Sustainability & Spirit
The eminent wisdom of the Home Power article on Conservation & Efficiency offers a rule of thumb for those building a life with lower consumption. "Paint walls before you lay carpet." "Till the soil before you sow seed." There is a natural order to things which, when not overridden by carelessness or ignorance, results in economies of effort, energy and capital; a natural order which becomes obscured when we employ energies whose costs are hidden -- such as fossil or nuclear fuel, foreign labor, or financial credit.
The difficulty of our current Western paradigm is that we are plump and comfortable, and don't know it. It is easy to react to your neighbors' complaining and the minor anxieties we face in our communities, without recognizing the great distance between our lives and what we might consider those lives' destruction. The loss of the smallest items or most minor conveniences clouds the mind and creates an anxiety of wants, which leads to a neurotic and sometimes violent response. Were our latest police actions inevitable? Would less dependence on the foreign sources that feed our material hunger have changed the rules of those engagements? Could we choose attainable and sustainable goals?
Not, perhaps, without changing how we view the world and live on it. A challenging article in the New York Times today offers some reflection on population growth, resource consumption, and global stability:
We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.
The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?
No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.
Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.
The author, Jared Diamond of UCLA, points to a missing element in many of these discussions: the resistance to changing patterns of living and patterns of thought, the difficulty in shifting from one paradigm to another. The developed world is flat, and those who have built empires of thought and wealth upon that plane, with an unacknowledged precipice at the edge of its Reason, will like any good Inquisition fight tooth and nail to protect itself. And like every good inquisition, will slowly bend under the weight of greater or clearer truths, until it breaks. As individuals who were born and raised with this view of the world - indeed, who helped create it in all of its glories - it is difficult if not impossible to leave the apparent shelter of its roof, while surrounded by its walls, or to think independently of a round world when all we can see is flat. As was the case in the earliest debate on the Center of the Universe (Us or not Us?): two perspectives rested upon the same observed evidence. One model was unsustainably complex, however, and the other intolerably challenging.
Difficult and perhaps impossible, while material wealth and comfort itself is the godhead. That phrase sounds overblown, but is actually much more mundane than it seems: two hundred years ago, on the farms and in the villages, when there were times of need, there was something larger, beyond objects, to sustain life and prop up the human spirit. There was a framework, a way of seeing and being, which allowed individuals and communities to continue to operate with scarcity, one which is certainly available to all of us today, but is not prevalent, unpracticed, and those who would be its speakers have not yet been made relevant by local events.
If the industrial world is to relax its greed and desire for oil-fueled speed, it must begin to bend the edges of its world; dare to look beyond its flat horizon, to see the blue-green globe spinning day on day; rediscover that sustainability is the same as spirit -- an ethical and unified vision of the world and its peoples -- so that, unfurling its fingers, unclenching its fist, it finds the empty hand is filled.
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by Rebecca at 08:55:39 PM On 03/04/2008 | - Website - |