Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  The park we saved from development by proposing that it be acquired as city open space will still provide a rest stop along the bike path that goes past the neighborhood. And that little three-quarter acre parcel will still be landscaped with native species that appreciate a little rain but can get along without it. The mission bell we imagined in early meetings and then acquired from the barn of a neighbor’s parents will still be calling people to dinner and neighborhood meetings, and the artwork of many very creative future residents will join the great photographs already on the walls of our common house. The brick walkway that contains sixty-five thousand bricks that we laid ourselves will still be here, and possibly our sturdy townhouses, too. Downtown Golden will still be eight blocks away, and light rail will still interconnect Golden with the metro area. In three centuries, thousands of people will have lived here. We are just the first sixty.

  11

  Higher Returns on Investment

  Twice the Satisfaction for Half the Resources

  Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

  —David Dunham

  Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

  —Johannes Keppler

  When you have Enough, you have everything you need. There’s nothing extra to weigh you down, distract, or distress you. Enough is a fearless place. A trusting place. An honest and self-observant place … To let go of clutter, then, is not deprivation; it’s lightening up and opening up space and time for something new and wonderful to happen.

  —Vicki Robin

  Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  For all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.

  —Gregory Bateson

  One of the most versatile tools we have for creating greater value from fewer resources is efficiency. In this time of great transition, we ask each other, a little desperately, “What should we do now?” The answer is simple: change our lifestyle to fit reality, rather than continuing to stretch reality to fit our addictive lifestyle. Although supplies of fossil fuels, minerals, and clean water are becoming less abundant and accessible, limitless reserves of human creativity remain untapped. We can use this nonpolluting source of energy to transition to a new way of valuing the world. That’s what we’re equipped to do: adapt, improvise, and create. However, if we refuse to make exciting, adventurous changes now, our options will quickly narrow. For one thing, nature is starting to look like the empty tables of a discount store during a going-out-of-business sale.

  In our current economic paradigm, profits and prices are often the only variables considered in a given decision or transaction; “If it makes monetary sense, let’s go with it.” But in the next era—now coming clearly into focus—ecological efficiency will be the dominant accounting tool, because resource realities have radically changed in our generation. We’ve never lived in a world so stripped of natural abundance, and the world’s population is growing at the rate of another Turkey-size country every year. Standard operating procedures are no longer appropriate. So accountants and investors will not just ask, “How much oil can be pumped, how fast?” but “How much expensive energy does it take to pump, ship, and refine the oil?” Not just, “How cheaply can we manufacture and market our widget?” but “How brilliantly can we design the product so it uses the least amount of resources possible, fits nature like a glove, and precisely meets the needs of people?” In other words, how much value do our efforts and designs actually deliver? Consumers of the near future will demand nothing less.

  We’ll base our economy on things like nutrition per molecule of food, and the quality of work accomplished per unit of energy. We’ll buy houses based on how well they satisfy our needs per square foot; and evaluate the efficiency of a car not just by miles per gallon, but by the number of peoplemiles per gallon. These new ways of living won’t be thought of as sacrifices, they’ll just become part of a new everyday ethic—the way we do it now. In all likelihood, future generations will look back at our high-consumption era—before the change—and ask, “What the hell were they thinking? How could they be so sloppy?” (They may even include us in a lumped-together era known as the Dark Ages.)

  Hitting the Nail on the Head

  I believe meeting needs precisely should be the fundamental organizing principle in creating a new civilization, one mind, one commitment, and one policy at a time. A needs-meeting approach answers the question, “Exactly what results do we get from our efforts, designs, and inputs?” I propose that we pay greater attention to what minds, bodies, nature, and culture really need, and supply those needs to create a trim, zero-waste, zero-regret lifestyle.

  Simple. You and I don’t have to be rocket or even rock scientists; we just have to get deeper satisfaction from more meaningful, better-designed products as well as nonmaterial forms of real wealth. In the following chapters, I suggest various ways to get more value out of the energy we use, the houses we live in, and the food we eat. I’m not talking about “back to the basics,” but rather “forward to greater inspiration and satisfaction,” by mindfully meeting needs more fully. What’s log-jamming our era is that we try to meet so many human needs with purchased commodities that are poorly designed, out of scale, and filled with dubious ingredients.

