Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 23
The United Methodist Church has produced a six-part video series called Curing Affluenza, featuring progressive evangelical theologian Tony Campolo, who was a spiritual adviser to President Clinton. (Campolo probably wishes his ministrations had been more effective, but that’s another issue.) Churches use the videos to promote a continuing discussion of consumption issues.
Also popular are the discussion groups that begin with a book called Simpler Living, Compassionate Life, a collection of excellent essays edited and compiled by Michael Schut, a staff member of the Earth Ministry organization in Seattle. Churches use the book to conduct twelve-week courses in voluntary simplicity. Weekly topics include Time as Sacred, Your Money or Your Life, How Much Is Enough?, Everyday Food Choices, the Politics of Simplicity, Theology, History, and Widening the Community.
THE ROYS OF DOWNSHIFTING
Churches seem a natural arena to question ideologies built on greed, but Dick and Jeanne Roy’s study groups take the battle against affluenza into unexpected places. Until he reached the age of fifty-three, Dick Roy had been a leader in the most traditional fashion: president of his class at Oregon State University, an officer in the Navy, and finally, a high-priced corporate attorney in one of America’s most prestigious law firms, with a thirty-second-floor office overlooking all of Portland. But he was also married to Jeanne, a strong environmentalist and a believer in frugality.
So despite their six-figure income, the Roys lived simply and often had to weather teasing from their friends about their old clothes and used bicycles. They went backpacking on their vacations. Once they took their children to Disneyland—by bus, walking with backpacks through the streets of Anaheim, California, from the bus station to their motel.
Jeanne, in particular, found many ways to reduce consumption: using a clothesline instead of a dryer; sending junk mail back until it stopped coming; carefully saving paper; buying food in bulk, and using her own packaging. Eventually, to the amazement of all her neighbors, she reduced the amount of landfill-bound trash the Roys produced to one regular-size garbage can a year! She says it wasn’t a sacrifice. “If you ask people what kinds of activities bring them pleasure, it’s usually contact with nature, things that are creative, and relationships with people. And the things we do to live simply bring us all of those satisfactions.”3
Eventually, Jeanne took a leadership role in Portland’s recycling program, conducting group workshops in people’s homes to teach them how to save energy and water and use resources to maximum effectiveness.
Meanwhile, Dick raised a few eyebrows at work by putting in the fewest billable hours of anyone in the firm so that he could spend more time with his family. Such behavior almost brands you as a heretic in the legal profession, but Dick was a darned good lawyer and he got along well with his colleagues, so they overlooked his transgressions. Yet eventually he grew tired of corporate law. His children were grown and he wanted to do something that more directly expressed his values, especially his concern for the environment. In 1993, Dick Roy left his job to live on his savings and devote his time to saving the earth.
WIDENING THE CIRCLES
He founded the Northwest Earth Institute in Portland (www.nwei.org), an organization that promotes simple living and environmental awareness by running discussion groups in existing institutions. Dick Roy’s corporate connections helped him bring workshops—"Voluntary Simplicity,” “Choices for Sustainable Living,” and “Discovering a Sense of Place"—into many of Portland’s largest corporations. Interested employees were encouraged to meet during lunch hours, in groups of a dozen or so, and conduct structured conversations that, Dick hoped, would lead to personal, social, and political action.
A decade later, the Northwest Earth Institute can look back at a surprising track record of success:
▪ hundreds of discussion courses conducted in private businesses (including such giants as Nike and Hewlett-Packard), government agencies, schools, and nonprofits throughout the Pacific Northwest
▪ dozens of church discussion groups in the Northwest
▪ establishment of outreach courses and sister Earth Institutes in all fifty states
▪ involvement of more than twenty-five thousand people in its courses
While the Earth Institutes have a large and growing staff, Dick and Jeanne still work (full time) as volunteers. The institutes conduct annual training programs for their organizers, always with a big dose of humor, music, and fun.
FINDING EACH OTHER
All of the study programs mentioned in this chapter start with aspirin and chicken soup: the premise that simplifying one’s life (curing affluenza, if you will), is easier when we have the support and encouragement of others.
In the late seventies, Duane Elgin conducted a study of people who were choosing simpler, less consumptive lives for the Stanford Research Institute. He found they were “eating lower on the food chain,” tending to vegetarian diets, wearing simple, utilitarian clothing, buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and cultivating their “inner” lives—living “consciously, deliberately, intentionally,” mindful of the impacts of their activities.4
Elgin published his findings in the book Voluntary Simplicity. His timing was off by a bit. The book came out in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was encouraging a return to excess and trend watchers were discovering the yuppies. Today Elgin, a gentle man with a gray beard and twinkling eyes, is an acknowledged leader in the new voluntary simplicity movement. Elgin believes that the embarrassment of riches that has marked the last few years of American history, and “the power of commercial mass media to distract us from real ecological crises and focus our attention on shampoo,” are “creating a mind-set for catastrophe right now.”
