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This makes us less happy, in the end, not more. He thinks there are solutions that will allow us to live even happier lives by consuming less, not more. Up to a certain point, more money make people happier. And that is so, even if population stops growing. For most of human history, "more" and "better" have been pretty much the same when it comes to the things we want.
I found this book deeply disturbing, but I think McKibben is right about the problems he identifies. Many of us are long past that point. McKibben, however, is not so pessimistic. I sincerely hope that he is right, and that more people at least listen to what he has to say. And, finally, our lifestyle is less and less sustainable. While this has worked for a while, it cannot work forever.
Even today, a very large number of people live in poverty, and their main priority is more -- more food, more clothing, more medical care, more things. McKibben starts with this observation, but then he moves further. The demand for oil -- and other limited resources -- will grow spectacularly as some of those in poverty start to adopt some of our way of life. For them, "more" would still be "better." But, for many of us, we have long ago passed the point where "more" is the same as "better." Every study that has looked at the correlation between wealth and happiness finds the same thing. Our food supply, for example, is highly dependent on cheap oil. We are social creatures, and living alone in massive houses, traveling in separate cars and the other things money tends to buy these days tend to isolate us from other people.
After a certain point, however, more money stops making us happier. According to McKibben, our wealthy modern lifestyle is actually starting to make us less happy.
He inspires while he educates, and ultimately leaves the reader feeling more empowered by the relevance of his or her own choices than overwhelmed by the impossibility of change. While one can't help but feel that the cat is out of the bag on this, and may never go back in, McKibben does an admirable job of highlighting the potential power of a slow, gradual shift away from the growth paradigm. This book is both interesting and enjoyable. In questioning a fundamental premise of our economy and modern society- that perpetual growth is good, desirable, and necessary- McKibben aims high.
McKibben provides a host of examples and contemplation on the hidden costs and the need for sustainable, local, community based economic models. In part my slowness in taking it on had to do with the recession, having to work hard enough already to stay solvent and not wanting to focus on those problems, and a reluctance to maybe look at what is hidden beneath our current economic trends. Possibly I should have called the Coast Guard. Give it a few years later and the entire project would likely be done over again at an even higher cost. on a test flight of an early prototype it sunk off the south shore of Long Island. On the surface it makes sense that we would want to pay less for more, or for just enough, but once the public spotlight on a project is gone, once a project goes into contract there are a whole host of "hidden" costs. that fueled the last economic bubble). When I read this book I kept reading passages that made me desire to buy more copies and send to specific of my friends as McKibben brings up so many issues that I have heard expressed regarding the need for a sustainable human built-environment, as well as sustaining the resource of traditional trades.Preservation of old buildings, and the people who practice the craft of historic preservation, is not solely about a near-religious fixation on ancestor worship.
These are costs that are in the interest of various players, particularly the ones who receive the windfall, to want to keep hidden. There are techniques of manipulation and negotiation that one learns as in any profession.None of this low-bid outrage has much to do with Bill McKibben's book, least ways not much on the surface. McKibben in one passage talks about local forest harvests and what some may call "alternative" building technologies that re-jigger the mass production economics in the building industry (think home building industry, and was it not the home building industry, mortgages etc. And yet, post-Katrina one of the problems encountered was the tendency of sheetrock to get black mold (unlike with plaster, and who knows how much of the sheetrock came from China and may contain poisons)., or the replacement of exterior doors or windows with the latest mass-manufactured big-box substitute. The name of the game is to bid low, which assures getting the project, then fight for change orders on every single discrepancy that can be fought over. It is also about not discarding the embedded energy and resource of the existing built environment, and a conscientious understanding of how most optimally to preserve that previously expended use of energy resources, and it is this perspective that the practitioners of traditional trades embody in a collective knowledge. To bring these people together to share in their knowledge is to build a sustainable community toward a durable future.You can paint it GREEN if you so desire, but it is so much more than choice of a color pallet."Consider the most influential new program on television in the last decade, Survivor, which ushered in the reality show craze. One can bend the language to create a myth of self-reliant individualism, but it remains just that, a myth.One of the things that I hear, and feel, is that a long-term sustainable economic recovery cannot be obtained if we continue to push toward "progress" in the same manner as got us to where we are now, and that a future economy will need to be different, will need to be more communal.
There is one thing that comes out to me very strongly in the current economy, and that is that healthy community, connections, relationships, networking is vital to our personal survival. This book sat on the corner of my work desk for more than a year before I finally picked it up. Contractors who master the low-bid game also master the change order process. and I mean this in the sense that not every home needs to be a McMansion, and not every McMansion needs three cars and a speed boat too large to trailer behind their SUV.