  Imagine a healthy, satisfied Pacific Islander relaxing in a hammock that swings gently in front of a seaside hut made from palm fronds. He plays a wooden flute for his family and himself, and for dinner, he picks delicious tropical fruits and enjoys fresh sunfish roasted on an open fire. His family feels happy—lucky to be alive. They are meeting physical, emotional and psychological needs directly. Suddenly, like a tsunami, affluenza sweeps across the island. “A businessman arrives,” writes Jerry Mander, “buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. He hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice cinderblock house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it.”1

  Suddenly, like most of us, the family tries to meet needs with products of lesser quality and that cost huge amounts of life energy to buy. I’m not suggesting that we should all live in thatched-roof huts, but simply that we should rely on efficiency (no waste), sufficiency (the right amount), and design (the right stuff) to meet needs directly. (In addition, we should vote that invasive, profiteering company off the island!)

  Who Needs Wants?

  I used to think that wants were somehow superior to needs—that as we progress from basics like food, housing, affection, identity, and community to “loftier” goals like speedboats, second homes, or Dom Perignon champagne, we automatically become happier. In recent years it’s become clearer to me that if happiness, balance, and meaning are primary goals, we stand a better chance of achieving them by squarely meeting needs than by obediently chasing wants. Like the Pacific Islander who now punches a time clock, we aren’t meeting our needs well. For example, the diet of many Americans isn’t based on what human bodies need to be healthy. The human body requires certain minerals, enzymes, and amino acids, and is equipped to digest certain foods; but many are in the habit of ignoring these anthropological parameters. Instead many eat from brightly colored packages that contain energy in the wrong places; the processing, packaging, and delivery of the food is rich in energy but often the food itself is not!

  When we meet needs poorly, the result is discomfort and vulnerability. Really, how can we expect junk food that delivers obesity, anxiety, gum disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, depression, heart disease, cancer—and more—to make us happy? Unfortunately, we get dissatisfaction and dysfunction instead, which often compel us to acquire even more consumer goods to “fill ourselves up.” Lacking energy, buoyancy, and self-confidence, we become vulnerable to the booming voices of the Market. We continue to consume more than we need partly because we’re not at ease. Besides
nutrition, we fail to satisfy other physical needs, such as water, sleep, sex, and housing. And we fail to meet psychological and spiritual needs, too, such as affection, connection, autonomy, and spirituality.

  On the physical side, if a person lives in a house with five or six extra rooms that are never used yet have to be maintained, heated, cooled, and amortized, do the benefits of that large house outweigh the liabilities? By living in more space than he or she needs, isn’t this person creating discomfort elsewhere, for example in biological habitats that are severely damaged to harvest building materials? Or in the creation of catastrophic weather patterns caused by global warming, which is in turn partly caused by the energy that house uses? Even if this person doesn’t realize it, side effects cascade exponentially back into his or her own life, and into the lives of many others.

  Is our learned desire for a trophy house really more valuable than the deep-seated human need for a home (and environment) that teems with life? Do we feel so secure in our inside world that we’re willing to give up the outside, natural world for it? Is the air-conditioned, sometimes toxic indoor-universe really meeting our needs?

  Donella Meadows cuts to the core of needs meeting in the book Beyond the Limits:

  • People don’t need enormous cars; they need respect. They don’t need closetsful of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty.

  • People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives … People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgment, love, joy.

  • To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.2

  To build on Meadows’s statement, it’s not money or things per se that we need, but value. Not coal or oil per se, but energy to refrigerate our food and clean our clothes. Renewable sources of energy in conjunction with appliances that use less energy can deliver these services even better, overall; they deliver services with fewer side effects. It’s not meat per se we need but protein, which is also contained in other, less resource-intensive foods. It’s not prescription pills we need, but a healthy lifestyle that prevents illness. We don’t need an endless stream of negativity on the evening news but rather stories that show us by example how to live ethically. It’s not just facts we need to teach and learn in our schools, but an understanding of relationships and how whole systems fit together. Our waste-filled, often misguided lifestyle keeps generating deficient products and services that miss their targets—sometimes as widely as if acupuncture were applied randomly, or baseballs were thrown by a broken pitching machine.

  Getting Full Value

  Let’s face it, with larger populations consuming more stuff faster and faster, we often feel overwhelmed by a world littered with Jetson-esque viaducts, broken gadgets, and packing peanuts. A good half of the resources, time, and human energy spent in our economy results in frustration, illness shame, or guilt rather than real value. In a way, waste and dissatisfaction have become America’s most lucrative products. When resources seem infinite, who needs precision? When schedules are tight, who has time to care? But believe it or not, these bad habits are actually welcome news in our time of great change, because they provide a bridge to a better quality of life. By reducing the waste and carelessness that now litter our economy—with better design, greater efficiency, and less consumption—we can finance the coming transition to a less destructive, more satisfying future.

  Our economic strategy will change—from using resources quickly to using resources well. By getting greater value from each molecule, each electron, each drop of water, as well as each moment, we can create richer lives without sacrifice. The new American lifestyle is not about what we give up (remember, we only need to get rid of the dysfunction and excess) but what we get.

