First, a note on positionality:
In case there is anyone reading this who doesn’t know me, I want to describe my positionality. I am white, cis-male, heterosexual, Canadian-American, Jewish in descent and culture, Irish by descent, possibly Anglo-Saxon by my paternal grandmother but I’m not sure, am able-bodied, and 27 years old. I am tempted to go way too in depth to describe my class background but basically I was raised middle class in Richmond, Virginia, USA, on a single parent’s income. From my mother’s income and the little bit of extra money she got from friends and family, I was able to get a decent education, always have the basics, and also got to do lots of fun things like play sports. Though my closest adult family members were always tight on cash or in debt my whole childhood, they held onto homes they bought that then accrued equity, and were eventually able to leverage this to become more secure financially. Via better financial habits, increased income, and marrying someone with a higher income and savings, my mother has increased her personal equity and financial security substantially. So at this point, I have a clear safety net through her. Since being an adult myself, I have tended to be very frugal, which comes easily as I have few material desires and am healthy so I haven’t needed to invest much in healthcare. I resist any form of debt-with-interest and have mostly either saved the money I have earned, or else spent it on things which were necessary or retained their value. Enamored with art making and resistant to the constraints of having a job, I have spent most of my adult life working very little and making due with very little (by American standards). I have probably never made more than $12,000 in a year, and often have made less than that. In 2020, my partner and I had few expenses (living with our parents for free), and low incomes, and were both awarded unemployment income and stimulus payments. We used this, paired with interest-free loans from my family, to purchase a very small, broken down house on an acre of land for $28,000. We learned how to build and fix and fixed it up enough to rustically live in. In 2021, my grandmother sold her house in Montreal, and I inherited 1/16th of the sale price, which equalled $53,000 USD. I used $10,000 of this to pay the rest of the loan back to my family. So I was left with $43,000. I basically still have (slightly less) than this amount of money, and this factors greatly into my personal economy. I have no mortgage and low utilities and my wants/needs remain low. Currently I have no real job, and have avoided living off savings by getting paid by my sister to babysit her kids occasionally, and recently fixing my grandmother's roof, which her insurance paid me for. Before this, I worked part time at my local library. Okay, I guess I went in-depth into my class background! It feels important given the subject matter.
Another disclaimer:
In some sections of the following bit of writing, I refer to “we” as people with “more resources' than others. So I am including myself in this group, as well as possibly, you. This “we” is a relative term and should be read with some nuance. I use it broadly and inclusively because I think too often people exclude themselves from being well off or consuming more than their fair share because they compare themselves to the richest of the rich. On one hand, it is appropriate to point out “the 1%” as villainous and problematic, but on the other hand it avoids the real privilege and responsibility that so many of us have. So, when I say “we” I am suggesting that you might consider whether you are included. If you live in a huge house and drive a fancy car, you are included. Even if you don’t live in a mansion and drive a fancy car, maybe you have some savings or own a house. So, compare yourself to those who live paycheck to paycheck, and have no equity. And even if you live paycheck to paycheck, consider how much resources are needed to provide you with the lifestyle you have, and compare that with most of the world which gets along with far less. There are more than 500 million people in the world who live very poorly on less than $2 a day, because they have no other option. If you don’t feel my statements of “we” include you, then I trust your analysis. I just think it's good to do that analysis.
An Intro:
The following is an attempt to synthesize a bundle of research and analysis I have been doing since last Spring. This research and analysis has led me to make some immediate changes in my life, as well as move towards more structural life changes that will allow me to better embody and act out my beliefs on a day to day basis. It is important to me to be clear on my analysis on basic issues, allow that to define my ethics, and then to live out those ethics to the best of my abilities. Because of my personality, skills, privileges, and age, this embodiment has played out in the realm of my day to day life. How I move about the world, how my household functions, i.e. my lifestyle, has become the area in which I am focused on living out my ethics. I do not have a career in which my ethics are engaged daily, and much of my skills and attention already have to do with household economy. I think that this focus is an essential piece of creating a better world for all of us, but it isn’t everything. My hope is that one thing I can do is to model this lifestyle and make it known as possible and beneficial, and that if I am on the right track, others might follow along. All of these ideas and actions are characterized by a positive, energizing force of doing things I am passionately interested in. I am not depriving myself of things because of a sense of guilt or self-consciousness. This makes my actions emotionally sustainable. I hope to model this as well. My goal in articulating these ideas is not to shame people into changing their behaviors but rather to provide an explanation for my own, so my choices can be respected if they are worth respect, be challenged if they are flawed, and maybe inspire others who might have similar passions, interests, and capacities.