Unfortunately nobody rises by their own efforts, they rise by the efforts of the community that selects and supports them to rise. What I come away with is looking at the immediate lives around me, my own included, and a desire to figure out how to make sensible adjustments toward a sustainable business model and life. to increase local labor (decentralized, potentially in work teams, as in communal and/or barter exchange) and in the end come out not only less expensive in the long-range (avoidance of long-term debt and usury) and often with materials that can be replenished within one human's lifetime.Regardless what one believes about climate change it is fairly obvious that humans are running out of resources as populations increase, and as emerging 'growth' populations take on a rapidly expanding conversion of non-renewable energy resources -- but what is not so easily noticed is the hidden costs of our state of mind, of the ferocity of our individualism, our demand that an individual has a right to rise to the top "by their own efforts". Along with its uncountable offspring, it operates on the premise that the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone else goes away and leaves you by yourself with your money"And then we have the father of balloon boy.Can one say that Richard Heene and his family is not living out the American dream, or soon to be nightmare, in a sort of modern morality play of Everyman as reinforced by our mass-news media.I have been building a UFO out of cast iron for many years now.
That is a bit of what McKibben talks about, the relationship of hyper-individualism, the uninhibited pursuit of number-one as opposed to the common good, and posits this social relationship against a backdrop of a closed-earth system with a limitation on progressive growth, and a limitation on the resources of energy, and a strain on the natural environment that human life itself is dependent upon.Something that I picked up on in New Orleans post-Katrina is that the historic structures that survived tended to be built not only in survivable areas, but with local materials (cypress for example, plaster made with burnt oyster shells for another) that were understood by the local building culture to be appropriate, but also that the local building culture had been influenced by centuries of French experience in Equatorial and tropic climates. I say this as the largest change order I was ever involved in manipulating, from the contractor side, was $2.5M and it had more to do with bureaucratic incompetence than it had to do with necessity. Or possibly the answer to capture maximum broad-band exposure is more gas and we purchase more better duct tape.After many years of working in the construction industry I am often struck, and a bit outraged, at the prevailing public opinion that the low bidder on a project, particularly one paid for by taxes, is the least cost and the most efficient. It makes for a cantankerous work environment.
This sort of thinking seems to me to be the basis for Deep Economy.McKibben's work is both bleakly terrifying and hopeful at the same time. Let me start by saying that I'm not an environmentalist. That being said I was transfixed by Bill McKibbens vision in this book. In short - why buy fruit from 2000 miles away when you can find it free (or cheap) in your own back yard, or perhaps your neighbors.
Anyone willing to crack this book open will be rewarded with a renewed vision. We each have the power to affect our own community by participating in a local lifestyle which will have the bonus effect of reducing our footprint on the world. In the seemingly lifeless trade city of Yiwu inhabited by millions of products but few true souls we are given a window into the emptiness of American consumerism punctuated by sales slogans in broken English. In the highly literate and well educated yet financially poor city of Kerala we see that a great community does not require high finance - just the dedication of the populous.
You can't build a daily relationship with a farmer on the other side of the country but you can do so with someone in your community. He shows us time and again that more is not necessarily better. I believe that this world is here for our enjoyment. The juxtaposition of the modern view of successful economy against the rich community found in the 'third world' shows just how diverse McKibben's experiences are.
Additionally, you don't even know if the guy way out there has a family but the one next door might have a kid who could use your kids hand me downs. He says what I have always believed - the best life is one derived locally: it helps not only the environment but enriches our social and emotional connectedness as well. The farmer 2000 miles away doesn't know or care when you get laid off or sick but the one next door might cut you a deal in hard times.
While not a left-leaning, Green Californian, I found his reasoning quite compelling on why I should buy local and begin to start asking stewardship questions like, "at what greater cost (to the earth or to exploited people, etc). Armed with stories about the growing farmer's markets phenomena, community radio, urban gardens and the 180 degree turn Cuba made in reinventing itself as a farming country (to name a few), McKibben provides us with story after story of what localization could look like in the 21st century without sounding like he wants us to sell our houses and join the Amish. am I getting this lobster from the restaurant, this tomato from Safeway, or this book from Wal-mart." And so by asking a whole new set of questions, McKibben offers a consumeristic America a wonderful gift: the call to begin thinking interdependently and to begin asking if MORE really does mean BETTER.So whether you're left, right, or just a hanging chad, this book will make you think about what makes you happy and how you fit into the whole of humanity. I had no idea what to expect going into this book, and I must say that I feel all the wiser for reading it. McKibben gives a wonderfully, refreshing alternative to globalization than fellow writer, Thomas Friedman, offers in The World is Flat: instead of pushing for greater innovation and being ok to the sound of globalization's inevitability, McKibben makes a prophetic call for a return to localization and community for the sake of the future of our world and for the sake of our personal happiness.
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