But he sees hopeful signs that weren’t there during the ’70s emphasis on simplicity. Elgin points to the rapidly expanding study-circle movement and the countless ways that seekers of a cure for affluenza can now connect with one another: a plethora of new magazines, some real, some merely opportunistic; the Simple Living Network, a valuable Internet resource; Web sites for dozens of simple-living organizations; list serves and chat groups; radio programs; new books filled with practical tips and inspiration. Ten percent of the population, Elgin says, is making changes. “For a long time they felt alone, but now they’re beginning to find each other.”
The change will take a generation, he feels, and he fears that’s about all the time we have before we run into an ecological wall. “The leading edge of those people choosing a simple life,” Elgin says, “have been relatively affluent. They’ve had a taste of the good life and have found it wanting, and now they’re looking for a different kind of life.” In that sense, the movement might be seen by some people as elitist. Yet, says Elgin, “it’s only when such people begin moderating their consumption that there is going to be more available for people that now don’t have enough.”
Elgin likes to talk about Arnold Toynbee’s “law of progressive simplification.” He points out that the great British historian studied the rise and fall of twenty-two civilizations and “summarized everything he knew about the growth of human civilizations in one law: The measure of a civilization’s growth is its ability to shift energy and attention from the material side to the spiritual and aesthetic and cultural and artistic side.”
Thousands of Americans are coming together in small groups all across the country, trying to bring about that shift.
CHAPTER 24
Fresh Air
It’s difficult to imagine being busy and enchanted
at the same time. Enchantment invites us to pause
and be arrested by whatever is before us. Instead
of doing something, something is done to us....
We stumble across a roaring, resplendent water-
fall in the middle of a quiet forest, and we
become profoundly entranced.
—THOMAS MOORE,
The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
A ditch somewhere—or
a creek, meadow,
woodlot, or marsh. . . . These are places
of initiation, where the borders between
ourselves and other creatures break down,
where the earth gets under our nails
and a sense of place gets under our skin.
—ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE,
The Thunder Tree
In the Age of Affluenza, American culture came indoors, in quest of ever-greater convenience. Imagine Janet Jones talking to her neighbor. “We don’t ever have to be hot again,” she confides as the air conditioning installer pulls into the driveway. Right behind him is a vanload of junipers, vincas, and a birdbath, to fill the space where the vegetable garden used to be. As she pads slipper-footed across a carpet of Kentucky bluegrass, Janet looks over her shoulder and adds, “Since we don’t cook much anymore, why have a garden?”
In the last decade, the aphorism “Stop and smell the roses” sank to a more cynical “Wake up and smell the coffee.” We didn’t have time for nature anymore. We learned to just ignore the damn roses—let the landscaper take care of them.
This chapter challenges a widespread, if unconscious, belief that if you make enough money, you don’t need to know anything about nature or have contact with it. Conversely, we suggest that the stronger your bond with nature, the less money you’ll need, or want, to make. If kicking affluenza is your goal, proven natural remedies may be the way to go.
JUST SAY KNOW
Thirty-four percent of Americans polled in 2003 ranked shopping as their favorite activity, while only 17 percent preferred being in nature. The Las Vegas Strip is ranked the number-one “scenic drive” in the country. One fourth grader, asked if he preferred to play indoors or outdoors, replies, “Indoors, ‘cause that’s where the electrical outlets are.” Another child pokes a stick at a dead beetle, commenting to her friend that the insect’s batteries must have run out. On a field trip to trace the source of their drinking water, inner-city New York middle-school kids are spooked by the cool, starry darkness and crescendo of silence in the Catskills.
“I thought potatoes grew on trees,” one college student confided as Dave recently helped her plant a garden in her backyard. “I guess I need to know more about where my food comes from.” Naturalists urge us to reintroduce ourselves to the real world by becoming familiar with our own backyards and county open spaces. This will help answer a question that lingers in the back of our minds: Where exactly are we?
Can you identify a few key species that live in your region and the natural events that take place there?
BIOREGION QUIZ
1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
2. Describe the soil around your home.
3. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the cultures that lived in your area before you?
4. Name five native edible plants in your bioregion and their seasons of availability.
5. Where does your garbage go?
6. Name five resident and any migratory birds in your area.
7. What animal species have become extinct in your area?
8. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?
9. What kinds of rocks and minerals are found in your bioregion?
10. What is the largest wilderness area in your bioregion?
(adapted from Deep Ecology, by Bill Devall and George Sessions)
A CIVILIZATION ON LIFE SUPPORT?
One after another, services that used to be provided free by nature have been packaged and put on the market. Take bottled water, home-delivered in five-gallon bottles, or tanning salons, where creatures of the great indoors bask in simulated sunlight. Human contact with nature has become a contract with nature. Even oxygen is for sale. But many educators and thinkers refer to an “extinction of experience” that accompanies our pullback from nature. Like a washed-out sprig of parsley on a dinner plate, the community park is often biologically bland—and sometimes not secure from crime. The only way some know nature is by mentally crunching images of it on TV, like popcorn.
