(AKA, where I get support for some of my crazy ideas.)
Voluntary Simplicity: as you might have been able to predict from the title, I loved this book. It has clean, simple writing; appropriate and credible sources; and an appealing balance of reality check and hope. The basic premise is to examine the lives of people who are living lives of voluntary simplicity; to appreciate the significance this has in a larger global context; and to present a vision for the future in which a life of voluntary simplicity can be part of a larger community effort toward meaningful, sustainable existence. Wow, this was right up our alley!
One section I especially liked contained a quote from Ghandi:
"As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you."[emphasis added] -Voluntary Simplicity, p. 32.
This really sums up our sentiments toward a lot of the changes we've recently been making. While there are many people who look at what we do and say "I could never live without [meat or paper towels or cable TV]," the truth of the matter is that it would probably be a lot less appealing to us, too, if there wasn't an alternate vision that is abundantly more attractive to us. The idea of being debt-free and able to self-determine how we spend much of our time; the opportunity to be engaged in lifework that is creative and meaningful to us; and the idea that we could die tomorrow and not regret how we've spent our time and money--these are the kinds of ideals that fuel the fact that we live our lives somewhat on the fringe. So I found that particular quote very meaningful and validating.
One of the other aspects about the book that was so interesting was the author's take on the life cycle of civilizations, which he likens to the seasons of the year: High Growth (spring), Full Blossoming (summer), Initial Decline (autumn), Breakdown (winter) (p. 166). He takes this further by saying that in a season of decline or breakdown, there are three options which face us. The first is collapse, in which people (by retreating from or denying the current circumstances) fail to change the direction of a society before it's too late. The second option is stagnation, which is actually a dynamic interplay between the forces of breakdown on the one hand, and renewed efforts by bureacracies on the other--which, however, only occur along old patterns of thought and behavior and serve merely to reinforce the status quo. The most dynamic option is regeneration, which is characterized by increased activity and creativity at the personal and grassroots level, leading to community-based innovations and a greater sense of personal involvement. It's obvious which of the three is the most desirable, and I'm encouraged to see that, ten years after the book was written, it seems like an increased number of people are using technology to connect with other like-minded individuals and form communities (even virtual ones) that are linked based on shared beliefs: ecological awareness, or homeschooling, or natural childbirth.
Along the same lines is the book The Omnivore's Dilemma. One could argue that it's more food-based than Voluntary Simplicity, which is whole-life-based, but as far as I could tell that isn't really true. A theme running through the whole book is that "everything is connected," meaning you can't separate yourself from your food or your food from where it came from. (One of the farmers he speaks to states repeatedly that "You can't do just one thing," ie, everything is interrelated.) In an era where food is inextricably tied to issues of global proportions such as climate change and ethics and dependence on fossil fuels, Michael Pollan has taken the time to trace the origins of a variety of foods (to an industrial feedlot, a corn farm in Iowa, a large-scale organic grower, and a family farm in Virginia which disdains the "organic" label but is instead intensively committed to sustainability and ethics), and what he finds is eye-opening. He also weighs extensively the pros and cons of each, considering the benefit-detriment effect on the growers, on the consumers, and on the environment. I haven't finished the book yet, but it lends support to ideas that we have instinctively felt about food and also heightened my commitment to using our purchasing power as a kind of political act. (It's also interesting how much of the book is set within miles of either my home in Iowa, or our home here in Virginia.) Coming from small-business families, as I've mentioned before, we feel a lot better spending a few more cents on something that's healthy for us and directly benefits various small operations as opposed to, say, the executives at Whole Foods.
Thinking about the origins of food and cooking most of it from scratch, for us, has also had the opposite effect on consumption patterns as does buying things in extreme bulk (ie Costco, although we do still do some of that). I've noticed that when we can get large amounts of foods extremely cheaply (ie eggs, or cheese, or bread), I tend to take a "we need to use this up" attitude-- using a little more than we need at each meal, serving bigger portions, being less careful about waste, etc. I also think that there's a certain kind of health-food consumption in our culture that encourages the mass consumption of certain foods (such as skim milk or prewashed lettuce or other "free" diet foods) to the exclusion of others, which leads to a certain numbness about what it takes to get those foods onto your plate. Instead, buying ingredients that are perhaps a little more expensive (Pollan would say more accurately priced) to begin with begets a certain carefulness with how one uses them. This morning, for example, we had eggs--but not our usual mindless 2-3 eggs apiece, since the eggs we buy in town here are more expensive than those we used to buy 5 cartons a month at Aldi. Instead, we each had an egg, homemade hashbrowns from a grated potato, a biscuit, and--because mushrooms are cheaper and healthier than sausage--the most amazing gravy I've ever had, sage and mushroom gravy, which oh my goodness you are missing out on if you don't make it SOON. Recipe to follow. We have also stopped buying juice, since it's somewhat expensive and more or less unnecessary, but we did have a number of tangelos and oranges that were getting a little wrinkly for the lunchboxes and so we squeezed up six or seven of those into two very respectable (and hard-won) glasses of juice. By diversifying what was on our plates a little bit, we were able to balance out the price of the higher-cost ingredients and also bring our consumption in line with what seems reasonable based on the effort involved to make it. Our container gardens have taught me a similar lesson, just how much effort it takes to grow, say, a single tomato or basil plant, and when one considers all that, the amount and variety of food we eat in a single day seems truly staggering and not a little miraculous. And all of that is what this book helped reinforce for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment