Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  In the classic little book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by Alan Durning and John Ryan, the life stories of such things as coffee, shoes, and computers are narrated in great detail, taking us behind the scenes to how things are made. For example, the typical T-shirt may say Cancun or Disneyland on its chest, but it’s been many more places than that. (I’m paraphrasing their great research and colorful writing in this discussion.) 10

  Look down. That 4-ounce shirt you’re wearing—half cotton and half polyester—began its life as a few tablespoons of petroleum from Venezuela, as well as the cotton harvested from 14 square feet of Mississippi cropland. Its life will be over when the collar starts to fray—or when you stop exercising and it “shrinks”—but in between the shirt’s birth and death are a universe of people, technologies, and places, including migrant farm workers who make a living spraying pesticides that damage their central nervous systems, kill the life in the soil, and only minimally hit the target crops; irrigation systems that water exceptionally thirsty cotton crops; huge air-conditioned harvesters whose parts come from twenty different countries; diesel fuel that comes from Mexico; cotton gin operators who separate fibers from seeds; and truck drivers who deliver the fibers to a textile mill in North Carolina, where the yarn is coated with polystyrene for easier handling. At each step, energy is expended and wastes are generated—many of them toxic. And that’s just for the shirt’s cotton!

  To provide petroleum for the polyester, workers spin a diamond drill bit into a Venezuelan oilfield. After spilling a mixture of diesel fuel, heavy metals and water in the process of lubricating and cooling the drill bit, the operators pump oil and gas to the surface, as crude oil leaks from derricks, pipelines and storage tanks. The crude oil is refined in the Caribbean city of Curaçao, where the factory emits dark clouds of air pollution. Then 3 percent of the crude oil is shipped to Wilmington, Delaware, to be used for petrochemicals, and it’s there that the T-shirt begins to emerge, as long chains of PET plastic are drawn apart to form polyester fibers. Then the T-shirt’s fabric is dyed and sewn in a Taiwanese-owned apparel factory in Honduras, where the workers make about thirty cents an hour. Your shirt is mounted on a cardboard sheet made of pinewood pulp from Georgia, wrapped in a polyethylene wrapper from Mexico, and stacked in a corrugated box from Maine.

  The box is shipped by freighter to Baltimore, by train to San Francisco, and by truck to Seattle. It’s displayed on a department store shelf brightly lit by a 150-watt flood lamp, and that’s where you find it, calling out to you. A lot of work has gone into it, but you’ve never once thought about that. (It’s not like in the old world, when the village tailor asked, “How do you like the shirt I made for you?”) Still, it’s a bargain at $12, and you take it home in a low-density polyethylene bag from Louisiana, feeling like one shrewd consumer. Pulling the shirt out of the dryer (where, if it was mine, it shrank), you wonder, come to think of it, why retailers shouldn’t be paying you to display the shirt’s very profitable commercial logo. The energy that will go into washing and drying your shirt over its useful lifetime will dwarf the energy that went into its manufacture. Of course, it would help if you got out your clothespins and clothesline rather than using fossil fuels to bake and shrink it dry …

  The story of your T-shirt is only one small episode among many billion stories of products that occur every day. Yet many continue to believe that all economic growth is unquestionably good for the environment and people—that the products we use leave squeaky-clean footprints in the environment as well as pumping up the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices. In a recent poll about the health of species, 44 percent agreed with the statement, “What I do does not impact the health of natural habitats.”11

  In the absence of a resurgent grassroots voice, most politicians and media-meisters continue to report what their sponsors and the general public want to hear: The Earth has limitless resources and a limitless capacity to clean up after us. This story may be a soothing one but it’s not factually correct. We’re on a collision course with dwindling resources and disrupted systems, including the inconvenient truths of climatic instability and shortfalls of grain, oil, and water that support the economy. Impacts like these have already occurred on a regional scale many times in human history, with civilization-crunching results, and now they are beginning to happen at a planetary scale. As the number and appetite of global consumers continues to expand, in effect the Earth shrinks.

  The average American’s “ecological footprint” (the land needed to provide the materials supporting his or her lifestyle) is 30 acres, or roughly thirty football fields of prime land and sea, year after year—which is roughly twice what the average Italian or German thrives on. As engineer Mathis Wackernagel explains, there is of course a finite amount of land on the planet—28 billion acres of biologically productive land and sea. Dividing that finite acreage by 6.5 billion humans, each of us has a theoretical right to about 4.3 acres. (However, that acreage also includes the rest of the world’s species, which are steadily and alarmingly being crowded out.)12 Using up in just a few generations resources that nature concentrated over the eons is a bit like going temporarily insane and gambling away your life savings in a single casino spree. But that’s exactly what we’re doing.