A final disclaimer:
I have been diving into this stuff for only about half a year. I write partly to put down my beliefs coherently for myself, and partly for others who might be curious, but I don’t pretend to be an expert, nor am I dogmatic in my convictions. There are many who know much more on these subjects than myself. And, my mind is always changing. This is where my thoughts are now, and though I have been rigorous in forming them, I am limited by my own capacity/time/perspective. I might, in a year, think everything I’ve written here is foolish. You never know.
The Main Ideas:
Every single person I know on a personal basis, including myself, uses more resources than the Earth can sustain forever. We do this mostly through using existing systems to keep our homes at ~72 degrees year round, driving often and/or driving long distances occasionally, flying in planes, refrigerating our food with existing systems, cooking with existing systems, eating (a lot) of meat, eating non-local or non-seasonal food, using excessive packaging, using non-recyclable or non-compostable packaging, not recycling or composting or reusing items when it would be beneficial to do so, fouling drinking water with poop- cleaning that water- and then bringing it back to our homes to drink/foul with poop again, keeping our water hot with existing systems and using quite a lot of hot water (ie washing clothes after a single use), drying clothes with a dryer rather than air drying, buying items that we don’t need or won’t use for very long, using electronics like phones and televisions more often than is necessary or even healthy, and probably some other things I haven’t thought of, or am yet to be aware of.
Using more resources than the Earth can sustain forever means that resources have dwindled/will dwindle over time, leading to less resources to go around. Within a market economy, this means that those with more resources already (us) will be able to leverage our economic power to continue to get the same amount, or likely more resources than we already have. So, in the short/medium/maybe even long term, many of us or our descendants will consume as much or more than what we do now, meanwhile those with less will make do with less and less. And those who have the least cannot have less without simply dying, so they will/do die.
This is already happening. We have already peaked in terms of production of major resources such as oil, fish, and land being farmed. Additionally, resources tend to become harder and harder to get over time, if they are taken at unsustainable rates. We get the easiest oil first, and the hardest to get oil last, which means that the oil we are getting now is generally much harder to get, so it takes even more resources to extract, meaning the net gain of extracting that oil goes down and down. This peak of resource production for key resources has happened recently and we are still near those peaks, but it is only going down from here. So, we are at the beginning of the trajectory detailed above. The market economy is already past, at, or near its limits for what it can deliver, and our population is still growing, and huge amounts of people are extremely impoverished.
And- our global and national economy, how we strategize about it, how we plan for it, what our stated goals are, is to have as much growth as possible all the time. A good market economy is one that grows a lot. A failing one is one that grows too little, a bad market economy doesn’t grow at all, and a shrinking market economy is terrible. This means that those who already have enough, or too much, must keep consuming not only as much as they do already, but more.
Perhaps an ideal version of this continued growth would be that it could be based on increased consumption by those who have very little at this point. The poorest could consume more, fueling the growth of the global economy, and bringing their standards of living up in the process. Unfortunately this vision, which is the fairest and most equitable form of a growth-based mindset, falls apart on many levels.
Within our current system and mindset, this isn’t happening, because the market will allocate resources to the highest bidder, i.e. those who already have more money to pay for things, i.e. richer people. And this richness includes middle, and in some cases working class people in rich countries who for example buy food exported from countries where many people are starving. So, the poorest of the poor are stuck not being able to compete in the global market and thus not raising their standards of living through market growth. Notably, the growth based economic mindset cuts across all classes in rich countries in the form of social mobility, where the richest seek to maintain or increase their vast amounts of wealth and power, the middle class people seek to become upper middle class, and working class people seek to (understandably) upgrade to a more comfortable middle class lifestyle. In a growing global economy, the stated goal of economists and politicians, this mobility is largely achieved. But the poorest of the poor are left out of the game.
But anyways, let’s assume that all these socially mobile people accepted the current [western/developed] definition of a middle class lifestyle, essentially halting their own consumptive growth at that point and for upper or upper middle class people, reducing their consumption to that point. In that case, could the resources be allocated to the poorest in the world, allowing global growth to continue via their consumption? Unfortunately this would still, in the medium/long term be unsustainable, given that even at our current point we have in about 150 years of intense growth reached our peak production of many key resources. With the world population likely to hit 10 billion by 2050, copy/pasting our middle class over-use of resources onto all those people means we would be running out of resources faster than ever.
A lot of focus is put on energy sources as the answer to our problems. Perhaps the earth could accommodate a middle class lifestyle for all if we could harness the power of the sun (for example) rather than relying on oil, coal or natural gas.
