Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Bingo. That’s a major reason why we consume more than “enough”: because of the excessive and shoddy ways we try to satisfy our needs. Our culture has been clobbered by advertising, peer pressure, defective economic policies, and the encoded emotions of fear, insecurity, and doubt. In addition, we’re programmed to believe that natural ways of meeting needs are inferior, though a sizable chunk of our economy is beginning to question that programming. “Alternative” health and wellness practices—many of which have been around for thousands of years—are coming back into the mainstream. For example, many insurance companies now pay for chiropractics and acupuncture. Organic food—which we’ve eaten for 99.9999 … percent of our time as a species—is becoming normal or at least acceptable once again. People are beginning to actually understand what their bodies need, to feel healthy and content.

  Commenting on the Max-Neef model, Terry Gips, president of the Alliance for Sustainability, says, “The good news ecologically is that it is possible to actually have more satisfaction with less stuff, because it’s not the materials and energy that provide satisfaction, but the degree to which basic needs are met.” Gips is a longtime advocate of sustainability who uses the Max-Neef matrix of needs in workshops and presentations to demonstrate how we often miss the mark, remaining dissatisfied. “It’s a great tool for helping people find shared values,” says Gips. “I used Max-Neef’s ideas in a design workshop for a $2.7 million renovation of a Minneapolis church. Our discussion about the interrelationship of needs resulted in a space that people love to use for meetings, that’s easier for custodians to clean, that has better lighting, and that has operable windows for greater comfort and participation.”5

  By choosing more appropriate satisfiers for each of Max-Neef’s nine fundamental needs—subsistence, protection/security, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity/meaning, and freedom—we can be happier with less consumption. One of the reasons why is that choosing the most complete satisfier fulfills more than one need at a time. We also pay attention to the needs of other people and the environment, becoming something grander than an ego in the process.

  Fundamental Human Needs Matrix, by Manfred Max-Neef

  For example, feeding a baby with formula meets nutritional needs fairly well (depending on the brand); but breast feeding, in addition to giving the baby better nutrition, also supplies a mutual need for bonding, affection, and building the infant’s self-esteem. Similarly, a prescription drug may treat the symptoms of an ailment, but preventive health approaches are more likely to treat the cause of the illness (such as stress, or unhealthy diet). They meet the human needs for participation (e.g., in one’s own health) and for understanding (e.g., how nature works). They also avoid bizarre side effects like my mother experienced: She took a drug to reduce cholesterol that also reduced her ability to use her hands effectively.

  When needs remain unmet but we reach for wants anyway, we leave gaping holes in our lives. “Any fundamental need that is not adequately satisfied reveals a human poverty,” writes Max-Neef. Some examples are: poverty of subsistence (due to insufficient income, food, shelter, etc.), of understanding (due to poor quality of education), and of participation (due to discrimination against women, children, and minorities). We face similar poverties throughout our economy. There are far too many side effects in the way we eat, sleep, form community, create housing, and get around. Basic needs remain unmet because of bad choices, design flaws, and inefficiencies. As a result, we feel physically and psychologically deficient, which we try to overcome by consuming more defective goods and services. When we relearn how to meet fundamental needs well, many of the wants will just wither away, because we’ll feel more self-reliant, and more content.

  Do You Get What You Need? Sex, Sleep, Food, and Water

  Max-Neef considers the way a culture meets needs a defining aspect of that culture. This is a key concept for the themes in this book, because many of the ways we meet needs are flawed, superficial, and based strictly on that abstraction known as currency; on quantity rather than quality. Because individuals learn behavior culturally, our challenge is to reshape our culture to fit reality.

  We are so accustomed to buying our lives that we forget we can meet many needs naturally. For example, frequent sex (once or twice a week) has been proven to deliver various physical benefits such as 30 percent higher levels of immunoglobulin A, which boosts the immune system. A large percentage of the advertising that bombards us capitalizes on the benefits and compulsions of sex. Although it’s true that even a prostitute could supply some of the physical benefits, to satisfy basic needs for affection, trust, and emotional connection, only real intimacy will work. It is for this reason that men who have a significant bond with another person are half as likely to have a fatal heart attack. And studies have shown that the hugs that accompany a close relationship dramatically lower blood pressure and boost blood levels of stress-reducing oxytocin, especially in women. When researchers asked couples to sit close to one another and talk for ten minutes, then share a long hug, they measured slight positive changes in both blood pressure and oxytocin.6;7

  What about sleep, another of Max-Neef’s subsistence needs? It’s clear that various substances in our familiar, hyperactive lifestyle often sabotage sleep, which we compensate for with sleeping pills. Our bodies become battlegrounds of conflicting biochemical responses. Contentedness is not really a possibility when we’re exhausted from sleeplessness, but vulnerability and loss of self-esteem are.

