Imagine my great relief to find that someone else had already written down everything that was in my head, but HE spell checked it! You know, with grammar and stuff.
I wanted to take bits and pieces of it and put it here, but once I'd picked out all the good parts it ended up being nearly the entire article. (they were my thoughts after all). So instead I'll link it here. I really hope you'll take a few minutes to read it. It's quality stuff from the founder of the Viridian design movement, Bruce Sterling.
Just a few things I want to touch on though. He mentions something that over the last few years has been bothering me more and more. As Americans have many possessions, most of it junk. I don't mean junk in the literal sense, it serves some purpose, but it is not lovely, does not inspire, and basically is worth only the dollar amount that it would cost to replace it with an equivalent product.
For example: I own a digital camera. It takes good pictures, but the design is boring, looking at it doesn't make me want to take pictures. Nobody else would look at it and feel inspired. If it broke and was insured I'd only be upset at not having it until I could get it replaced. See what I mean?
I don't remember exactly when I noticed this, must have been 6 or more years ago, but it came about at the time "antiques roadshow" was at the top of it's popularity. My father had asked me why I thought this was suddenly so popular with the average man.
I remember saying "Look at your house and the house of most of the people you know. If your fully insured house burned down what would you miss?
"Some pictures.", he replied.
"Anything else?" I asked. He had to confess that there really wasn't anything else he would miss, as long as he would be paid to replace it.
And that's exactly why there's been so much renewed interest in Antiques. I think that people realize that in the end all the plastic and aluminum that they have is basically worthless outside of immediate function. People want something to be proud of, something that doesn't need upgrades to stay relevant. Something that in seeing it, holding it, showing it to others makes them feel something.
The problem with that is that making something beautiful and unique takes time and effort. One hand made rocking chair with hand carvings will cost you what 6 generic rocking chairs will cost you at Walmart. I agree with this author, don't economize! Prioritize.
His example: You can't spend too much on a bed (I disagree, you can, but only by being silly about it). You spend 1/3rd of your life there! I myself spent years sleeping on a bed that made my back hurt. Pain every night all night and most of the day after, and all because I didn't want to buy a new mattress because mine "works perfectly well! Insanity! I finally bought one and it literally made my LIFE better.
I've been thinking about this more as Christmas nears. I don't want to give out any more plastic gifts! Of course I will, because tech is fun, and sometimes that's OK. But I'm thinking more and more about gifts that can mean something. I'm the classic problem though, would love handmade awesome things, can't always afford them. I guess the answer maybe is to buy less things, but better things.
All that is great, but it doesn't really work all the time, Which brings me to the second thing he mentions that I want to talk about, what he calls "hairshirt environmentalism". From the article:
"Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.
Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life."
For example: I know a lot of people who like to eat locally. This is a GREAT idea. If you have wonderful, fresh and local tomatoes why on earth would you eat the mealy, pink rocks they sell at the Mega-mart? But what happens if you DON'T have local tomatoes? Should you go without tomatoes then? I know Hair-shirt Greens who would say yes. What about Pineapple? It doesn't grow very well in PA, but I sure love it. Can I buy that from a Mega-mart if I can't find it local?
Like he says, the Hair-shirt green lifestyle just isn't sustainable. You'll never convince enough people to live in a state of deprivation long enough for it to have any long term effect. I'm not saying that change is hopeless by any means. I'm just saying that I think the time for extremes is over. We must find a middle path, a compromise that will allow us to move forward, and convince others to come with us. It won't work if we go alone, or drag them kicking or marching at the end of the bleak, sharp stick of environmental disaster.
I love his article, I love his suggestions. What do you think? I have lots of diverse friends, and I'm always afraid of offending someone when I write something like this, but if you read it and feel hurt or think I'm crazy I want to hear it. The best thing about the Middle Path is it lets you listen to anyone.
~Meme
P.S. I've placed some examples of what I'm talking about below:
First, teapot #1
Teapot #2
Desk light #1
Desk light #2
Which category inspires you more? Which would you like to leave to someone special when your time is up?
7 comments:
I agree with you, and this fellow who knows your mind so well, wholeheartedly, and with now-admitted relief. I'm not really good at the hair-shirt stuff, so I felt guilty about not being more green... but I am already green. I like to keep and use things that are old and unique, not like fragile antiques, but as useable things. An idea I really want to implement is dishes - real hand-made dishes. Everyone in the family gets a place setting, and it's theirs and their responsibility to keep clean and whole. It's expensive, but I can imagine using those dishes in 50 years.
We don't have good local tomatoes currently. I'm going to buy some from the mega mart to make my saag paneer and tikka masala. One fear of mine, which may or may not be related is: does hair shirt green lead to insularism, and a lack of diversity? If local spice production doesn't include cinnamon or all the goodies inside garam masala or 5 spice powder or lemon grass... do I stop cooking with them? If that's the case, you can bite my metal can, to quote Bender.
I'm not entirely sure where this falls, but it feels relevant: I love my iPod touch. It was super expensive, and really difficult for me to allow myself to buy. I did end up buying it, though, and it's because of all the stuff it can hold for me. It is aesthetically pleasing, and to me it represents a freedom that I wouldn't have otherwise. I can keep music, files, pictures, reminders, communication, and with the magic of sound-reducing earbuds, I can keep the magic of uninterrupted sculpting time in it. Will I pass it down to my son? Actually probably yes, but not as an antique, just after I'm ready to do the next upgrade. Do I think my son's kids will enjoy it someday? No. But it does inspire me and is a piece of aluminum and plastic. :)
I was thinking about Apple products as I wrote this actually. I was wondering where they fell along the scale.
My conclusion is that they fell somewhere along the middle. They are a tool, one that you interact with every day. They are elegantly designed in a very minimal way. I don't really see anyone handing them down to their progeny though. Nor do I see them as beautiful enough to justify their existence outside of their functionality. If a new ipod came out you'd most likely replace yours and never miss it.
Lamp #2, please! I love it.
Sharon Astyk and George Monbiot are having an interesting discussion on this very dichotomy
Here's a link for the interested - http://sharonastyk.com/2008/11/25/george-monbiot-is-arguing-with-methat-has-to-be-good/ Sharon has a link to the Monbiot article right at the top of her post. I am pretty firmly with her on the "hairshirt" side of things, though I don't think either of us would put it that way without tongue firmly in cheek.If my shirt is hairy, it's because a cat was sleeping on it.
(disclaimer: because this is the internet and this sort of thing needs to be made explicit - I make no judgement on those who live or believe differently from me - we all make our own choices based on our own situations and worldviews, and come to our own conclusions about reality and what to do about it, and I fully accept that your conclusions can be different from mine and we can all be ok with each other. Even if that leads you to buy icky supermarket tomatoes, I still like y'all, and Helen, I'm sure your saag paneer would rock my world no matter where the tomatoes came from. So that said, here's my contrarian opinion.)
I admit to being totally confused by some of the stuff I read on Sterling's site. I understand about the value of beautiful, well-made, useful stuff - I have a low tolerance for cheaply-made tools and one of my rules in life is to never, ever buy cheap shoes. I would go into debt if I had to in order to have shoes that are good to my feet and tools that will do what I need them to do and last forever. I do not understand what he means by "hairshirt environmentalism." One aspect of buying well-made items is that they are almost always more sustainably produced than the plastic crap from China. Buying fewer nice things rather than tons of crappy things seems to be what he is advocating, and that goes right along with any "voluntary simplicity" ideas I've ever seen. I don't understand what he's standing in opposition to. The idea that life without designer handbags or Lean Cuisine or styrofoam cups or bottled water is a sad and miserable existence is just ridiculous. Not having tons of useless crap is not "deprivation." Which seems to be what Stirling's point is, but then he seems to contradict that with this "hairshirt environmentalism" nonsense.
Since I freely admit that I don't understand what he's written, what I have to say might not have to do with what he's talking about. So I'm addressing what I think is the issue here, which is the high-tech, high-energy solution to the issue of limits to growth vs low-tech, low-energy solutions. Which I think might be the point, but I got kind of lost in Stirling's essay and don't know if this is really the issue.
Even if we had the technology and the know-how for the high-tech stuff (which we do for some of it, but certainly not all) we lack the resources to head off an energy crisis. We lack resources in a big way. Our country is bankrupt - our monetary system is broken. Add that to a constricting fuel supply and incipient climate change, and the outlook for spending and inventing our way out of trouble is pretty dim. Reality has hard limits built in, and wishing them away won't make one bit of difference.