The first issue with this hope is that it is just a hope. The technologies we currently have which use abundant energy sources like solar and wind are not able to support that goal because they are too costly, and use too much energy/resources to begin with and are too intermittent to supply the constant energy needs of said lifestyle. We are betting the well-being of billions of people on the hope that technology will improve enough (and quickly enough) to deliver them the lifestyle we want to maintain ourselves.
I am still learning what the limitations are of nuclear power, and to a lesser extent hydro power. I think proponents of nuclear power would say the technology already exists to provide for energy needs with that power source, and that it isn’t just a hope. Detractors point out safety issues mostly as far as I can tell. As for hydro, I think its limitations are geographic and it massively destroys local ecologies. But, I will leave those questions open for now, partly because of the following point:
There are other limits to growth that must simultaneously be addressed and are similarly difficult to imagine solving, like food production. Major areas of food production like the amount of productive farmland and fish being caught, have peaked already. How will we feed 10 billion a typical American middle class diet if we aren't already feeding everyone even the most basic diet with what we have?
The next issue is that at the hypothetical point mentioned, 10 billion living as we do now, would we then be content to stop growing? If not, how would we then supply more?
So, do we really want to attempt to bring the whole world up to a standard of living we currently enjoy, based on the hope of quickly finding an endlessly abundant and consistent energy source using the means of a finite planet to do so, whilst also trying to provide food on a scale massively higher than what we do now, having already reached the peak of many of our food production systems, also hoping that at that point we would then cease growth altogether?
The answer is no, that's completely ridiculous! Yet I wonder how many of us operate with that underlying assumption. I know that in a passive way, I did for my entire life. The “hopeful” narrative I had in mind was that if we had the right technologies and social programs, we could bring everyone to the level of consumption I took to be normal. I didn’t assume that would happen, but I hoped it would. But I realize now that this is basically an impossibility, not because of political realities but because of the laws of physics. It’s a fallacious goal.
So what is the alternative? In terms of resource use, it is up to everyone to change their lives so that they don’t use more resources than the Earth can sustain forever. We must create and execute a standard of living which is altogether different from our idea of a middle class lifestyle. We have to use drastically less than we do in all the ways mentioned in the first paragraph of this section.
The good news is, a healthy, happy life is possible without using more resources than the Earth can sustain forever. There are people who have explored versions of this lifestyle, both in pre-industrial times and in our era. You can live clearly within the resource-budget of our earth while still having a comfortable temperature in your house, good (even better) food, hot showers, electricity, internet, and improved social connection. Communal living, less electricity use, more temperature fluctuation inside, less meat, and much less high speed, long distance traveling would probably be necessary. But our current technologies and energy resources, if used carefully, are still quite amazing and abundant and can provide a good life, probably better in many ways, then the ones we currently have. And is it worth having our houses exactly at 72 degrees, driving wherever we want whenever, and never turning off our computers at some point in the day to do something else, to doom massive amounts of civilization to extreme poverty and eventual extinction? Of course not! But we don’t think about it in these terms.
I will, in my next writing, go into detail about what this equitable, sustainable lifestyle could look like. For now I want to say that it isn’t an endless pit of self-denial and deprivation. It would look different in different climates and contexts but it has finite limits and clear targets. The point isn’t to shrivel up and die. It’s just to use the right amount. And that amount falls into an area which includes a very good life for all people. Though the amount of resources used, or income level might compare to some levels of poverty we know in our system, it is incorrect to imagine that using less equates with those lifestyles. Since our system is built on overconsumption and allocation of resources to those who already have more resources, there are many tiers of poverty in our society that result in unhealthy, unhappy lifestyles. When you reimagine your personal, local, and interconnected global economy to allocate resources based on basic needs and decent quality of life, then using much less does not mean living in misery. I know these are just vague words. I am writing them quickly now to ward off the assumptions that might be drawn when I talk about, for example, working class people in America using less. That idea does not mean to suggest that people who are already struggling to live in a terrible system, would then have to do the same but with less. It’s to imagine that they could work less, consume less, and on the whole have much better lives than they might have now. .
And I will again point out that equitable and sustainable resource use is just one small piece of a massive puzzle of change. The premise here is that our system is inherently flawed and has led to massive inequality and levels of misery which will only increase as resources get more limited. The change needed is humungous, and involves new economic and political systems. So, changing your personal lifestyle away from being a beneficiary and proponent of this system from a resource-use perspective will not solve all our problems. But it's a very important angle, and worth considering deeply. Partly because it is perhaps more achievable than we think.