  The average American baby will be taught to expect a lifestyle that requires 30 acres of productive land and sea on a continuing basis. A wealthy American’s lifestyle might require more than fifty acres—ten times a fairly distributed amount available for each human. Credit: Marjolane, See Through Me

  Let’s face it, the working, spending, and consuming life can really drain a person’s energy. And for what? As Lily Tomlin points out, “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” The thought of being just one more ratlike species is not very exciting, is it? We buy a plastic wastebasket at a discount store and take it home in a plastic bag. Then we take the wastebasket out of the plastic bag and put the bag in the plastic wastebasket—over and over again. That’s why I believe we need to create a new, better-fitting lifestyle as quickly as possible. All the baggage we carry (physical, emotional, and psychological) is getting very heavy; it’s time for us to reinvent a more moderate economy based on how nature actually works and what humans actually need. I have to admit, however, that there are still many, many people who aren’t willing to listen to mounting evidence about environmental dysfunction. Their mantra is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but mine is, “If it ain’t fixable, don’t break it.”

  How I Became a Terrorist Without Even Trying

  The week before Christmas in the year of 9/1 1, many Americans were still reeling in a state of post-traumatic shock—baking cookies for neighbors, lighting candles, and waving little flags-on-sticks. A friend called, advising me to get a copy of that week’s Denver Business Journal, where, he warned me, I’d been slandered in an article called “On the Lookout for Radicals.” The journal’s editor referred to me as a terrorist, suggesting that I should be tried before a secret military tribunal. My first and strongest reaction was a bewildered, “Hunh?”

  “Being alert for threats to America,” he wrote, “I read Mr. Wann’s article and immediately detected signs of thinking that—if played out to logical conclusions—could lead to the destruction of the United States as we know it. Wann is a weekly columnist at a big metropolitan newspaper. He has influence. He can sway minds. He must be stopped.” The thing is, I agreed with him about the “destruction of the United States as we know it.” I’m an advocate of a much better, much more sensible United States!

  It turns out I was stopped—at least temporarily—not too long after that editorial. After an intense yet exciting stint as a columnist with the Denver Post, I was dismissed via a short, perfunctory e-mail that also went to the paper’s owner. It appeared that others had also found my wise-consumption commentary unpatriotic—or at least unprofitable; some were CEOs whose companies advertised in the newspaper.

  Hanging my head on that wintry d
ay, rereading the article that condemned me, I wondered how I’d fallen so far, so fast. Change-agent, maybe even sustainability superhero (in my dreams) one week, and terrorist the next! I’d been getting phone calls and e-mails from dozens of readers telling me to keep up the good work—someone needed to be saying what I was saying—when all of a sudden I was being pilloried by free marketeers for “shaking the foundations of our society.” The Business Journal editor continued, “Wann believes our society is built on ever-expanding consumption and personal dissatisfaction with a perceived lack of material goods. He calls it ‘affluenza,’ like it’s some kind of disease. I don’t know about you, but I could use a touch more affluenza, if you know what I mean.”

  I did indeed know what he meant. I was well familiar with this kind of attitude after twenty-some years on the environmental front. Tell them about rising temperatures or falling water tables and somehow they’ll turn it into “progress.” At the age of thirty-five, I’d gone back for a master’s degree in environmental science, then spent ten years as an EPA analyst and communicator and twelve years (and counting) as a freelance writer and filmmaker. I’d been bumping into people like this editor every step of the way. It was easy to imagine him elbowing a colleague and whispering, with a wink, “I don’t know about you, but we could use a bit more environmental degradation, if you know what I mean.”

  All right, so maybe that’s an exaggeration (or maybe not), but I have, without a doubt, witnessed selective and calculated blindness throughout my career. I’ve researched and written in depth about the large percentage of our economy that’s conveniently ignored—waste, pollution, fraud, negligence, planned obsolescence, and other profitable spin-offs. While the Gross Domestic Product continues to climb, the Genuine Progress Indicator (a more accurate tracking system that subtracts the “bads” from the total) continues to fall. Our official national yardstick doesn’t allow us to subtract the oil spills, car accidents, energy waste, and lawsuits from the GDP, to come up with a more sensible assessment on how we are really doing. In terms of GDP, the economic hero is a terminal cancer patient going through a messy, expensive divorce, whose sports car is totaled in an accident that was his fault. The data from his misfortunes make the GDP go up. But the reasonably happy guy with a solid marriage who cooks at home, walks to work and doesn’t smoke or gamble is an economic nobody, in the eyes of economists.

  The editor quoted directly from my column: “While we frantically climb the peak toward economic milestones that are always still further up the trail, less time and care are given to things that really matter, like family and friends, personal health, environmental vitality, community and cultural traditions. Rather than exhilaration, we often experience vertigo, from uncertainty as to whether we’re living well. Are we spending our time, human energy and money in ways that really make sense? We may be the nocontest world champions in economic prestige, but at what real cost?” He responded to this earnest, out-of-context paragraph, writing, “Yeah well, and your point is, Dave? What could be more American than spending money?”

  He had me. Spending has become the quintessential American trait. Maybe I was being un-American. Maybe I shouldn’t question the direction America is headed, and just go along with it. Maybe I should just download the latest lifestyle software and go deeply in debt to buy a Hummer that gets eight miles per gallon, because it’s good for the economy, and darn it, God Bless America!

