by David Wann
I love great Belgian, Swiss, or Italian dark chocolate that energizes me in a very smooth way because its ingredients are so pure. I can’t say the same for most American chocolate, because it has so much sugar and so many additives that it makes me feel jumpy—and fat. I also love organic produce that has a story connected with it: Maybe it comes from Buffalo Canyon Farm, where growers use heirloom seeds and “green manure” (cover crops) to make the soil rich and full of nutrients. There’s a connection between the growers’ intentions to grow healthy food and my desire to feel good—it becomes a relationship centered on health.
I value my old car, a 1986 Volvo station wagon with 274,000 miles on it, for atypical yet logical reasons. It enables me to do things like carry potted fruit trees from the nursery without stressing about the carpeting; recycle the neighborhood’s cardboard; and take boxes of books to sell at presentations. It helps me feel secure because who would want to steal a twenty-year-old car when there are brand-new Toyotas parked next to it? Even if it suffers a parking lot dent or scrape, I still love it. If my overall goal is to live a life free of stress, my car is a good vehicle to get me there, because I avoid the stress of monthly payments, I carry liability insurance only, and I go easy on borderline repairs. So rather than spending the typical $7,500 a year for a car, I spend less than $2,000. Money not spent on the car can be spent elsewhere. Rather than just miles per gallon, I’m currently opting for miles per vehicle, avoiding for society-at-large (you’re welcome) the energy costs of manufacturing a new one—which comprise at least a fourth of the car’s lifetime energy use.
In general, I love things that last. Six years after my dad’s death, I’m still wearing a pair of his classic Clarks shoes in the garden. (It feels good to be walking in his shoes.) My mother has a Singer Featherweight sewing machine she bought fifty-five years ago that still works great, and a GE clock radio that’s also earned “vintage” status. My friend Mary Romano cherished a well-designed German coffee grinder that she maintained for twenty-five years, changing the parts whenever necessary to keep it in great operating condition. When it finally gave out, she replaced it with a grinder from the same company, but it was a sealed-up unit that couldn’t be maintained or repaired, and it was fed to the landfill within a year.
The Stuff of Life
Before going on a vacation a few years ago, I told friends my main stimulus was to take a break from work projects. But I have to admit I also craved time away from my stuff. At least ten times a day, things that are not alive intervene in my life, competing for maintenance, payment, and acquisition. The computer printer gets paper-jammed. The packaging on a new CD takes ten minutes of my life to remove. The house needs a paint job. The car needs a lube job. The microwave shorts out. All day long, like a nest full of wide-mouthed baby birds, my stuff cries out for attention.
I decided to escape my stuff by going Down Under. I carefully selected and packed what I hoped was the right stuff, and my son, Colin, and I boarded a jam-packed airliner for New Zealand, courtesy of frequent-flyer miles. The small amount of gear we’d brought was perfectly adequate for making contact with this unique place, but the real stuff-challenge came when we had to consolidate it into backpacks for several treks in New Zealand’s spectacular Fjordland. What we’d already boiled down for the vacation needed to be boiled down again, into seven cubic feet or less of backpack space. My favorite objects on those three-day hikes were a two-cup thermos for swallows of green tea throughout the day’s hike; my notebook, pencil, and sharpener; the food we’d brought to cook—much of it fresh rather than packaged—and my well-designed clothes that saved me during a chilly, windy, and rainy day on the beautiful Routeburn Track. In an area that gets up to three hundred inches of rain a year, you need to have gear that sheds water and dries quickly. We didn’t need a lot of clothes, just good quality clothes.
I like the analogy of a backpacker when I think about the emerging American lifestyle. The backpacker doesn’t want a lot of junk in a backpack. She or he wants only items that are ingeniously designed, like a Whisper Lite cookstove, a warm fleece sweater, a good pair of boots that can go the extra miles, and food that’s full of slow-release energy. The backpacker brings along acquired skills, stories to tell and an open mind to learn new ones, a well-designed tent, maybe a flute or a great book. During the journey, the world is a splash of light and shadow, with mountain peaks in the distance and bighorn sheep standing guard. If we’re smart, the awakening American lifestyle will deliver clarity, a sense of wonder, and great health, as if life itself was an energizing, mind-opening backpacking trip.
