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Lower Fertility: a Wise Investment
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Scientific American
Plans that encourage voluntary, steep reductions in the fertility rates of poor nations pay dividends in sustainability for everyone
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With the world risking ecological disaster at every turn-climate change, water stress, habitat destruction, over-hunting and over-fishing, pollution-sustainability of the world economy will require action on several fronts. We will have to economize on our use of scarce and depleting resources, especially fossil fuels and natural habitats vital to other species. We will have to foster resource-saving technologies, such as environmentally sound fish-farming to substitute for over-harvesting of ocean fisheries. And we will have to help the poor regions of the world to complete the demographic transition to achieve stable populations, a process that is underway but by far not fast enough.
True, rapid population growth is not the main driver today of environmental threats. Pride of place goes to the high and rising rates of resource use per person, rather than to the rise in the sheer number of people. Even if the world’s population were to stabilize at today’s level of 6.5 billion people, the pressures of rising per capita resource use would continue to mount, as today’s poor and middle-income societies increase their resource use to live like the rich countries, while today’s rich countries continue their seemingly insatiable quest for still greater consumption levels. With the rich countries living at roughly $30,000 per person and the world’s average income at around $10,000 per person, simply having the poor catch up with the incomes levels of the rich would triple global economic throughput, with all of the attendant environmental consequences.
The continued rapid population growth in many poor countries will markedly exacerbate the environmental stresses. Under current demographic trends, the U.N. forecasts a rise in the world’s population to around 9 billion as of 2050, another 2.5 billion people. They will arrive in the poor regions, but aspire to income and consumption levels of the rest of the world. Those 2.5 billion people eventually living at the income standards of today’s rich would have an income level more than today’s entire world GNP. If the economic aspirations of the newly added population are fulfilled, the environmental pressures would be mind-boggling. If those aspirations are not fulfilled, the political pressures will be similarly mind-boggling. All the better, therefore, to slow population growth while there is still the chance.
(Sept 2006 issue)
Roof Rainwater-Harvesting Questions Answered
Anne K. Goedken, Buildings Magazine
Today, water is being harvested and reused to save money, earn LEED points, and tell a story about sustainability in action
Previous generations collected water in barrels and used the contents for watering gardens and plants. Today, water is being harvested and reused on a much larger scale to save money, earn LEED points, and tell a story about sustainability in action.
(21 Aug 2006)
Spiritual Significance of the Simpler Way
Ted Trainer, The Simpler Way
The following notes are not based on much acquaintance with the literature on spirituality; they just represent some of the more obvious ways in which The Simpler Way is likely to have a spiritual significance.
The least obvious yet the greatest benefits of The Simpler Way are to do with its “spiritual” aspects. How often in consumer-capitalist society do people feel inspired, ennobled, at one with nature, of good will to all people, or at peace with the universe? An essential characteristic of consumer-capitalist society is the high level of anxiety, stress and depression. Depression is about the most common ailment now. The triumph of “neo-liberal globalisation” is rapidly increasing the insecurity of the middle classes and workers even in the richer countries. Many work increasingly long hours and complain about not having enough time. Many in lower classes have no jobs and are condemned to boredom and hopelessness.
Even more important, the spirit permeating consumer-capitalist society is mean and narrow. The dominant concern is individualistic struggle to get more money and possessions, in a climate that is viciously competitive and callous. There are other values as well, but the struggle by the individual to get constitutes the essence of western culture now. This obsession is distressingly impoverished — it means that a vast range of other and more noble and rewarding pursuits that people could be devoting their lives to are mostly overlooked. It is also a nasty orientation. It is selfish, grasping, exploitative and predatory. You try to beat others, not help them. You take advantage of the other’s misfortune. Most leisure time is spent consuming the trivia the media churns out. For large numbers consumer-capitalism is pretty close to a spiritual desert. Even the richest one billion people on the planet fail to have anything like the spiritual quality of life that is possible.
The first point to make about the spiritual significance of The Simpler Way is that we will have about six days a week to give to it! Because we will have confined working for money, merely economic activity, to a relatively small amount of time and attention we will be able to put most of our time into important things. These will include arts and crafts, gardening, reading, community, discussion, projects, governing, learning, celebrations and rituals. It is not that spiritually enriching experience will be another thing we will engage in — in a satisfactory society just about everything we do will have a spiritual significance, a spiritual benefit.
(14 Aug 2006)
The latest writing by Dr. Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Australia). Trainer has spoken and written extensively on the transition to a sustainable society. What sets his work apart is his detailed vision of what a new sustainable society could be like; see the many articles on his website, The Simpler Way. -BA
Your Money or Your Life: Financial Independence – For Us Common Folk
Jane Dwinell, Vermont Commons
…I began to keep track of every cent my family spent and took in, what we spent it on, and then asked the question – is this purchase in alignment with our values? After having considered what our “real” hourly wage was (it’s not what on your paycheck), I could also figure how many hours of our life energy we spent to acquire that good or service.
Does this sound complicated? Does it sound intriguing? It’s all part of a nine-step program called “Your Money or Your Life” (YMOYL) presented in a 1992 book of the same title written by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin. This book changed my life.
In our busy, consumer society, it seems that so many of us just go along with our lives without taking time to consider if what we’re doing – and how we spend our money – is in alignment with our values. I thought my family lived a pretty simple, honest life. We gardened and raised a good share of our food. We lived off-the-grid with solar power. Both adults were committed to working part time so that one of us would be home with the kids. We didn’t buy too much stuff – or so I thought.
It turns out that, by examining our life by following the nine steps, we were able to achieve Financial Integrity, Financial Intelligence, and Financial Independence.
Here are the steps…
(31 July 2006)
Start with the Land
Peter Forbes, Vermont Commons
I am wary of talk of independence that doesn’t start with the willingness and knowledge of how to grow healthy food. I am wary of calls for secession that don’t include mention of what will succeed our maples.
Forget politics, let’s talk about soil.
Are we really loyal to our own soil? Let me make a straightforward proposition: all talk of the future of nations and states that doesn’t start with the fundamentals of soil, and our relationship to it, is the domain of armchair revolutionaries.
Soil and land is the foundation of our cultural house. It isn’t the roof, or the walls, or the windows, or the plumbing, but land –and our relationship to it—supports and defines all the characteristics that we call humanity and community. And from this awareness comes a glimpse of another truth: our true wealth and security comes from that relationship to the land. If we want political independence then we must start in the right place: with how all Vermonters live on the land and in community. Those relationships to the land determine whether we subject ourselves to systems and economies beyond our control, or liberate ourselves to be fully human.
(31 July 2006)
Living Post-Carbon: Vermonters Begin Grappling With Global Peak Oil
Dennis Derryberry, Vermont Commons
During the past several months, as the ominous phrase “Peak Oil” has begun appearing on the U.S. public’s collective radar screen, hundreds of forward-thinking Vermonters already have decided to look for new ways to live which do not rely upon the use of fossil fuel energy, and not least among their reasons is the simple fact that oil fields don’t exist in or anywhere near Vermont. Just a few months since its creation, the Vermont Peak Oil Network (VPON) website www.vtpeakoil.net has networked at least nine local and regional groups who have rallied around the possibility of creation an alternative energy future in the face of dramatically increasing fossil fuel energy and shrinking production capacity globally.
This is thinking and acting locally. This is choosing energy independence.
Not surprisingly, the main pursuit of each VPON group is to establish a permanently sustainable local agricultural and energy supply at the community level. Less than one year after New York Times writer Peter Maass landed an empty fuel gauge on the cover of the flagship newspaper’s Sunday Times Magazine (See NYT, “The Breaking Point” – August 21, 2005) the VPON website now offers a host of creative solutions for re-inventing local Vermont economies around more sustainable agricultural and energy systems.
VPON (www.Vtpeakoil.net) is the brainchild of Annie Dunn Watson, a Burlington College professor who taught a course on peak oil this past spring. After viewing Peak Oil documentary film The End of Suburbia during the fall of 2004, Watson said she felt depressed, and noticed, during the next few months, that many Vermonters seemed unaware of the looming crisis. An entire year passed, and Watson – who is trained in psychology and studies social attitudes, conflict and mediation – found she had discovered a tricky psychological problem surrounding the Peak Oil issue. “We grew up in this age of abundance,” she said, speaking of the post-WWII generation, Americans who have lived their lives in step with a U.S.-dominated global fossil-fuel economy offering ubiquitous transportation, consumerist, and technological offerings. “This sense of material entitlement makes us very reluctant to accept or even acknowledge the vision of a world with less. Americans are going to have a hard time dealing with the changes ahead.”
(31 July 2006)
Good article. See also Growing A New Food Paradigm: Vermonters Plant Localvore Chapters
-AF