  Or maybe not.

  I wrote a tactfully worded e-mail inviting the editor to join me for lunch so I could explain how patriotic I really am. How I’m trying to base my lifestyle on biological and social realities rather than oblivious optimism and returns on investment. How I’ve actively promoted sustainable, economically viable technology and design for thirty years; have written eight books, and produced many TV programs and videos on these topics. I wanted to tell him how I helped design the neighborhood I now live in, where people know and support each other; and how I personally use less than half the resources the average American does. Predictably, he wriggled out of the invitation, assuring me that he had “only been kidding” in the editorial.

  I’d been infected by a carrier of affluenza (it made me feel better to think of him as a germ), the very disease I was trying to fight. The Denver Post soon replaced my print “inches” with those of a consumer advocate who was also a TV commentator, whose columns seemed to be mostly about new gadgets and how they could make our lives more convenient. For the next half-year or so, people asked me when my columns would reappear. Like me, many believed that dissent is what fine-tunes and maintains a healthy democracy. Like me, they refused to perceive overconsumption—a highly destructive and often morally questionable pursuit—as a national religion and patriotic duty.

  Ironically, the staggering increases in income, mobility, and information don’t appear to be increasing our happiness, as the next chapter demonstrates. The things we value the most—meaning, purpose, relationships, and time to enjoy life—are being swept away. The burning question is, Can we wake up in time to make personal and social changes that can still prevent cultural death-by-overconsumption? Only if we agree to seek help to break our various addictions: to drugs, naive optimism, hyperactivity, media, and stuffed lifestyles. Good riddance to all of it—there’s something much better now being born.

  2

  Evolutionary Income

  An Instinct for Happiness

  Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.

  —William Bennett

  Happiness is a way station between too much and too little.

  —Channing Pollack

  The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.

  —James Branch Cabell

  Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.

  —Robert Frost

  If I were to ask you what you want out of life, I can guess what you’d say. You want less stress than you have now, and more laughter. You want a greater sense of control over how you spend your time, including fewer everyday details like security codes, telephone calls to be made, and endless consumer choices (which health insurance? which sunscreen? which mutual fund?). You want more energy and vitality, and fewer “worn out” days. You want the people in your life to really understand and care about you—people who you love and respect. You want activities and passions that foster creativity and self-expression; a sense that your life has meaning and purpose; a feeling of being safe in your neighborhood—and in our expansive, mysterious, starry “neighborhood,” too—these are the kinds of things that make us happy.

  When we’re lucky enough to have the important things in our lives, we are less likely to beg doctors for antidepressants and more likely to sleep soundly on a cushion of well-being. We’re less likely to be dependent on the approval of others, and more likely to know in our own hearts that we’re on the right track. We spend less time at the mall hunting/gathering what we hope are the latest fashions and hippest products, and more time completely absorbed in activities that make the time fly past. When we understand who we are and what we want, we have a greater sense of clarity and direction. Rather than feeling that something is wrong or insufficient, we feel content. We know instinctively that we have “enough,” and those nagging, insecure voices go silent at last.

  For the Greatest Good

  Humans have an instinct to seek happiness partly because the things that make us truly happy also help us survive—as individuals and as a species. Charles Darwin acknowledged the value of pleasurable sensations such as eating healthy food, socializing, and the joyful intimacy of sex, which promote the perpetuation of our species. He also believed that humans have a strong, innate sense of altruism—that beyond self-gratification we are hard-wired to cooperate for the good of all. “When a man endeavors to save a f
ellow creature without a moment’s hesitation, he can hardly feel pleasure,” wrote Darwin. “There lies within him an impulsive power widely different from a search after pleasure or happiness; and this seems to be the deeply planted social instinct”.1 Recent examples of this social impulse are the heroism of passengers on Flight 93, who lost their lives preventing a 9/11 hijacker from smashing into the White House. Other heroes were, at the same moment, rescuing survivors from the smoldering, collapsing World Trade Center, later suffering lung damage for their efforts. And in today’s paper, the story of fifty-year-old construction worker Wesley Autrey, who jumped onto New York City subway tracks even though a train was coming, to save a young man who’d fallen after having a seizure. Two passenger cars thundered inches over their heads before the train screeched to a stop. Navy veteran Autrey called up, “We’re O.K. down here, but I’ve got two daughters up there. Please let them know their father’s O.K.”2

  We’re fond of believing, “When the chips are down, we’ll roll up our sleeves and get busy!” Well, the chips are down, and now we’ll see what we humans are really capable of. Yet the urgency of our situation doesn’t mean we can’t live satisfying, enjoyable lives; in fact, taking better care of things and people will bring stimulation and purpose to our lives—which many psychologists say delivers the greatest happiness of all. Sometimes it takes a crisis to jolt us back to the reality of who we really are as humans. When the chips are down, it doesn’t matter how much money we have. More important to our happiness are such qualities as flexibility, generosity, calmness, and a resilient sense of humor.