I have not yet mentioned climate change, which is another huge problem related to our economic system and over-consumption. I leave it out up until this point because for me it is more complicated than the issue of resource use. It is easier to understand the concept that if there is only so much resources, then using too much will lead to scarcity for others. I also feel the problem of climate change has become confused and tired for many. A narrative I feel running beneath it is that you have to choose between saving the Earth or helping people, as if those are different things. Climate change comes with an imagery of melting ice caps and intense hurricanes, somehow acquiring a flavor of detachment from “real human issues”. This is a false connotation but I feel it nonetheless. So, yes, our economy of endless growth and our unsustainably consumptive lifestyles are releasing massive amounts of CO2, and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, warming the planet with catastrophic effects, like killing 60% of animal populations since 1970, sea levels rising, increased frequency of drought and wildfire, and all the political consequences of this. This is all in addition to the issues I started out with. For me it underscores what I’ve already said.
I have read some articles recently that seem to accept all of the main points I am articulating but feel it is a strategic error to voice or write about these ideas too bluntly. I think many of those who have long accepted some of these realities have decided it better not to talk about them because it overwhelms people and turns them off from making any changes at all. I respect that opinion very much, and am trying to bring it into my own way of thinking and communicating. Having read these articles it makes me wonder if it's counterproductive for me to share this writing.
But, I think there is some use in voicing these points, at least some times. Personally, I felt disempowered and disengaged from any kind of progressive goals until I read a more cohesive and dire account of things. It didn’t inspire me much to ask that I recycle this or compost that, to get a more fuel-efficient car, etc, when I only had vague notions that it might do a little to reduce global warming and thus change climate patterns, and then help some people and ecosystems in that way. When I realized that even my relatively humble (in American terms) lifestyle is massively overusing resources, to the detriment of those with less, and that there are systems that have already been worked out to make a lifestyle that is sustainable, and that this new lifestyle actually sounds wholesome and nourishing, then I felt inspired. So I hope some others might feel that way too.
But for those of you who are overwhelmed or read these things and feel helpless and guilty, I am sorry and I don’t think you should feel bad about your life because of the amount of resources you consume. It is how our system is, and it would take a lot of effort to change how we relate to that system. It is emotionally unsustainable to try to deny yourself your desires or needs on an ethic of self-deprivation for the sake of distant others. We need to find it in ourselves to align our ethics and our desires so that it feels good to do good. For some that might never mean giving up flying in planes, for example. That’s ok. Like I said earlier, this is just a piece of the puzzle and there is so much that needs to be done that doesn’t concern the lessening of resource use by those who use too much. Probably there are some who would find themselves unable to do amazing, necessary work if they were also changing their lifestyles to be sustainable. We just need to strive for that alignment of good feeling and good doing, for the betterment of ourselves and each other. And so again, I trust your assessment of these things, I just am adding some of my own ideas to that assessment.
I think my next post will outline the systems that have been worked out for creating a wholly sustainable and equitable lifestyle. Stay tuned!
This was a pleasure and joy to read. I am also always changing my mind. Love the approach. I think your thoughts in the second to last paragraph were profound. Sustainable change (and influence) has to be about an exchange of pleasures. We’re meant to live for pleasure. I think that often the most deeply satisfying ways to live are hidden from us in 2023; and few have the time to dissect every aspect of their existence. Other thinkers have to do that and then market good ideas (with integrity) to the general public. This is how the engine of culture has always moved along. Someone had to convince farmers’ wives that Crisco was better than pastured butter. Now we must do the same in reverse. Anyways I’m soaking in some chlorinated city water after a long day of enjoying nature 🙃. Will respond more later. Thanks for sharing!! I’m honored to be included.
I love this from beginning to end! Your willlingness to write when you know your thought process is not done, and the clarity with which you distill your understanding here was very helpful. I’d never considered the « fallacious goal » of redistribution, and appreciate your blunt putting it out there that we all have to reduce. While I knew the latter, I like the concreteness of how you explain it. Your bluntness, for me, is helpful in laying things out.
That said, I understand the tendency to guilt or overwhelm, when thinking « can I do this myself? » and knowing what one does falls short. To live wity the dissonance is very challenging. I absolutely loved what you wrote near the start, that because your material needs are minimal , doing good (in this way) feels good, and is therefore sustainable. I think you’ve hit a nail on the head there. To find a sustainable way of life that doesn’t feel depriving. I’m lookin go forward to next reading your ideas on that!