So, the question is, will you voluntarily set limits or wait around for the limits to be set for you? If you don't accept that there are limits then it makes sense to go ahead and buy the pineapples because the issues that make the pineapples problematic will soon be invented away. If you don't, then it might still make sense, because, hey, if the party's over soon, we might as well live it up while we can.
I don't agree with either of those conclusions. I don't think that we're going to invent/spend our way out of trouble, and I don't think we're looking at the End Of The World. I think we're headed for some major transformations that will take the decision of whether or not to buy the pineapples right out of our hands. (I am of course using "pineapples" as a metaphor for all the conveniences and luxuries of life in a high-energy high-tech world.)
So. I don't buy nonlocal meat or produce except on rare and special occasions. I don't own a car and walk almost everywhere. I avoid using anything that only has a one-time use (grocery bags, paper napkins, styrofoam cups, that sort of thing.) I dry my laundry on the line instead of by machine. My house is super well insulated. I avoid buying anything wastefully packaged. I buy my clothes at thriftstores and get a happy thrill from reusing something that someone else might throw away. I garden. I can food. I dry food. I compost. In short, I don't buy the pineapples.
I am trying to think of any suffering that comes from this, and it's not coming to me. There are plenty of tomatoes in the pantry, canned or dried, that there is no need for me to go buy supermarket tomatoes for saag paneer. The local ones are all still right here.
I like my life. I like setting my own limits and living with discipline. I look around for more ways I can cut back, save money, save resources, keep my supply lines short. It keeps me thinking, it keeps me connected, and it keeps me aware. I think framing this as "hairshirt" living is a strawman - if you actually talk to people who work to live within limits, I don't think you'll find a higher percentage of miserable people. Just the opposite, actually. We don't go on about this stuff because we are all smugly moral greenies who want everyone to share our suffering for the Greater Good, no matter how much other people might want to frame it that way.
Helen - I like cinnamon (for instance) and use it all the time, but if it were suddenly gone it would not impact my happiness. I think I could put together a pretty good substitute from locally sourced ingredients (hmm, sounds like a challenge - home-grown garam masala? Coriander, anise, hot peppers, and fennel are all pretty easy, and that sounds like a good start. Could do indoor ginger. Mental note for next year's garden.) (ps lemongrass can be grown in our zone - it just won't get as big) So in a sense there is an insularity with only using local ingredients, but then, how do you think all those great world cuisines got their start? They all use stuff they can grow in the back yard. I have not found that my cooking is less interesting than anyone else's. Again, just the opposite - I get really creative in the kitchen.
So, if I understand correctly, what your objection is to the word/implication "hairshirt". I think I can understand this. You're not suffering or doing this to be greener than thou, you're doing those things and making those choices because you believe they are the right thing to do and you enjoy doing them. Is this correct?
I think that for some people, your choices would be the wrong ones. I feel a little bit that it's implied that yours is the path that others should follow, but that could possibly be me simply misreading it.
At any rate, I think all shades of green are on the same path, just doing it differently. You don't ask a painter to do the accounting, and you don't ask the accountant to sculpt, but I think they' both get there in the end.
Nettle,
Yeah, isn't that lamp just awesome? It's like something out of Jules Verne.
Thanks so much for your interesting response. A few things came to mind reading it.
The first is that he's not talking about what he thinks is best for each person. Instead he's talking about what we can have as a "movement" that will actually work. Does the distinction matter? I think that he’s trying to say that environmental extremism is driving away those in the middle. I think he’s trying to say that for an environmentalist movement to take hold it has to be the Barack Obama of movements. Left, but not too far left.
You said:
"I am trying to think of any suffering that comes from this, and it's not coming to me. There are plenty of tomatoes in the pantry, canned or dried, that there is no need for me to go buy supermarket tomatoes for saag paneer. The local ones are all still right here."
Part of what he was saying is that our environmentalism needs to be sustainable. There ARE plenty of tomatoes right now, but only because there are so few people buying like you do. If the entire population of the area you live in tried to buy tomatoes locally there would not be enough to go around. You could argue then that people would begin to grow their own tomatoes, or that more people would start small farms, but recall that we already had that lifestyle, and people chose to move away from it. (Did we move away? Who made the decision? Was it conscious or unconscious?)
You also said:
"I like cinnamon (for instance) and use it all the time, but if it were suddenly gone it would not impact my happiness. I think I could put together a pretty good substitute from locally sourced ingredients"
Maybe you could, but a lot of people (myself included) don't feel that substitutes always work.