  Wanted: Better Ways to Satisfy Needs

  A central theme of this book is that when we become obsessed with wants, the root cause may be that we’re off balance because of the dysfunctional ways we try to meet our needs. Our relationships aren’t satisfying, our drinking water is contaminated, we aren’t stimulated by our work, and so on. We’re taught in school and in the media that basic needs are already achieved for most Americans; and that, in any case, meeting needs is not as worthwhile and “fun” as is satisfying wants. But I strongly disagree. Many billionaire CEOs hope we remain meekly dependent on deficient products, services, and experiences because, when we take charge of meeting some of our own needs (such as entertaining ourselves, maintaining our health, or changing our own oil), we don’t consume as much. In a wasteful, design-challenged economy that often leaves us feeling empty, my priority is to slow down, fully satisfy needs, and let the wants go find some other sucker. “For fast-acting relief,” suggests Lily Tomlin, “try slowing down.”

  The Excessive Material “Needs” of an Average American Lifetime

  During its life, the average American baby will consume 3.6 million pounds of minerals, metals, and fuels! Now multiply that times 300 million … By using more efficient technology, reducing waste, and knowing when enough is enough in our personal lives, we can easily cut that mountain of materials in half.

  572,052 pounds of coal 1.64 million pounds of stone, sand, and gravel 82,634 gallons of petroleum

  69,789 pounds of cement 34,045 pounds of iron ore 25,244 pounds of phosphate rock

  6,176 pounds of bauxite 1.692 Troy ounces of gold 22,388 pounds of clay

  1,544 pounds of copper 31,266 pounds of salt 28,564 pounds of misc. minerals, metals

  849 pounds of zinc 5.59 million cubic feet of natural gas 849 pounds of lead

  Source: Mineral Information Institute, Golden, Colorado (www.mii.org), 2005

  Mario Kamenetzky, formerly with the World Bank, wrote, “Human needs are ontological facts of life. Failure to satisfy them results in progressive human malfunctions, whereas unsatisfied wants lead to little worse than frustration.”3 Yet, in our world, the two categories often get mushed together like wads of Silly Putty. Wants become perceived “needs.” For example, in a recent USA Today poll, 46 percent could not even imagine life without a personal computer (38 percent specified with “high-speed Internet”), and 41 percent felt the same way about their cell phone. But I’m guessing many could quite easily imagine life without leafy greens or organic grains rich in essential minerals.

  A moment of truth—an “aha” moment—comes when we realize we’ve been duped by a value system based primarily on material objects and values. We realize that the way we live now is just something the marketers and inventors made up! In many cases, it’s not based on biological or even psychological needs, but simply on the fact that someone has invented something (often accidentally) and wants to make a buck. In our way of life, we’re instructed to select happiness from an endless display of goods and services—many of them defective or wasteful—but there’s very little education about how to have “enough,” the perfect amount. After being told three million times that Frosted Flakes contains more happiness than oatmeal does, we begin to believe it. But our bodies, psyches, and even bank accounts tell us differently.

  Many are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A pioneer of the Human Potential Movement, Maslow theorized that by meeting material needs (e.g., sleep, food, and water) and social needs (e.g., safety, security, and self-esteem), we ascend through moral needs (e.g., truth, justice and meaning) to the apex of the pyramid: self-actualization (presumably, only a few rungs from Heaven). This model is actually very useful, because it illustrates that humans can become truly satisfied by meeting anthropological needs.

  However, Maslow’s model has several shortcomings, in my opinion. First, being a hierarchy, it implies that we must rise above the muck of survival needs to become happy; that a low-income person struggling to put food on the table ca
n’t have a strong sense of justice, beauty, or self-esteem. Secondly, it doesn’t evaluate how well a need is met. How clean are the air and water that meet our survival needs at the base of the pyramid? How resilient is the community in which we exchange affection, love, and acceptance? Precisely how are security needs met—with a $400 billion military budget, or a sense of trust in your neighbors?

  As I began to research this book, a colleague asked if I’d seen the needs analysis work of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef. In the book Real-life Economics, edited by Max-Neef and Paul Ekins, I found a great “lens” for looking at value. Max-Neef’s work is right in line with the scope of this book. Max-Neef proposes that in contrast to wants, which are infinite and essentially insatiable, basic needs are “finite, few, and classifiable.” (What a relief—they are actually achievable!) “Needs are the same in all cultures and all historical periods,” he writes. “Whether a person belongs to a consumerist or to an ascetic society, his/her fundamental human needs are the same … What changes, both over time and through cultures, is the way the needs are satisfied.”4