Many people have written into the Story of Stuff Project saying they want to make change but don’t know what to do since they are only one person. But here’s the thing: I’m only one person too; we’re each just one person. By joining together, we can accomplish goals well beyond our reach as individuals. That’s why hooking up with an organization, a campaign, or a group of like-minded friends and neighbors working toward a shared goal is an essential first step.
In terms of focusing our political engagement, one of the great things about such an all-pervasive system-level problem is that there are so many places to intervene. To figure out where to plug in, I recommend that you take an inventory of your interests, passions, and skills and then look out in the world and see which organizations are a good match. If toxics in consumer products worry you, join or form a national campaign for chemical policy reform like the Safer States coalition in the Unites States. If healthy food systems are your passion, you might get involved with community-supported agriculture (CSA). My daughter’s school is a drop off site for a local organic farm’s CSA. Would that work where you live? If you’re sick of hearing your friends in Europe talk about their month-long vacations and leisure time, get involved in a national campaign for a shorter workweek and mandatory vacation law. A great place to find organizations in your region or interest area is a huge online database called WiserEarth, created by the sustainable business guru Paul Hawken. WiserEarth includes about a million organizations working for environmental and social justice and can be searched by topic and geographic region, so it’s easy to find like-minded people with whom to collaborate. There’s so much work to be done in overhauling our current systems that it doesn’t really matter which issue you choose; what matters is that the work is done towards the broader goal of a sustainable and just world for everyone.
Paradigm Shifts
Drawing from conversations with dozens of colleagues and experts in economics, natural resources, industrial production, cultural issues, corporate accountability, and community organizing, I’ve compiled a list of four major shifts that would lay the groundwork for creating an ecologically compatible life on earth—life with greater happiness, greater equity and, for many of us, less polluting, wasteful, cluttering Stuff.
1. Redefine Progress
We pay attention to what we measure. Establishing a system of measurement helps us clarify our goals and mark our progress toward them. Currently, the main measure of how well a country is doing is the gross domestic product (GDP). As I’ve discussed, GDP doesn’t distinguish between economic activities that make life better (like an investment in public transportation) and those that make it worse (like building a big new belching incinerator). And it fully ignores activities that make life sweeter but that don’t involve money transactions, like planting a vegetable garden or helping a neighbor. We need a new metric that matches the new paradigm, measuring the things that actually promote well-being: the health of the people and environment, happiness, kindness, equity, positive social relations, education, clean energy, civic engagement. These, not economic metrics alone, are a measure of how well we’re doing.
Alternatives to the GDP include the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, developed in the late 1980s, which evolved into the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). This measure evaluates a number of factors beyond traditional economic activity, including pollution, resource depletion, amount of leisure time, and income distribution, although some have critiqued it for operating from within the same fundamental pro-growth paradigm as the GDP.5 The United Nations’ Human Development Index also looks at broader development goals, beyond economic growth. Then there’s the previously mentioned Happy Planet Index, combining environmental impact with human well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which, country by country, people live long and happy lives.
How do we actually promote adoption of a different metric as an official macroeconomic welfare indicator at the international, national, and local levels? John Talberth, a senior economist at the Center for Sustainable Economy who worked on the GPI, says that community-based sustainability planning processes provide fertile ground: community leaders often need help defining key environmental, economic, and social objectives and measuring progress toward those objectives.6 Many organizations, including the Center for Sustainable Economy and Earth Economics, track public planning processes and legislation that promotes sustainability. To find out more, visit www.sustainable-economy.org and www.eartheconomics.org.
Of course, we’re not measuring for measurement’s sake. The new indicators must inform and evaluate a comprehensive set of goals, policies, and systems that prioritize the well-being of people and the planet.
Source: Redefining Progress, 2007.
