiring book among a lackluster garage sale selection or bagging up clothing I no longer need for donation. Countless small things like these bring me pleasure.

In exploring simplicity discussion forums online, I ran into an anti-status-quo faction that had become a new status quo in the narrower world of that group. They criticized people for buying a new washing machine or questioned whether an eager new simplicity seeker really needed that consignment shop trip. These were the deprivation-proud radicals who insisted that simplicity was an all-or-nothing commitment.

On one extreme of the simple-living spectrum are the territorial types who feel the need to surpass others, who equate ambivalence with weakness. On the other are magazines trying to convince us that scaling down requires more purchases: we have to go out and stock up on wholesome, charming, simplicity-related supplies. Sometimes I want to cut through the media babble and be more of an uncompromising idealist; sometimes I want stacks of new boxes and shelves for organizing my kitchen. I can be attracted to either impulse, depending on my mood. But what really feels right is striving for independent thought and shunning programmed activity of any kind. I believe that we can all find ways to lighten our stress as well as our imprint on the earth, but like all change this will happen only in fits and starts, the sum of our own individual paces. . . . .

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Katherine Hauswirth is a writer (technical by day, creative by stolen moments) who lives near the Connecticut shoreline. Her blog, Inching Toward Simplicity: Pragmatics and Prose (http://inchingsimplicity.blogspot.com), includes both real-life tips and philosophical musings on the effort to simplify. She has been published in The Writer, The Writer’s Handbook 2003, Pregnancy, Pilgrimage, Snowy Egret, Funds for Writers, Writers Weekly, and many other print and online publications. Her first book, Things My Mother Told Me: Reflections on Parenthood, is available on amazon.com.

Intolerable beauty

Chris Jordan, Circuit Boards #2, New Orleans 2005

A very worthwhile story on Bill Moyers Journal yesterday about photographic artist Chris Jordan. From the accompanying page on the Moyers site:

Former corporate attorney turned photographic artist, Chris Jordan explains that he never used to be focused upon making a social statement with his work. "All I was interested in about photography was aesthetic beauty...places where color appears inadvertently."

Yet after photographing a large pile of garbage that he deemed "really beautiful," friends began to point him toward the social repercussions inherent in his work regarding waste and American consumerism. "It's something that I truly cannot take credit for, is finding my way to consumerism as my subject. Because it found me."
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Jordan's latest project, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, seeks to make tangible statistics about our country's consumption that involve such large numbers that they are difficult to fully fathom on the page. "Our minds are just not wired to be able to really comprehend and make meaning of, and feel, numbers that are that huge," Jordan explains. "I think there's this worldwide cultural craving for a more sensible approach to our consumption."
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Size plays an important part in the new series, with certain pictures over 10 feet high and 25 feet wide. "I want people to realize that they matter," Jordan describes. "As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us."

More on story and interview video here.

Simple Living America NewsSummer 2007 newsletter column

Simple Living America News
By Carol Holst

Simple Living America has a new website, a new quarterly newsletter, and a new way to Get Satisfied! All traffic from our old URL is now forwarding automatically to our consolidated site at www.getsatisfied.org, so check out the heaping helping of satisfaction! Enjoy the information galore; 50% member discount on pre-ordering Get Satisfied [Easton Studio Press, October 2007]; house parties and other events; public postings on The Satisfaction of Enough; and of course low-cost ways to renew your Simple Living America membership this year if it slipped past. Now is the time if ever there was one to come aboard or stay aboard and ride the Get Satisfied campaign nationwide.

I’ll just highlight one of the above items in the final paragraph of my column, so you can glide on to the other cool features in this newsletter: vital columns from Cecile Andrews, Wanda Urbanska, and Frank Levering; praise for Sarah Susanka’s new book, The Not So Big Life; news on the “What’s the Economy For, Anyway?” Conference, and our popular newsletter feature, “Outside the Covers: Honoring Other Get Satisfied Stories.”