I'm sure that you could grow your own ingredients, but there are many people who could not, or who have no space, inclination, or health to spend on it. Again, he's not talking about what would be ideal for the species, he's talking about the best that we can realistically do.
Again, addressing the "hairshirt" (you'll notice that even I put it in quotes, because I don't really like it either). Average Joe does not want to hear that because his favorite food can't be sustainably grown within 100 miles that he can't have it. Again, Americans had that lifestyle, and they rejected it as soon as it was feasible (not all of them, but most). When Average Joe hears that to save the environment he has to give up many of the things he loves he immediately becomes resistant. If instead you tell him that he needs to have the things he loves a little less often, or pay a little more for them, you have a much higher chance of convincing him to change his ways. It may not restore the earth overnight to a garden like state, but it will help.
I guess in a way it has to be a bit like politics, if we really want to make a difference in the world we're going to have to take a middle road, even when we really would like to take the high road.
Deprivation is in the mind of the beholder really. It reminds me of a show they used to have on the food network. It was about some lady who would take your favorite fatty meal and remake it low fat, low carb, low calorie so you could enjoy it without consequences. It was always an unmitigated failure, because she'd take a cheeseburger, replace the bun with a pita bread slice (just one), replace the beef with tofu, replace the dressing with oil and leave the cheese off entirely. Of course, the eaters were always disappointed. I remember one man saying "It doesn't even resemble the food I liked anymore." The lady who hosted the show was always amazed that they would complain, because it was "pretty close". The thing is, I'm sure for her that it was close. I'm relatively sure that is the sort of food she ate normally anyway. My point is that she didn't help anyone. Instead of giving them some pointers like using a lower fat meat, or low fat cheese, things they could have lived with, she changed it to a point where they felt it was not worth doing, they felt deprived.
I think that the irony in all this is that if something doesn't change people may soon be forced to live that way, whether they like it or not! I think that his hope is that we'll find a measure that everyone can live with, that will either be close enough to what we need and want, or else give us a little more time to find what we need/want.
One last note:
You said:
“I like my life. I like setting my own limits and living with discipline. I look around for more ways I can cut back, save money, save resources, keep my supply lines short. It keeps me thinking, it keeps me connected, and it keeps me aware. I think framing this as "hairshirt" living is a strawman”
I don’t think that he was framing that mindset as hairshirt living. Cutting back and saving money and resources are great if you can do it without making yourself unduly uncomfortable. From what I’ve seen of your life and lifestyle I’d say that you are not living a type of hairshirt lifestyle. BUT, I think that the vast majority of Americans would feel unduly deprived if made to live this way, and thus they balk at a lot of the suggestions made. He’s not talking about leading the enlightened druids (said with real feeling) among us to environmentalism; he’s talking about the great masses as it were.
In conclusion, I think he was talking about a sustainable movement with the power to really change America and the world, while you are talking about something much more personal. I definitely think that both have their place in the world.
Thanks so much for taking the time to post that well thought out comment. I always love to hear what you have to say.
~Meme
ok, checked my mail and such at a friend's house while traveling this weekend.... My full thoughts may just becaome a blog post of my own once I get back to home-life and proper internet access.
For now, I read it, it is REALLY interesting topic, and I am falling on the middle path between the two lovely women here, (pun/irony intended). Oots of thoughts to ponder, but I tend to lean towards Meme's comment.
It's not so much about what "we" do personally...I got from the orighinal article and blog-post that there is some serious choiuces to consider and look at regarding Society-at-large being swept up after their fragile illusion of prosperity starts fading.
I would turn this around: "Again, Americans had that lifestyle, and they rejected it as soon as it was feasible" and ask it about the lamp. Once upon a time, all of our goods were made close to home, and we paid more money for better-made things. Why did we reject this? I think it's for the same reason that we've rejected growing or preserving our own food - it's easier and cheaper (for now) to go buy it at the megamart. The Walmart lamp may not be as nice and it may not last as long, but it still lights up the room. The tomatoes may not be as tasty or nutritious, but you can still make saag paneer with them. The Walmart lamp and the supermarket tomatoes have a whole lot in common. I think the same kind of analogies can be made for almost any of the "hairshirty" choices out there.
I just left a comment over on Maebius's blog going into this in more detail (hey, it's now a multi-blog conversation! maybe I need to do a blog post, too...)
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