2. Do Away with War
In 2008 governments around the world spent a record amount of money on upgrading armed forces—and that amount continues to increase. They spent $1.46 trillion in 2008, which is 4 percent more than in 2007 and 45 percent more than a decade ago. The United States continues to be the largest arms spender, followed by China.7 The nonprofit National Priorities Project (NPP), which maintains an ongoing tally of the costs of war, calculates that as of July 2009, U.S. spending since 2001 on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped $915 billion.8
In our work for clean renewable energy and carbon reduction, public transportation, nontoxic alternatives in industrial production, cleanup of polluted sites—as well as health care for all, excellent public schools, and just about any social good—how often do we hear that our suggestions are nice but are too expensive? That there just isn’t the money to pay for the changes we seek? It is infuriating to hear this while we’re hemorrhaging billions for needless wars that destroy lives and communities and devastate the environment. And don’t forget, many of our wars are fought primarily to maintain access to oil, a substance from which we absolutely need to be weaning ourselves! Imagine how we could have built the electric grid that would enable decentralized renewable energy generation, or the high-speed train network which would replace millions of individual cars—not to mention how many lives we could have saved—had we invested the war money in real solutions instead. As mentioned earlier, the top ranking on the Happy Planet Index is Costa Rica, which abolished its military in 1949 and redirected those funds to social goals.9
In my home state of California, we have a severe financial crisis. Our news is filled with stories about additional teachers being laid off, libraries and state parks being closed, and cuts in health care for poor children. The NPP calculates that taxpayers in California have paid about $115 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.10 For the same amount of money, we could have had:
47,712,271 people with health care for one year, or
206,545,462 homes with renewable electricity for one year, or
346,992 affordable housing units, or
1,664,958 elementary school teachers for one year, or
2,070,973 public safety officers for one year, or
1,464,132 port container inspectors for one year.11
Enough of letting our leaders cut vital public services or deny funding for transitioning our economy toward sustainability, claiming there’s no money. There is money, plenty of it, being wasted on wars around the world. It’s our right and responsibility as citizens to make sure that our government’s spending is consistent with our values. Funding wars while cutting schools and health clinics and other vital social needs doesn’t work for me and I hope it doesn’t work for you.
3. Internalize Externalities
As you’ve seen throughout this book, many costs of making, transporting, and disposing of all the Stuff in our lives are basically ignored by businesses, which set artificially low prices to attract consumers. Yet those “externalized costs” are piling up—stress, disease, and other public health crises, environmental impacts, social erosion, and damage to future generations—while none of these are reflected in the price tags on Stuff. The Ne
w York Times recently ran a front page story about indigenous communities around the world that are threatened with actual extinction because of climate-related changes in the natural systems on which their survival depends. The Kamayurá tribe in the Amazon depends on fish for survival, but as water warms and disappears, fish populations have collapsed. Dr. Thomas Thornton of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford was quoted as saying, “They didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations.”12 The extinction of whole cultures is among the most serious hidden costs of polluting industries I can imagine.
Many economists still argue that the miraculous hand of the free market will adjust prices and influence supply and demand such that everything will stay in some “optimal” balance. But optimal for whom? The failure to account for externalized costs encourages excessive consumption and unfairly leaves others to pay the real cost of our systems of production and consumption, while business owners earn illegitimately high profits since they aren’t paying the full expenses of their operations. That’s a market failure if ever there was one.
Paul Hawken notes, “Instead of markets giving proper information, everything else is giving us proper information: our air sheds and watersheds, our soil and riparian systems, our bodies and health, our society, inner cities and rural counties, the breakdown of stability worldwide and the outbreak of conflicts based on environmental shortages. All these are providing the information that our prices should be giving us but don’t.”13
Calculating costs for social and ecological losses ranges from straightforward to impossible. How do you adjust the price of a laptop to reflect the cancer and neurological damage in workers, the loss of habitat for gorillas in the Congo’s coltan reserves, and the contamination of soil and groundwater after the computer gets trashed? Prices go way up, that’s for sure.
The price of gasoline, for example, was about three dollars per gallon in the United States in 2007, which reportedly reflected the costs of discovering the oil, pumping it to the surface, refining it into gasoline, and delivering the gas to service stations. It did not include the cost of providing tax subsidies to the oil companies, building public infrastructure to facilitate their operations, health care in communities where the oil is drilled or processed, or, of course, the significant costs associated with climate change. It also excluded the enormous costs of maintaining a military presence in the oil-producing regions of the Middle East to secure our access to that oil. A study by the International Center for Technology Assessment found these costs would total nearly twelve dollars per gallon of gasoline—bringing the total to fifteen dollars per gallon.14
Economist Dave Batker adds that while internalizing externalities is necessary, it’s not the whole solution: “Rather than figure out the economic cost of poisoning a child with mercury and adding that to the bill for your coal-fired electricity, the companies should have to stop emitting mercury, period. Let’s ban these toxic products and processes outright. For those costs that don’t threaten to push us across a critical ecological threshold or damage people’s rights to life and health, internalizing those costs into the price of the product corrects for market failures.”15
4. Value Time over Stuff
There’s ample evidence now that working too much leads to greater stress, social isolation, overconsumption, health problems, and even climate change. Reducing work hours is good for people and the planet. As economist Juliet Schor explains, “The key to achieving a more sustainable path for consumption is to translate productivity growth into shorter hours of work instead of more income.”16 A study by the Center for a New American Dream found between one-fifth and one-third of people want to trade income for time.17 They’re exhausted by the work-watch-spend treadmill and realize that the benefits of reduced stress and more time with friends and family will actually contribute more to their happiness than a marginal pay increase with which to buy more Stuff.