Rethinking Priorities in an Average-Income Household
I love it when economists call our hard-earned money “disposable” income, because in many cases, that’s exactly what it ends up being! An overlooked but sizable chunk of the household income typically goes straight down the drain for wasted food; poorly designed, wily widgets with their own agenda; appliances that crunch kilowatts like Cracker Jack; and prescription drugs that mask one set of symptoms with another.1
Surely, the most perplexing TV commercials in recent memory are the prescription drug announcements that once we’ve secured a doctor’s signature for antidepressants, allergy inhibitors, hair-growth stimulants, and sleep inducers, our troubles will be over. That is, if we learn to accept extreme nausea, erections that won’t go away, or elevated risk of stroke as part of the miracle. But we can eliminate many side effects from various consumer choices by directly providing more of our own health, entertainment, food, and transportation. If we make our household more productive and less consumptive, we can also write much lighter checks to Visa.
“Yeah, right,” you say. “How? Where will the extra time and human energy come from?” Quite a bit of it comes from letting the Joneses go their own way, as fast as they want. By redefining what we personally value as “wealth,” we can reclaim much of the disposable time we’ve lost in recent years. What if an average household’s annual expenditures of roughly $43,000 went to different priorities? What if a family’s purchases (and decisions not to purchase) brought more durability, greater vitality, more satisfying entertainment, greater intellectual growth and more laughter into their house? Their choices might result in major attitude adjustments—psychological makeovers—that would make discretionary time seem far more valuable and a huge income seem less necessary. For example, they might begin to enjoy more of their food at home. As recently as the 1970s, the average U.S. family allocated almost three-fourths of food expenditures for food eaten at home and one-fourth for food eaten away from home. In the twenty-first century, however, the average U.S. household allocates almost half of its food budget for food eaten away from home. We’re not sure what exactly is in restaurant food, or how it will make us feel, but it has those four basic food groups: crunchy, greasy, salty, and sweet!
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 63 percent is spent for housing, transportation, and food. Each of these categories represents huge opportunities for reducing waste, stress, and the dark threat of bankruptcy. About 32 percent is spent for housing (that’s the house, utilities, furniture, and supplies). The family could win back time, money, and vitality by living in a smaller, better-designed house with efficient appliances and good natural daylight, buying well-built furniture that doesn’t need constant replacing, and having a different attitude about what a house is for. If they consider it a trophy or “display unit,” they’ll spend hours a week decorating and redecorating it, and cleaning it or paying someone else to clean it. But if their house becomes more of a healthy verb than a passive noun, there may be a vegetable garden out back, a workshop in the garage, and an accessible place to store well-used bicycles and a scooter. The house will be comfortable, and so will its residents.2
About 18 percent is spent for transportation. If the house is located near the things the family needs—work, friends, groceries, bank—the average family can reduce transportation costs by at least a te
nth, or about $750. Getting rid of the second car and all its insurance and maintenance expenses will yield even greater benefits.
If the food they eat delivers energy rather than lethargy, they’ll exercise more, walking to the library or bank, and playing sports rather than buying them. Health-care costs will be lower and weight-loss programs won’t be necessary. With better food in their lives, they’ll go to the doctor less and require less insurance coverage. They’ll spend more social time eating, reducing their entertainment costs. Almost certainly, they’ll feel a greater sense of contentment and wellness. By slowing down to the speed of life, the average American family can become more than just an “average” family—they can be an exceptional family. Instead of disposing of their income, they can save it, eat it, and live it.
