Cultural Prosperity
The Earth as a Sacred Garden
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
—David Orr
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
—The Bible, Proverbs 29:18
I’m not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads.
—Pete Seeger
You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller
With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes.
—Abraham Lincoln
As the dominant values of a culture change, so do many individual values; and conversely, when enough individuals express the need to change priorities, cultural habits shift in things as mundane as what we eat, the way we dress, and the way we use energy. Cultural change occurs in churches, workplaces, cafés and cyber
salons, associations, and discussion groups; in the media, where actors, columnists, and newscasters imprint behavior; in stores, where what we buy often expresses who we are; in the chambers of city councils, state legislatures, and U.S. Congress. But most importantly, cultural changes occur in our minds, and this is where the tide is turning.
We’re seeing only the tip of a huge iceberg of social change; the rest is still in our heads. We’ve been lost in thought (and in media “thoughts”) for about a generation, and now we’re reaching a tipping point. Said historian and cultural interpreter Joseph Campbell, “We are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit.” Environmentalist Lester Brown believes we’re shifting to an age of ecological enlightenment, a shift comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions that shaped the course of human history. Futurist Marianne Williamson’s interpretation is conceptual: “We are exiting a Material Age, which has lasted for thousands of years, and entering an Ideational Age; shifting our focus from extrinsic to intrinsic value.”1 And Marilyn Ferguson, a veteran agent of change, is poetic about the shift that is well underway: “Sometimes a people moves en masse because scouts and travelers carry tales of a distant land that is fruitful and temperate.”2
These are exciting and challenging times, to put it mildly! Not only must we shift to a less materialistic age; we must do it quickly, before the Earth becomes a poached egg, and before we run out of cheap oil to fuel the transition. Fortunately, global communications have blossomed in our lifetime, enabling culture to change almost overnight if the right messages, stories, and evidence of consensus are conveyed. It feels like we are a crowd of people milling around in a park (the Earth), waiting for direction. We pace back and forth, ruminating over huge questions like these: How can we create a civilization that precisely and elegantly meets the needs of people and nature, letting nothing go to waste? How can the world’s economies get better without having to get bigger? How can we learn to consider scarce resources as sacred? Given that humans now dominate the planet, how can we create a joyful, moderate lifestyle that ritualistically treats the Earth as a Sacred Garden?
In a thorough study of twenty-two civilizations throughout history, historian Arnold Toynbee concluded that the most successful among them made graceful transitions (soft landings) from materially dominated values to spiritual, aesthetic, and artistic values—what he called the path of
“progressive simplification.” Essentially, they learned how to meet the most needs with the least amount of resources and effort—developing an ethic that supported and ritualized this approach. They implemented policies that valued cultural traditions; they took care of nature with terraces that minimized erosion from hillside farms; and they minimized conflict with other cultures. Throughout its long, illustrious history, China has been a civilization with a moderate, culturally rich way of life, though its current cultural aspirations, like those of the United States, are unrealistic (see “Beyond the China Syndrome”). Other modern examples of cultures based on moderation and meeting needs precisely are Costa Rica, Denmark, Kerala (in India), Cuba, and Switzerland—enclaves of cultural pride, relative peacefulness, and social satisfaction.
In fact, nonmaterial pursuits often characterized civilizations before the seventeenth century. For example, the salvation of pharaohs’ souls preoccupied the Egyptians; art, philosophy, and fitness kept the Greeks busy; and the quest for eternal salvation and renunciation of worldly pleasures was a dominant feature of the Middle Ages and the Crusades in Europe.3
Then technology burst onto the scene, exponentially increasing human access to resources. The American moment in history is perhaps the highest peak in the mountain range of the industrial revolution. On the strength of inspired political foundations, can-do infrastructure, technical ingenuity, an influx of energetic and often destitute immigrants, and a stockpile of virgin resources, the United States led the world into an era of unprecedented material abundance. Although America’s mainstream lifestyle currently centers on economic growth and consumption, the shift to a knowledge-based economy rich in efficiency, spirituality, storytelling, cooperation, and biologically inspired design is already well under way.
A culture shift like this—from an emphasis on material wealth to an abundance of time, relationships, and experiences—has already occurred in cultures such as Japan in the eighteenth century. Land was in short supply, forest resources were being depleted, and minerals such as gold, silver, and copper were suddenly scarce as well. Japan went from being resource-rich to resource-poor, but its culture adapted by developing a national ethic that centered on moderation and efficiency. An attachment to the material things in life was seen as demeaning, while the advancement of crafts and human knowledge were seen as lofty goals.
In this “culture of contraction,” an emphasis on quality became ingrained in a culture that eventually produced world-class solar cells and Toyota Priuses. Japanese shoguns established strict policies for reforesting.
Training and education in aesthetics and ritualistic arts fluorished, resulting in such disciplines as fencing, martial arts, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, literature, art, and skillful use of the abacus. The three largest cities in Japan had 1,500 bookstores among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care, and the necessities of life, further enriching a culture that required very few resources per “unit of happiness.”4 Referring to this Tokugawa period of Japanese history, Jared Diamond concludes in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, “Future deindustrial societies could achieve just as much. That goal is within reach, and it’s hard to think of a better gift we can offer the future.”5
The adventurous, vision-driven European Union has its sights set on something more valuable than monetary wealth, as Jeremy Rifkin documents in The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Whereas the American culture is hypnotized by economic growth, Europeans value a more moderate quality of life that doesn’t bankrupt nonmonetary forms of wealth. Europeans are fond of saying they “work to live” as opposed to “living to work,” and their paid vacation time tends to back that statement up: They average six weeks a year of vacation, compared to two weeks a year in the United States. Europeans have more physicians per capita, a higher voter turnout, greater equality of income, lower rates of infant mortality and homicide, and a much lower per capita rate of imprisonment: EU member states average 87 prisoners per 100,000 people, compared with the U.S. average of an astounding 685 prisoners per 100,000 people, which comprises one-fourth of the world’s prison population. Social critic John de Graaf refers to current U.S. taxation policies as “you’re on your ownership.” A thirty-year trend of income tax rollbacks has decreased quality of life overall in America, he reports, reducing levels of trust, family cohesion, literacy, happiness, and preschool education in measurable ways.6
In contrast, Western European countries invested in their social contracts. “Their provision of more public goods, like healthcare, education, transportation, and common space, reduced the need (or desire) of individuals to maximize their own incomes,” says de Graaf. The familiar economic yardstick, Gross Domestic Product, lumps “bads” together with an ever-increasing pile of goods and services, but an alternative to the GDP, the Genuine Progress Indicator, tells a different story. The GPI, which measures
twenty-four quality-of-life indices, shows a fairly consistent decline in well being in the United States since a peak in 1973. Similar indices for Europe show consistent improvement in most areas of life.7
Rifkin, who divides his time between the United States and the EU, writes from the perspective of a perplexed American, in The European Dream. He regretfully concludes, “Europe is busy preparing for a new era while America is desperately trying to hold on to the old one.” The American lifestyle is largely based on exclusivity, he observes, a cultural habit that not only neglects the social dimension of life but can also be environmentally destructive. In contrast, Europeans seek freedom and security in inclusivity and access to social networks. “The more communities one has access to, the more options and choices one has for living a full and meaningful life,” says Rifkin. In a more public European lifestyle, it’s more likely that a person will value such shared amenities as open space, libraries, and museums.8
Another aspect of American culture that puzzles many Europeans is America’s religious fervor. “The very notion that God has made Americans a chosen people often elicits chuckles of disbelief among the more secular Europeans,” says Rifkin. In America, 48 percent believe the country is under special protection from God, and close to half attend church every week. More than a third of Americans believe that everything the Bible says is literally true, and two-thirds believe, literally, in the devil. However, although more than 80 percent of Americans say that God is “very” important to them, less than 20 percent of Europeans express such devotion. In the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 10 percent attend church even once a month, and surprisingly, even in the Catholic strongholds of Italy and Poland, only a third of the population says religion is very important to them.9
I often wonder if unwavering religious convictions help Americans sleep a little too soundly. Are we in effect passing the buck to a God that may not even be there, at least in a super-human form? Instead of taking responsibility for the care of the Earth, an apparent majority of devout Americans can justify juggling the challenges of environmental protection and human rights by saying, “It’s in God’s hands.” Yet it seems to me that God is probably very busy creating and maintaining gazillions of other worlds. If it took Him or Her six days to create our world, let’s see, what’s six times a gazillion gazillion? I think we’d better assume responsibility ourselves. In fact, an increasing number of very devout Americans agree that, in effect, the Biblical phrase about “having dominion over the Earth” may mean, “Take care of things whenever I’m away.”
Fortunately, religious groups like the National Association of Evangelicals
are using noncontroversial terms like “creation care” to express an urgent need for action on challenges like global warming. A recent manifesto from the thirty-million-member group calls on government to “encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats.” Yes!
It strikes me that as a young, energetic country, we’ve had a great kickoff party but now it’s time to clean up and get back to work. We’ve been quite certain that our lifestyle is the best in the world, but now we’re hearing that the world may not always agree. For example, according to a Pew Global Attitudes Projects survey, 79 percent of Americans believe that “It’s good that American ideas and customs are spreading around the world.” However, less than 40 percent of Europeans agree.10 Pew’s 2005 global survey asked people in sixteen countries as well as the United States what words or phrases they associate with the American people. Fully 70 percent of Americans described our society as “greedy,” though the world at large was a bit less critical. However, 49 percent of Americans surveyed saw themselves as violent, and majorities in thirteen of the sixteen countries agreed with that one.11
Times have changed since America’s dominant cultural traits took shape. We need a different ethic—not based on archaic deities or on the needs of world trade, but a cross-section of values like efficiency, humility, compassion, preservation, and restoration. We need a Mission to Planet Earth. Sociologists Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, coauthors of The Cultural Creatives, see such an ethic taking shape. They document that more than a fifth of all Americans, and more than a third of all Europeans, are advocates for significant cultural changes. Many social movements, including environmental, civil rights, gay rights, and peace activists, took root in this population sector. Says Paul Ray, “If you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health, lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the earth and the diversity within and among species, you are not alone.”
Their book begins with the words, “Imagine a country the size of France suddenly sprouting in the middle of the United States. It is immensely rich in culture, with new ways of life, values, and world views …” The traits of the fifty million or so cultural creatives in the United States cut across the currents of long-held assumptions about the free market, the mission of science,
and the role of the individual in society. Cultural creatives sense that humans are a “future-creating species,” and that a society’s image of its future is a self-fulfilling prophecy.12 “They pay attention to what’s going on in the world as a whole, and they have very good BS detectors,” comments Paul Ray.13 They believe that by aligning their actions with their values, a much more enjoyable and sustainable future will take shape. Because their worldview is grounded in moderation and richness of experience, this population sector offers great potential for instigating a new American lifestyle that provides twice the current level of satisfaction for half the resources.
Lifestyles of the Cultural Creatives
What They Do:
• They are readers, not TV watchers. They buy more books and magazines, listen to more radio, and watch less television than other Americans. They are more likely to be involved in the arts, are more likely to write books and articles, and to go to meetings and workshops about books they have read.
• They like to talk about food, experiment with new kinds of food, cook food with friends, eat out a lot, do gourmet and ethnic cooking, try natural foods and health foods.
• They go on vacations that are exotic, adventuresome, educational, experiential, authentic, altruistic and/or spiritual. They don’t do package tours, fancy resorts, or cruises, and don’t like taking the kids to Disneyland.
• They volunteer for one or more good causes.
What They Like:
• They desire systems views of the “whole process” in whatever they are reading, from cereal boxes to product descriptions to magazine articles. They want to know where a product came from, how it was made, who made it, and what will happen to it when they are done with it.
• They want access to nature, walking and biking paths, ecological preservation, historic preservation, and to live in master planned communities that show a way to re-create community.
• They care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development.
What They Buy:
• They are careful, well-informed shoppers who do not buy on impulse, and read up on a purchase first. They are practically the only consumers who regularly read the labels as they’re supposed to.
• They invented the term “authenticity” as consumers understand it, leading the rebellion against things that are “plastic,” fake, imitation, poorly made, throwaway, clichéd in style, and high fashion.
• They want safety and fuel economy in a midpriced car. These are the early buyers of hybrid cars. They buy fewer new houses than most people of their income level; instead they buy resale houses and fix them up the way they want.
• They are consumers of experiences rather than things, in search of intense, enlightening moments.
What They Believe:
• They dislike the emphasis in modern culture on success and “making it,” on luxury and affluence.
• They love nature and are deeply concerned about its destruction.
• They place great importance on developing and maintaining relationships.
• They care about holistic health: body/mind/spirit are a single entity.
• They believe women should have more equality in the home and at work, and should be business and political leaders.
• They are concerned about actions and impacts of big corporations.
The heart and soul of a culture are its values, and how it meets them. Core values—expressed in words like diversity, moderation, responsibility, respect, durability, equality, quality, trust, prevention, care, and regeneration—translate directly into tangible goals like “clean energy,” “great neighborhoods,” and “wellness.” In turn, these goals can drive specific policies and actions like “expand the use of public transit,” or “reduce the consumption of cigarettes, gasoline, and saturated fats.”
It’s not only possible but extremely important for the different factions of American society to agree on which direction we’re going! Do we want the
greatest good for the greatest number of people or are we willing to passively default to a latter-day form of feudalism, in which a small minority holds the wealth and power? Do we want a world in which species are on the rebound, or one in which habitats are being swallowed up by poorly planned development and computer-controlled machinery? Do we want clean energy, provided with ingenious design, or dirty energy we literally pay for with our blood? Do we want a world we hurry through stressfully and fearfully, or a world worth slowing down for? As I’ve said throughout the book, there’s only one basic change we need to make to begin the shift to a new era: Define and value wealth in wider, deeper, more holistic terms than money.
When a sufficient number of individuals take pleasure in the elegance of a need well met, it will become obvious that efficiency is not about “cutting back” but “cutting waste.” There may be a prolonged debate concerning the best route to renewable supplies of energy, but surely we can agree that the sooner we switch to clean power, the stronger and healthier our culture will be. It will be a larger challenge to agree that consumption should be reduced, since spending and consuming is so deeply embedded in our current lifestyle. But when we ask ourselves if we’re meeting our real needs with a given product, we start to understand that it’s not the stuff we want, but the values the stuff is trying to satisfy. We buy a sporty car to attract a partner so we won’t feel lonely. We eat a quart of ice cream in one sitting, but the real hunger is for something worthwhile to be doing.
For this book, I interviewed Lester Brown, an eminent environmental analyst whose work (with Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute) I’ve followed for almost thirty years. He’s authored or coauthored more than fifty books that have been translated into forty languages. The Washington Post called him “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and the U.S. Library of Congress requested his personal papers, noting that his writings “have strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.” He routinely addresses the Parliament of the European Union and meets with party leaders in China.
We sit together in a hotel lobby and I ask him why we seem unable to take action on major challenges like climate change and species extinction. “We’re monitoring false signals,” he says. “The price of a gallon of gas, for example, includes the cost of production but not the expenses of treating respiratory illnesses from polluted air; or the repair bill from acid rain damage
to lakes, forests, crops, and buildings; or the costs of rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, hurricanes, and relocation of environmental refugees.” His words put the problem in a nutshell: As currently structured, the world’s economies are consuming not just products but the living systems they come from.
He explains his recent research on the startling economic growth of China. “They’ve now overtaken us in the consumption of the most necessary resources,” he says. “They are the world’s largest consumer of all the basic commodities—grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel—except for oil, and they are closing that gap quickly. In fact, if their economy continues to grow at 8 percent per year, in 2031 income per capita in China would be same as in the United States today. They would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars—well beyond the current world fleet of 795 million. Their paper consumption would be double the world’s current production—there go the world’s forests,” he says. “China also imports vast quantities of grain, soybeans, iron ore, aluminum, copper, platinum, potash, and the cotton needed for its world-dominating textile industry. Its voracious appetite for materials is driving up not only commodity prices but ocean shipping rates as well.”
Two monumental Chinese landmarks are now visible from space—the Great Wall of China and the Great Mall of China. Covering an area more than 5 million square feet, the “Golden Resources Mall” is twice the size of our huge Mall of America in Minnesota, a popular vacation destination for devout consumers. A recent news story offers clear evidence that affluenza has now infected one of the world’s oldest cultures: A Chinese father was under considerable consumer pressure from his daughter; becoming so desperate to silence her whining, he spent 5,000 yuan ($625) on ten school bags and twenty Barbie dolls. According to the Xinhua news agency story, the father’s shopping sprees ended up frightening his daughter, who stopped making gift demands. But the wasted money angered his wife, who threatened to divorce him. Partly as a result of its one-child policy of past decades, China is filled with pampered kids known as “little emperors.” Who knows what kind of pent-up consumer demand lurks in these ranks?
Certainly, China’s “progress,” like America’s, puts the rest of the world at risk. China is now by far the world’s biggest driver of rain forest destruction, says a recent Greenpeace report. Nearly one-half of the tropical hardwood logs shipped from the world’s threatened rain forests are headed for China. And the footprints from those rain forests lead through China right to America’s doorstep; as fast as China manufactures products made from wood, American consumers buy them. Wal-Mart, which in 2006 generated about 2 percent of the U.S. GDP, now imports $19 billion a year of Chinese products, selling them at prices we can’t refuse.14
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by Brown’s comments, I ask him for a bit of good news. I’m sure he gets that question a lot, and he quickly replies, “With each wind farm, rooftop solar panel, paper-recycling facility, bicycle path, and reforestation program, we move closer to an economy that can sustain economic progress,” he says. “Change can happen very quickly. For example, the Berlin Wall coming down was essentially a bloodless political revolution; there were no articles in political science journals in the 1980s that said, ‘Hey, keep an eye on Eastern Europe, big change is coming there.’ But one morning people woke up and realized the great communist experiment was over.
“Or what if we’d been sitting together ten years ago and I’d said, ‘I think that the tobacco industry is going to cave’? It was the most powerful lobby in Washington. It controlled congressional committee chairs. But there was a steady flow of articles on smoking and health over a period of a few decades, along with persistent denial. The industry just lost its credibility. Another example is World War Two. If you did a poll on December 6, 1941, that asked, ‘Do you think we should get involved in the war?’ probably eighty-five percent would have said, ‘Nothing doing—we’re not going to make that mistake again,’ and then twenty-four hours later, everything changed.’”
He gives me a long list of reasons to be hopeful: “Iceland is experimenting with what it might mean to be a ‘hydrogen economy,’ where energy would be generated with fuel cells and by direct combustion of hydrogen, that produces water vapor as a by-product. Denmark, Germany, and Spain are world leaders in wind-generated electricity, with Denmark now meeting eighteen percent of its electrical needs from wind. Ontario, Canada, is emerging as a leader in phasing out coal; the province plans to replace its five coal-fired power plants with natural gas-fired turbines, wind farms, and gains in efficiency. The resulting reduction in CO2 emissions in Ontario will be equivalent to taking four million cars off the road.”
Israel leads the world in the efficient use of water, he explains; the United States is expert at stabilizing soil, reducing soil erosion by 40 percent in less than two decades. Japan is a world leader in the production of solar cells; and, in the Netherlands, 40 percent of all trips are on bicycles, demonstrating that, with good planning and design, bikes can be a viable alternative to cars. Brown recalls a stay in the Dutch college town of Utrecht, where he gave a presentation. “From my hotel room, I looked down on streets that were mostly one-way—intentionally inconvenient for cars—and I did a vehicle count. For each car, I counted about nineteen bicycles. From there, I flew directly to Seoul, Korea. Again, I was in a hotel in a horrible downtown area of Korea, and there was a thoroughfare in front of
the hotel. I was there two or three days before I saw a single bicycle. Korea has been so driven on creating a modern economy, they think what they have just built is the future, but it’s not.
“If the United States over the next decade were to shift its whole automobile fleet to highly efficient gas-electric hybrid engines with efficiencies comparable to today’s Toyota Prius, the country could easily cut gasoline use in half,” he said. “The potential for cutting coal use and carbon emissions by developing wind resources to generate electricity also has enormous potential. By 2020, half of Europe’s four hundred million people are projected to get their residential electricity from wind.”