But what will happen if we all work less and shop less? Won’t the economy collapse, since it’s currently disproportionately driven by consumer spending? Yes, if it happened overnight. But don’t worry; that’s not likely. Working less and buying less need to be phased in gradually and simultaneously to make the transition as smooth as possible. We can do it. We’ve got massive productivity in this country. The key is that the consumer demand side and the labor market side both shift down in tandem. As Schor says, “Depending on how the policy aspects of the transition are managed, it can expand employment opportunities by reducing the average number of hours worked in every job.”18 We need gradual, structural changes to enable people to reduce their work without being penalized. Some policies that would advance this are a mandatory vacation law, career options that allow for career advancement without full-time work, and the development of job-sharing programs. Many European countries have such structures. In the Netherlands and Denmark, for example, up to 40 percent of the population works part-time, protected by nondiscrimination laws.19 Another way to decrease work hours is to increase vacation. Only 14 percent of Americans get a vacation of two weeks or longer, and unlike 127 other countries, we don’t currently have a law requiring paid vacation.20
Perhaps the single most effective tool for facilitating a reduction in working hours is the separation of benefits (especially health care) from full-time work. Currently, many people who would like to work less can’t, for fear of losing health benefits. The best way to accomplish this would be by implementing a national universal health care program that ensures quality health care to everyone who needs it, regardless of their employment status. Pending that, a short-term transitional proposal is to have employers pay for health care costs by the hour, or by a percentage of salary, rather than by the number of employees. When organizations pay for health care by employee, they have built-in incentive to hire one overworked employee rather than two healthier part-time workers. The interesting thing is that, absent a systems view, most environmentalists wouldn’t identify health care reform as a top priority. Yet it turns out that obtaining a national health care program would be a significant step toward reducing our overall environmental impact—because, again, if people don’t need to work full-time to get health benefits, many will choose to work fewer hours and earn less and will therefore buy and trash less Stuff and have more time to engage in community and civic activities that help the planet.
New World Vision
We know what the world of today looks like: climate chaos, toxic chemicals in every body on the planet including newborn babies, growing social inequity, disappearing forests and fresh water, increasing social isolation and decreasing happiness. So how might the future look after we make the necessary shifts? Here’s one scenario, inspired by my dreams and informed by the projections of various scientists and economists.21 Of course our society’s new vision will be collaboratively developed and may diverge from this one, but the important thing is to keep in clear sight a vision of what we are fighting for, because the things we are fighting against are all around us:
It’s 2030. There is the sound of laughter and birdsong here in the city. Children everywhere are playing in the streets, just out of the line of vision of grown-ups hanging laundry to dry in the breeze and tending to the vegetable gardens planted in former lots and lawns. The high-density housing is built with community life in mind: bicycle paths, shaded gathering places, fruit and vegetable stands, and cozy cafés fill the streets.
The air is clean nowadays, for two main reasons. The first is that personal cars have almost totally disappeared, while the punctual public transit system now serves every corner of the city, powered on clean, renewable energy. The second is that polluting industries have become extinct, driven out by the one-two-three punch of high taxes on carbon, waste, and pollutants; the high price of virgin raw materials; and government incentives for clean industries.
Because of the strict ban of toxic chemicals, on top of the costs of repairing thei
r past damages to public health and the environment, industries can no longer afford to use hazardous chemicals in products. Green chemists and biomimicry experts have stepped in to provide nontoxic alternatives for everything from parabens and phthalates in cosmetics to fire retardants in furniture to PVC in toys. Inefficient and toxic buildings have been retrofitted and people are no longer allergic to their homes and offices.
We are well under way with the conversion to an ecologically compatible economy. Governments around the world have collaboratively instated a team of biologists, climatologists, and ecologists to work out what levels of consumption and emission are sustainable within the earth’s limits and in keeping with social equity. We don’t use natural resources faster than they can be replenished by the planet; we distribute those precious resources fairly and sensibly; and we are near our target of zero waste. There is no such thing as extraneous packaging now, eliminating a gigantic portion of the former waste stream. We generate organic wastes at levels at which they can be composted, returning their valuable nutrients to the soil.
Designers, engineers, and technology types constantly invent and improve on ways to do more with the resources we already have. Businesspeople cooperate to maximize resource efficiency and minimize waste, and “industrial ecology,” in which the waste of one factory is used as the raw materials of the next, is widespread. An increasing number of businesses are worker owned, and in those that aren’t, union membership is welcome.
THE STORY OF STUFF Page 36