But television can’t communicate a multidimensional, sensuous, interactive reality. It shows only the visual realm—and that through the tunnel of a lens. We’re not actually there to smell nature, and touch it, and feel the breeze. Besides, television nature is often scripted nature—as fake as a paper ficus. Spliced together from hundreds of nonsequential hours of tape, a typical nature program filmed in Africa zooms in on a majestic lion, relentlessly on the prowl for wildebeests, jackals, and gazelles. The reality is, lions are as lazy as your housecat, sometimes sleeping twenty hours a day. Even so, footage of two lions mating is predictably followed by “cubs, tumbling out after a two- or three-minute gestation, full of play. The timeless predatory cycle repeats. . . Z’1
In The Age of Missing Information, quoted above, Bill McKibben compares and contrasts the information contained in a daylong hike in upstate New York with the information content of a hundred cable TV stations, on the same day. He took a few months to watch every single taped program and observed a vast virtual wasteland that hawked a commercial mind-set. Writes McKibben, “We believe that we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘revolution.’. . . Yet vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach.” In one hundred hours of programming, he found very little to enrich his life.
On McKibben’s daylong hike, however, all kinds of things were happening. Seven vultures leisurely circled directly above —so close he could count their feathers. “It was nearly unbearable—almost erotic—this feeling of being watched,” he writes. “At moments I felt small and vulnerable, like prey.” Still, he knew the day’s encounters with vultures, water striders, and thrushes would never be Spielberg material. “I had not been gored, chased, or even roared at. I had failed to tranquilize anything with a dart; no creature had inflated stupendous air sacs in a curious and ancient mating ritual.”2 Yet his real-world experiences made him feel actively, rather than passively, alive.
In the closing sentences of The Age of Missing Information, McKibben reminds us of the virtual canyon we’ve put between ourselves and the natural world:
On Now You’re Cooking, a lady is making pigs-in-a-blanket with a Super Snacker. “We have a pact in our house—the first one up plugs in the Super Snacker.”
And on the pond, the duck is just swimming back and forth, his chest pushing out a wedge of ripples that catch the early rays of the sun.
OVERCOMING ECOPHOBIA
As McKibben and many others point out, when we lose touch with the origins, habits, and needs of our earthly housemates, we lose our biological sense of balance. As psychologist Chellis Glendinning writes, “We become homeless, alienated from the only home we will ever have.”3
In an evolutionary sense, we risk losing the living scaffold that supports our biological sack of tricks. (For instance, without a healthy universe of decomposers, we’d all be knee-deep in dinosaur bodies.) And we lose a way of knowing what’s right. Ecologist Aldo Leopold believed that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”4 But let’s face it: most of our daily activities and standard operating procedures walk all over Leopold’s law. We don’t have a clue about the biotic community, or what it needs.
Educator David Sobel terms our separation from nature “ecophobia"—a symptom characterized by an inability to smell, plant, or even acknowledge the roses. “Ecophobia is a fear of oil spills, rain forest destruction, whale hunting, and Lyme disease. In fact it’s a fear of just being outside,” Sobel explains. A fear of microbes, lightning, spiders, and dirt. Sobel’s first aid for ecophobia emphasizes hands-on contact with nature. “Wet sneakers and muddy clothes are prerequisites for understanding the water cycle,” he says.5 In the book Beyond Ecophobia, he describes the magic of overcoming “timesickness” and regaining a more
natural pace.
I went canoeing with my six-year-old son Eli and his friend Julian. The plan was to canoe a two-mile stretch of the Ashuelot River, an hour’s paddle in adult time. Instead, we dawdled along for four or five hours. We netted golf balls off the bottom of the river from the upstream golf course. We watched fish and bugs in both the shallows and depths of the river. We stopped at the mouth of a tributary stream for a picnic and went for a long adventure through a maze of marshy streams. Following beaver trails led to balance-walking on fallen trees to get across marshy spots without getting our feet wet. We looked at spring flowers, tried to catch a snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child’s pace!6
NATURE: NOUN OR VERB?
One summer night, twenty years ago, Dave’s family was abruptly wrenched from sleep by an eerie, piercing sound that cut through the night like a Bowie knife. All four family members jerked upright in their beds, as lights went on in cabins throughout the little rural valley. At 4 a.m., Dave’s kids stood shaky-legged on the couch, peering out into the darkness. They hoped to catch a glimpse of the mountain lions that had just faced off in the front yard. This was a primordial experience, connecting them with the fear and the wonder that humans have known throughout our evolution. They felt lucky to have the experience—though none of them slept for the rest of that night. Now, fast-forward twelve years or so to a rocky ledge overlooking Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Dave’s son, Colin, calls attention to the skeletal remains of an animal feast. As they study an antelope skeleton lying on the ledge, Colin imagines out loud, “A mountain lion dragged the antelope up here to eat it.” He likes the idea of a real-world museum exhibit, and he likes the detective work, too.