Lifestyles of the Unashamedly Poor and Not-So-Famous
The Social Security statements that come every year remind me, with the inhuman harshness of data, that I’ve had a few lean years since jumping ship to become a freelancer. In fact, there have been years when I lived below the poverty line, a phrase that seems to require dramatic intonation. It’s not that I’m trying to find my way to the bottom of the economy, it’s just that I haven’t had a lot of time to make money in recent years; I’ve been contentedly busy pursuing things that aren’t about money. Do I sometimes wish I had more cash? Sure, we all do, but I feel like I have many other forms of wealth, so in general, no major complaints. (But tell your friends about this book … )
My kids, too, are exploring alternative lifestyles that shed light on the excesses of the American lifestyle. On a recent volunteer mission to Nepal to work in an orphanage near Kathmandu, my daughter, Libby, lived with a Nepalese family for four months. Their lifestyle (no car, no refrigerator, a squat toilet) requires less than a fifteenth as many resources as the average American’s, yet she says the host family members usually have smiles on their faces. Each e-mail she sent from the Internet café was a glimpse of a colorfully grounded reality. In her first note, after hellish travels that included misplaced luggage, she reported cheerfully, “My host mother, Songita, is boisterous, pushy, and good natured. Her English is pretty rudimentary, and she frequently gets objects and emotions mixed up. She’ll tell me she’s very mad at me when I’ve done something good, and tell me to drink my hot tea very slowly because it is very, very cold. I nod and smile, and at the end of a conversation I get up from the table wondering if I’ve just agreed to marry someone, or buy each villager a new goat.”
She learned to love the rice, lentils, and curried vegetables the family eats twice a day, but opted to pose as mostly vegetarian when she found out that, after being cooked, the meat sits on a shelf for days at a time. On a ten-day trek to the base camp of Mount Everest, she experienced a way of life most Americans will never have the opportunity to see. (Less than a fifth of all Americans even have a passport.) “At night,” she wrote, “we stayed in guesthouses run by Sherpa people—keeping ourselves warm by a lone fire stove, burning yak dung in the middle of the dining room.”
“The trip was surreal: through valleys where water-powered prayer wheels propelled blessings to the sky, to mountain passes where monks chanted in monasteries, and past ancient Tibetan women wearing Nike tennis shoes and fake Northface down jackets over traditional dresses … The Himalayas themselves are almost beautiful enough to make you cry, but the Sherpa peoples’ history and their current struggle between tourism dollars and traditional ways are especially fascinating to me. I could sit and watch these beautiful people all day long—I would pay to talk to these old-timer porters, these human beasts of burden who so gracefully and humbly haul crates of chocolate bars, boxes of beer, and other tourist luxuries up the mountains each day—hundreds of pounds carted at a time in baskets …
When she got home, she explained the challenge she’d stepped into: The director of the orphanage had skipped out with the money and left thirty-five kids without sufficient food or health care, sleeping four to a bed, and spending much of their time sitting on mats, doing nothing at all. Libby and her volunteer cohorts found emergency funding for food and new bunk beds, got the kids to a health clinic, and enrolled them in school. Although the orphans didn’t speak English, she discovered that her abilities to dance, jump rope, and play soccer came in handy. Just showing interest in them brought smiles back to their faces.
Libby Wann helped meet the basic needs of many children when she volunteered in an orphanage near Kathmandu, Nepal. Credit: Libby Wann
I wish I’d been able to visit her in Nepal, but I’d given her most of my frequent-flyer miles for the flight, and besides, I was working on a certain book … But I was glad that she, an anthropology major, was learning that many of the world’s people are not as obsessed with stuff, spotlessness, and convenience as we are.
I did, however, make a point of visiting a more accessible adventurer in the family this past Christmas, my son, Colin. I saw firsthand how even a person with a third-world level of income can “cut back” on resource consumption. It was my first solo road trip in a few years—the kind where you get behind the wheel and just go, for hundreds, thousands of miles, floating on a magic carpet made of two tons of steel, four fragile tires, and a cumulative 55-gallon drum of credit-card gas.
Colin, the Big Guy, is six foot three and currently living in a bright blue van parked in a friend’s driveway, in Prescott, Arizona. Two days a week, he coteaches a course on outdoor education at Prescott College, where he got his undergraduate degree. The other five days, he hikes, bikes, climbs, runs, hangs out with friends, and cooks food from the health food store, on a twoburner propane stove in his van. Life’s uncomplicated. I can often hear Thoreau’s words when Colin opens his mouth: “The cost of a thing is the amount of life exchanged for it …” Like me, he has a relationship with resources—probably more intimate than my own. For example, when I offered to give him some beginning Spanish CDs and a battery-operated player, he didn’t accept the player because he didn’t want to consume batteries.
Although he owns and highly values a pickup truck with a camper shell, recently its battery has lost its charge because he doesn’t want to buy and consume the gas. His friends, who also live in and around the house, likewise refuse to associate with their vehicles. After all, the shops, parks, and institutions of downtown Prescott are at most a ten-minute walk from where Colin lives, and his sturdy, custom-built bicycle can take him anywhere else: to the mountains, to outlying components of Prescott College campus, even to the Grand Canyon and back (about a 200-mile ride). So the truck’s primary use, at least for the winter, is storage—a Tuff Shed on wheels.
One of the trip’s highlights occurred after we’d set up camp in an isolated spot in the Coronado National Forest—just north of Sonora, Mexico. “Have you ever made fire without matches?” he asked me. I seemed to remember trying to, back at scout camp … He stood beside the ten-foot-tall flower stalk of a sotol cactus—a relative of the agave and yucca species—and cut a four-foot section of the lightweight wood, about the diameter of a cucumber.
He dissected another section of the stalk into a short, flat platform. He cut a notch into one edge of the platform as an exit ramp for coals, just as he’d done at many outdoor workshops on backpacking expeditions. After assembling a tinder ball out of dried grass roughly in the shape of a bird’s nest, he went to work: holding the platform in place with his foot, he created friction by boring a hole into it with the sharpened stalk. His intensity and focus were awesome. I wanted this effort to be successful, just as so many before me did—so many humans, hungrier and colder than me, hoping for fire.
After ten minutes or more of intense effort, a tiny coal slid down the notch into the pile of sawdust. He grabbed the ball of dried grass, carefully dropped the coals into it, and softly breathed fire into the tinder. When the tinder nest began to crackle, he placed it on a large, flat rock, adding a few little sticks to the newborn fire. In that moment, I felt a little less like a father and a little
more like the son of many fathers. As we walked back to our campsite, I pondered the idea of forefathers; we consider two thousand years ago to be ancient history, yet it’s really just fifty (forty-year) generations distant. Fifty fathers and mothers who taught their children about fire, food, and fairness—or else failed to. Ponder this, if you dare: What will our world be like in another fifty (quick) generations?
Unconsuming—A New Olympic Sport?
I don’t mean to imply that our descendants will need to make fire by friction or hunt javelinas with spears, but with any luck, they will be far more skillful at minimizing their impact on planetary resources and the living systems that contain them.
In Radical Simplicity, author and peace advocate Jim Merkel describes the Global Living Project, in which seventy-five teachers, students, and activists spent six weeks tracking what a three-acre-footprint lifestyle would look and feel like. (In rough terms, a three-acre-footprint is a higher standard of living than the average citizen of India has, but with only one-tenth the consumption impact of an average U.S. citizen.) The project demonstrated that with three acres as a base of support, a person can consume enough food to remain healthy, but items like wine, beer, cheese, butter, and meat aren’t feasible, and only appeared in the more consumptive six-acre lifestyle. Likewise, air travel and transportation by taxi are not part of a three-acre footprint. Telephone use, medicine, medical insurance, small appliances, and computer use are available to the three-acre consumer, but only in small, shared proportions.3
Still, Merkel observed that participants adapted quickly to a three-acre footprint, with little discomfort. “Just like going overseas or moving to a new town, once the culture shock is over, the new life is just the new life,” he says. What if resource scarcities and rising prices begin to shrink the bloated American footprint of about thirty acres? Conceptually lopping off four-fifths of that footprint, Merkel insists, “With careful choices that reduce our mobility needs and housing size, a six-acre option could look like a typical North American lifestyle, only downsized, with less clutter and less waste.”4