Do Americans have the guts to become a joyful, moderate culture? Of course we do. Although the United States currently consumes a fourth of the world’s oil and even larger percentages of resources like paper and aluminum, we still have the memory of frugality from Depression and World War II days. After being reluctantly drawn into the war, the entire U.S. economy adapted its cultural concept. In this stunningly swift conversion of American industry, automobile factories converted to tank and armored car factories, a merry-go-round factory made gun-mounts, and a corset manufacturer made grenade belts. Strategic goods like tires, gasoline, fuel oil, and sugar were rationed beginning in 1942, and incredibly, the production and sale of cars and trucks for private use was banned, along with driving just for pleasure. Highway construction stopped. Americans salvaged tin cans, bottles, bits of rubber, and waste paper. About twenty million Americans produced two-fifths of the nation’s vegetable produce in their Victory Gardens. Both on the war front and home front, there was an elevated feeling of camaraderie. Women marched into the factories by the millions to build aircraft and operate large cranes. A poster released by the Office of War Information stated simply, “Do with less so they’ll have enough,” and we did, temporarily.15
Now, the time for a permanent culture shift has come, powered by renewable energy sources, the elimination of waste, and a reawakened population of citizens. I believe the best measure of a civilization is how well it can absorb disruption and keep going; the same might be said of individuals. One poignant example is Victor Frankl, a physician and psychiatrist imprisoned during World War II in Auschwitz. In Love and Survival, Dean Ornish writes, “Frankl wondered why some people survived and others did not. Some who were relatively young and healthy seemed to give up and often died soon thereafter; others who were old, frail, and quite sick were able to survive and function despite overwhelming odds. He noticed that their survival was much less a factor of age or infirmity than their ability to find a sense of meaning in the midst of this horrible experience. Some people wanted to live to bear witness; others for love—to help a parent or spouse or child who was there with them …”16
How to Support the Transition to a Moderate, Sustainable Society
These initiatives and others like them can counteract the formidable trends discussed in this book, and create a world less reliant on finite resources, less focused on money.
• Reduce U.S. energy consumption per capita by half—to levels equivalent to Italian and German energy consumption. Changes in lifestyle will help: Eat less meat (since it “costs” so much energy to produce); live in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods; consume fewer things but better things, since consumer goods are filled with “hidden” energy.
• Implement high-leverage policy changes already proven in EU countries, such as Extended Producer Responsibility (“Take-Back Laws”), which requires manufacturers to recycle/refurbish products at the end of their lives; and Tax Shift policies, which place economic burden on undesirable outcomes such as energy consumption, pollution, and inefficient technology. For example, Sweden’s tax shift lowered income taxes but increased energy taxes. Revitalize deposit systems for containers and incentives for reusable packaging.
• Invest in “socially responsible” companies and mutual funds that enable you to make a good return while aligning your portfolio with your personal values. Participate in shareholder advocacy and community investment opportunities. For more information, see www.socialinvest.org.
• Support more useful ways of measuring wealth and well-being than GDP, which includes the “bads” with the goods and services and thus shows only how much money was spent, not how well it was spent. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator, a tool devised by the group Redefining Progress, shows how we’re really doing. At the personal scale, consider self-evaluation measurements that report “real wealth” such as creativity, connection, and care-taking.
• Support and subsidize alternative transportation that’s less energy intensive, for example, revitalize the train industry for both passenger and freight use. Optimize train performance with high speed and Maglev design. Continue to build bike trails, separate from roads, which enable access to shopping, commuting, and travel within a metro area. Support the United States’ becoming a world leader in automobile efficiency.
• Support scientific research to make the transition from petrochemistry to “phytochemistry” (based on plants). In the manufacture of plastics, fertilizers,
fabrics, and medicines, for instance, transition from a hydrocarbon economy to a carbohydrate economy. Algae may be a key material of the future.
• Support a diversity of solutions in energy, transportation, manufacturing, and other industries so that regional strengths are optimized. For example, support wind-generated electricity in those regions with the best wind potentials. Generate renewable energy at the community and rooftop scale; recycle water and solid wastes at the local level, too.
• Support sustainable agriculture that maintains the health of the soil and prevents erosion with techniques such as cover crops, crop rotation, and composting to increase the organic content of the soil, which increases its water retention and nutrient value per unit of food.