Thanks to Dr. Yukio Okano’s cutting-edge work at Kaiser Permanente, Simple Living America has been given the honor of presenting a session at their 2007 Behavioral Health Symposium, further indication of exciting mental health advances in this field. It will be held on October 26 at the Pacific Palms Conference Resort in Industry Hills, CA, and is designed for Kaiser physicians and health care professionals getting CME credit, although anyone may attend upon submission of registration and payment of fees to Kaiser (see www.getsatisfied.org Events page, click here for fee schedule). Principal speakers will be Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior at UCLA and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, and Cecile Andrews, Ed.D., author of Slow Is Beautiful and The Circle of Simplicity.

All SLA newsletter columns and archives are posted at the main site here.

Get Satisfied

Are you satisfied?

There’s nothing like finding satisfaction in life, especially the satisfaction of enough. Just try to grasp one without the other! Our culture is great at making both seem out of reach, where neither hares nor tortoises quite finish the race no matter how hard they try. But how many people really want to be suspended in comical animation indefinitely? Those days are over and a movement toward satisfaction in America has begun.

Our new web site has launched. Be the first on your block to check it out.

www.getsatisfied.org

Outside the Covers:Honoring Other GET SATISFIED StoriesSpring 2007 newsletter column

Each Simple Living America newsletter highlights one of the 400 diverse samples received about “the satisfaction of enough” that is not included inside the covers of our book due out later this year.

Featured writer this issue:
Tom Turnipseed

Escaping the hammering yammering of television’s incessant talking heads, who hype out-of-control war and weather, and blather on about Armageddon, I seek satisfaction and refuge on our backyard deck where the mating songs of birds and cicadas and the flickering of fireflies soothe my soul on sultry summer evenings. Last evening at twilight, I gazed upon my vegetable garden adorned with reddening tomatoes, butternut squash turning from green to orange, and bright yellow okra blossoms becoming green okra pods.

Suddenly, a bold little hummingbird darted up to within three feet of my face, hung still in midair and looked directly at me before deftly inserting its long, slender beak into several nectar laden flowers in a pot on our deck, then flitted away into the woods beyond our yard. Those woods appear just as they have for hundreds of years—long before European colonials first came. About twenty feet away, our rustic bird feeders hang from a large oak tree attracting a variety of colorful birds to watch. An appreciative cardinal flew up within 5 or 6 feet of me. A small squirrel scampered up on the deck, as if to say hello to me, before being chased away by our cat, Muck.

I know the birds and squirrels sense that I’m an ecologically kindred spirit who wants to share our common habitat. It sounds simple in our hectic high-tech culture but connecting with the natural world could be our last best hope to avert an eco-catastrophe caused by our pernicious propensity for greed and violence. The bane of our very existence is the more-you-have-the-better-you-are credo along with the worship of a God who says we should kick-ass to get it and dominate nature. ..

Twenty-three per cent of mammals, 12 per cent of all birds, a quarter of conifers, a third of amphibians and more than half of all palm trees are threatened with imminent extinction, according to the scientists’ estimate. The further extinction of between 15 and 37 per cent of all species by the end of the century could be caused by climate change alone. The scientists say, “Because biodiversity loss is essentially irreversible, it poses serious threats to sustainable development and the quality of life of future generations.”

Tom's column continued here....

All SLA newsletter columns and archives are posted at the main site here.

The Fruits of EqualitySpring 2007 newsletter column

The Fruits of Equality
By Cecile Andrews

In my book, Slow is Beautiful, I explore one of the fundamental causes of our frenzied society: the gap between the rich and the poor. Recent research (see Greed and Good by Sam Pizzigati) has found that the biggest predictor of the health of a nation (particularly as measured in longevity) is the wealth gap and the size of the middle class. The bigger the middle class, the greater the life expectancy. It’s not just because the poor have bad health care; everyone is affected. The rich person in our society is no better off than the average person in a country like Denmark or Holland where there is much greater wealth equality. One of the reasons seems to be that when this kind of gap occurs, everyone is chasing after higher status and this striving for status undermines our health in many ways. Recently I discovered a good example that illustrates this: Equality is also one of the biggest predictors of educational achievement.