  Habits clash with biology when we eat large meals before going to bed. We need about three hours to digest dinner but sometimes, especially in European cultures that dine late, we are still digesting as we try to sleep. The average American consumes about two to three cups of coffee a day. But many also consume two or more caffeinated sodas and a little chocolate, too, resulting in sheep counting, mantra reciting, and compulsive snacking in the wee hours. And caffeine isn’t the only stimulant that screws up our sleep; although alcohol relaxes us when we drink it, it later becomes a stimulant. Once again, moderation is the way to go. Beyond “enough” is the “too much” that keeps us awake. (The word “moderation” doesn’t apply to tobacco, another substance that disrupts sleep, because its main appeal is that it’s a legal addiction. As someone who was once briefly addicted, I say, Just don’t go there!) We sometimes think a given problem is all in our head, but often it’s in our endocrine system or stomach. If we are dehydrated, our body feels a sense of alarm—“something is wrong”—which can also disrupt sleep. (But the right time to drink water is in the morning and afternoon, not evening).

  According to psychologist Richard Friedman, it’s quite normal to wake up in the middle of the night, as many humans and animals do routinely. It’s even physiologically normal to be awake for an hour or two. The problem comes when the “gears” begin to turn and we become increasingly conscious; thoughts begin to focus on what needs to be done tomorrow and what we did wrong yesterday. I keep a good magazine by the bed for when that happens, and I’m learning that after a half hour of article reading, I fall back to sleep without any negative consequences. If I get less sleep than usual, I make sure to exercise the next day and stay away from processed food. I don’t feel sleep deprived, and I sleep fine the next night. It really helps to know that nature will provide the sleep we need.

  In the United States, we eat slightly more than a ton of food a year (and it sometimes seems like a large portion of that is consumed on Thanksgiving Day). But how much of that food supplies nutrients our bodies and psyches can actually use? Does the American diet really meet our needs? The federal government’s Food Guide Pyramid recommends a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts; and low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt, and added sugars. But to the average American, it’s too boring to eat vegetables (because they typically aren’t fresh) or to learn what exactly a trans fat is. So this average Ame
rican simplifies—and companies like Kraft, ConAgra, and PepsiCo are delighted to help.

  Says anthropologist Katharine Milton, “A wild monkey eats better than Americans do!” The monkey has a diet richer in essential vitamins and minerals, fatty acids, and dietary fiber than the more intelligent (ahem) Homo sapiens americanus. Milton followed monkeys through tropical rain forests with plastic bags, picking up the food they dropped from the trees. “They would bite off the tips of leaves and throw the rest away,” says Milton, who analyzed the leaves and found that the tips were especially nutritious. If Americans followed a similar strategy, would we eat the cardboard box a fast-food burger comes in, for the fiber, and throw away the fatty burger and white bread bun? Research now pouring in about excessive fat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates tends to suggest that. Even meat, an American institution, is coming under fire. In today’s news, federal health officials have approved the spraying of bacteria-eating viruses onto meat and poultry products just before they are packaged. This approval is well intentioned, since meat infected with the listeria bacteria does infect an estimated 2,500 Americans every year, killing 500.8

  Yet, a more systemic problem is the way meat is produced, with a potential for contamination on a much larger scale. Forced to eat grain and beans they aren’t equipped to digest well, and housed in close quarters where disease spreads quickly, livestock are routinely injected with heavy doses of antibiotics. Mutant strains of bacteria may evolve resistance to the antibiotics, in effect making feedlots potential “bacteria factories.” A case in point is the recent, widespread contamination of spinach with a strain of E. coli that grows in the stomachs of grain fed cows but not grass-fed cows. Apparently, some of the manure got into the irrigation water of farms in the region.

  In terms of overall calories, the government’s Center for Nutritional Policy recommends from 1,600 calories for sedentary women and older adults to 2,800 calories for teenage boys and active adults; but Americans wolf an average of 3,800 calories. This tally includes two-fifths more refined grains and a fourth more of both added fats and sugars than in 1985. We’re literally consuming more than enough, eating as much for “fun” as we are for health. As with other matters concerning health and the environment, scientists can’t seem to figure out what humans should be eating. We don’t differentiate between good fats and bad, good carbs and bad, good sugars and bad. We act as if we’re carnivores, hunting ground chuck and veal cutlets like the great cats of the Serengeti hunt gazelles and wildebeests. But anatomy may tell a different story.

  “I think the evidence is pretty clear,” says cardiologist William C. Roberts, from the beefy state of Texas. “Humans are not physiologically designed to eat meat. If you look at the various characteristics of carnivores versus herbivores, it doesn’t take a genius to see where humans line up.” (He points out that while a carnivore’s intestinal tract is three times its body length, an herbivore’s is twelve times its body length, and humans are closer to herbivores. Our digestion takes place without benefit of strong acids in the intestine, as carnivores have. Herbivores (and humans) chew their food before swallowing with grinding molars, whereas carnivores rip meat in chunks with incisors and swallow it whole. Herbivores and humans get vitamin C from their diets, but carnivores make it internally.