• Begin the inevitable transition to a national wastewater strategy that doesn’t waste the nutrients that are now flushed down the drains of homes and small industries. At a minimum, cities should separate wastewater containing toxic materials from wastewater containing sewage and biological waste. At best, they should optimize the use of both neighborhood scale “living machines” that purify water in a greenhouse setting, and computer-controlled compost toilets that convert wastes into fertilizer.
• Support the construction of mixed-use neighborhoods that reduce consumption and increase satisfaction. Support the gradual transformation of suburbia to a mosaic of villages and communities in a metropolitan setting.
• Support social change that reduces the linkage between security and the need for higher incomes. For example, support a national health-care system that uncouples health care from employment. Support workplace legislation to create more part-time jobs that have prorated benefits.
• Support the creation at the regional scale of wildlife corridors, integrated private land conservancy strategies, and open space strategies at the local and county level.
• Support increased U.S. participation in the United Nations, to ensure an equal voice in developing nations as well as global consensus on environmental issues.
If humans like Frankl are capable of enduring such nightmares, why do so many Americans refuse to even acknowledge the challenges we face? From the top of the hill, gazing at a commanding view, they ask, “Why should we be expected to give up our 300-horsepower cars, our homes that are large enough to shelter two hundred people, and personal diets that a hundred could survive on?” I think the most persuasive argument is that in each case, moderation feels better than excess, when all values are considered. Not only can we feel better about ourselves but we’ll get daily dividends from a natural world on the rebound: cleaner air, happier nonhuman Earth mates, and a stable, dependable climate. Think about it—would you rather have an expensive SUV or a world that takes care of our kids? A McMansion, or a home in a much larger sense—that resonates with birdcalls, beaver dams, and iridescent dragonflies? A diet of refined powders and tasteless produce or a society whose citizens are full of vitality, hope, and purpose?
I believe that as individuals and as a culture, we long for a slower, saner world—less transfixed by money and stuff. As visionary Paul Hawken notes, our lives are often played out by the rhythm of capital, whizzing around the planet at the speed of a trillion dollars a day. But other rhythms are more comfortable, more compelling. “What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have “bad” payback under commercial rules: infrastructure, universities, temples, poetry, choirs, literature, language, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, line dancing, and art,” says Hawken. “Commerce moves faster and requires the governance of politics, art, culture, and nature, to slow it down; to make it pay attention to people and place. In between culture and business is governance—faster than culture, slower than commerce. At the heart, the slowest chronology is earth, nature, the web of life. As ephemeral as it may seem, it is the slowest clock ticking, always there, responding to long, ancient evolutionary cycles that are beyond civilization.”17
By slowing down to the speed of life, a new American lifestyle—which reveres the Earth as a Sacred Garden—can save the pieces, allowing nature and culture to regenerate on their own terms. The high-consumption lifestyle we lead will change dramatically in the years to come, whether we choose it or are chosen by it. The problem isn’t just one of high incomes
and ego-trips—those are the least of our problems. Because of resource shortages, a reduced capacity of the environment to clean up after us, an epidemic of debt and possible foreclosure by foreign lenders, a longing for meaning and purpose, and a deep-seated instinct for ecological stability, we’ll invent a more culturally abundant lifestyle, as many civilizations have before us.
The secret of success at the national and global scale is not really a secret; it’s in plain sight, and it’s called moderation. We’ll get more value from less stuff and better stuff, by tapping into riches like quality products, brilliant design and redesign of cities and towns, cultural and aesthetic greatness, curiosity and fascination about how nature really works, cooperation with coworkers and neighbors, and generosity, just because it feels right. Like former addicts who walk victoriously away from the cliff, we’ll choose to experience and embrace life rather than try to dominate it. Although the pace and density of our world are often confusing, we are very certain about some things. For example, we know we want more meaning in our lives; we know we want to use logic that’s based on reality (what I call biologic) rather than obsolete rules and policies. We’ve always loved the idea of rising to the occasion, of being heroes in the last minutes of a game. We’ve practiced heroism for many thousands of years in our myths and scriptures. We’re ready, in these most critical times, to continue the transition—individually and culturally—from the “love of consumption” to the “love of life.”