US News and World Report (March 26- April 2) had a special section about ways we can learn from the rest of the world. One article talked about how Finland has some of the best schools. Finnish 15 year-olds score at the top in reading, math and science in an international ranking. They’re also top in literacy. The U.S., on the other hand, is way down the list at about 18th, 22nd, and 28th, respectively. Finland also has the smallest gap between the best and weakest students, and is number two in gaps between schools.

The article talks about what Finnish schools have done to bring this about. For one, teaching has high prestige, up there with doctors and lawyers. Classes are small. And one of the most interesting facts is that there are no “honors” classes or “college prep” classes. Finland got rid of the class system of vocational and college-bound schools and created comprehensive schools where even the learning disabled are in the same classes as all the rest.

Cecile's column continued here....

All SLA newsletter columns and archives are posted at the main site here.

WorldwatchingSpring 2007 newsletter column

Worldwatching
By Frank Levering

With Wanda in New York last week, I had the tall order of filling in for her as an interviewer on our Simple Living show in Washington, where our crew paid a visit to Worldwatch Institute and its downtown offices on Massachusetts Avenue. It’s always a pleasure to visit the folks at Worldwatch – this is the third time in the past three years we’ve shot there. We’ve gotten to know well Gary Gardner, until recently Worldwatch’s Director of Research, and Research Associate Eric Assadorian, who also serves on our National Advisory Board. In addition to being unfailingly generous people, dedicated in their personal lives to simplicity, these are two of the best-informed and keenest analytical minds on global environmental issues you’ll find anywhere. Their work in Worldwatch’s annual State of the World report along with parallel publications Vital Signs and Worldwatch magazine is always authoritative and compelling. But I’d never met Worldwatch’s energetic president, Christopher Flavin.

Now that I have met him – and had the pleasure of interviewing him – I better understand why Worldwatch is arguably the planet’s single most respected and comprehensive source of information on the global environment. From the time in the early ‘80s when Chris Flavin came to Worldwatch as a young researcher, he’s set the bar high. I can remember reading his cogent pieces back in the early days of State of the World, when my activist Quaker father, Sam Levering, would buy each new State of the World by the boxload and hand out books as gifts to friends and acquaintances. Though Flavin still researches and writes, his primary job is keeping the Worldwatch ship afloat, which often involves partnering with other organizations, and always entails meeting financial obligations. Though by some measures Worldwatch is not a large ship, by others – the impact, for example, it has on individuals worldwide and even, in some cases, on governments – Worldwatch is a mighty boat in endangered waters.

Frank's column continued here....

All SLA newsletter columns and archives are posted at the main site here.

The Tipping Point and Simple LivingSpring 2007 newsletter column

The Tipping Point and Simple Living
By Wanda Urbanska

My line of work—promoting simple, sustainable living via public television—is an incredibly rich and rewarding enterprise. Not “rich” as in lucrative. Quite the opposite. In fact, from the start, it’s been a labor of love. But “rich” as in textured, meaningful, making-a-difference kind of work. What a labor of love. As we begin production of the fourth season of Simple Living, I look back with fondness on the many friends we’ve made along the way—and the many visions we’ve seen of sustainable living, the many idealistic people we’ve met who are working to make the world a better place, working hard to curb the effects of climate change.

Visiting Samso Island in Denmark in November 2004, which is the Danish government’s experiment in getting an island community to achieve energy self-sufficiency this decade, made an indelible impression and has remained a tremendous inspiration. So was my lifetime career highlight of interviewing President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia back in April 2005. President Carter was light years ahead of the American public when he advocated dramatically increasing fuel mileage on the American fleet in the 1970s, only to be roundly opposed by American automakers and ultimately defeated by the electorate.

But perhaps the proverbial tipping point has arrived. Maybe the public is finally starting to wonder if climate change is real and is concerned about the crazy weather patterns we’ve all been experiencing lately. (Frank and I lost our first cherry crop in 17 years due to an Easter freeze, after enjoying spring weather at Christmastime.)

Wanda's column continued here....

All SLA newsletter columns and archives are posted at the main site here.