  Although it’s not likely that most humans will suddenly decide to become vegetarian, why not pay attention to the way human bodies actually work? Why can’t we share a few great vegetarian recipes with each other and decide to eat one-third less meat, or even just a tenth less? Albert Einstein, himself a vegetarian, believed that, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” And Thomas Jefferson, who lived to be eighty-three—pretty good for his day—ate meat “as a condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” When we reduce the space allocated to billions of grazing, chewing, squealing, tail-swishing livestock (about twenty billion of them!), we’ll free space for other uses: open space or wilderness, which will make nature more resilient and humans healthier; the growing of cellulosic crops (maybe algae) for vehicle fuels; and a place for additional homes and communities, since world and U.S. populations continue to expand. With less meat in our diets, we’ll also use much less energy per capita (since nitrogen fertilizer is made from fossil fuel), generate far fewer greenhouse gases, and conserve water for more critical uses, such as drinking, sanitation, and the irrigation of fruits and vegetables.

  We’re not meeting the need for water, either. Says physician and water expert Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, “People in industrialized countries aren’t sick, they’re thirsty!” He’s documented a link between dehydration and inflammation; heartburn; back, joint, and stomach problems; digestive difficulties; blood pressure problems; diabetes; depression; stress; and being overweight. Professor Friedrich Manz of the Research Institute of Child Nutrition in Dortmund, Germany, reports that students should be drinking 20 percent more water, because dehydration also causes an inability to focus. What’s the right amount to drink? Instead of counting glassfuls, Batmanghelidj counsels, “You can tell if you’ve had enough water, because your urine will be colorless.”9 A general rule of thumb is that 20 percent of the liquids we need come from food, and, in season, I can easily get that amount with just peaches and plums.

  Why should it surprise us that our bodies require water? The human brain is 75 percent water; muscles, 75 percent; and even “bone-dry” bones are 22 percent water. Water is needed (in blood) to carry nutrients and oxygen to cells, and helps convert food into energy, remove waste, moisten oxygen for breathing, regulate body temperature, and—the grand finale—create life. But although the need for water is indisputable, the ability to continue to meet that need well is less certain. Water tables are falling throughout the world, reservoirs are filling up with silt, and our use of water is often very careless, especially when subsidies keep costs artificially low in agriculture or industry.

  But water is far from free; in my hometown, its price has jumped from $1.85 per thousand gallons to $3.85 in just the last six years. My neighbors and I feel very fortunate to have purchased water rights for our community garden in 2001—accessed from an irrigation ditch with a solar-powered pump—because our half-acre shared garden and orchard uses as much as half a million gallons of water every growing season—more than a thousand dollars of value at potable water prices.

  While each American drinks a daily four to ten glasses of water and other beverages, the amount of water our food “drinks” in the fields and processing plants is more like 2,000 gallons a day. About an equal amount is used in the United States by the power industry to cool natural gas turbines as well as nuclear cooling towers. (In the broiling summer of 2006, nuclear plants in both the United States and Europe were forced to shut down because cooling water from ponds and rivers wasn’t cool enough to ensure safety.) So really, the best ways to conserve water are to pay attention to what we eat, and to use energy efficiently. It’s also very important to use water-efficient fixtures in the home, and landscaping that minimizes water use. The 100 gallons a day that we each use in our homes can easily be cut by a third to a half by substituting efficient conveyances—in the form of well-designed fixtures, showerheads, toilets, and aerators—for resources. The need for water will only get stronger, since the global populations continue to expand, but the amount of fresh water remains exactly the same.

  Efficiency and Sufficiency

  The consumption of resources for tangible needs, such as lights, heating, mobility, food, and water, can be delivered with a higher level of ingenuity and more mindfulness about what result we are trying to achieve. When we choose the right size, the right time, and the right place for both devices and actions, saving resources becomes automatic. However, the way we meet intangible needs, such as affection, creativity, identity, and freedom, isn’t usually a question of engineering or design, but rather psychology and behavior. That makes th
em no less of a problem; if the intangible needs remain unmet, we cling to consumption and careless technologies as would-be pathways to satisfaction.

  12

  Energy Savings

  Finessing the Carbon Conundrum

  Our energy supply will become increasingly diverse, dispersed, and renewable. In time, centrally located, traditional thermal-power plants will come to be sentimentally admired, like Victorian steamships are for us.

  —Amory Lovins

  Suburbia, 2012—The microwave beeps nonstop as Eric and Margo Petrovich set the table for dinner. They’re listening to a feature story on National Public Radio about the rising costs of energy, water, and food, a topic much in the news these days. The year 2012 has been a wakeup call for the fifty-something couple whose four-bedroom Colorado home is becoming less affordable every month. They’ve talked about moving to a smaller, more efficient house—closer to their jobs, stores, parks, and theaters—with good solar orientation and insulation. But they really hate to give up their big suburban backyard, and what would they do with all the antiques they refinished themselves?

  “It’s true that roughly half of the world’s oil reserves are still in the ground,” an expert explains on the radio, “but the fact is that it’s more expensive to get these low-grade, remotely located supplies. More importantly, we need more oil than we can get, since world oil production has reached its peak and will soon begin to decline. Global demand now exceeds supply, it’s that simple; we want more than we can have. As prices rise for food, fuel, medicine, and consumer products, we are finally seeing how dependent we are on fossil fuels in agriculture, transportation, food processing, and the chemical industry … That’s why oil at a hundred and twenty dollars a barrel is having such a ripple effect on our daily lives …”