Earth Matters

What is Sustainable Living?

Sustainable living is living as if the earth really matters, as if the earth is really our home. Anyone can pay attention to how their life style, consumption patterns, eating habits, and attitudes effects the earth, and, in turn, make choices that benefit rather than damage natural systems. Earth Matters is dedicated to teaching others about this way of living.

We’ve been living unsustainably for a long time and it has now caught up with us. In fact, an alarming number of species are going extinct and many large ecosystems are deeply stressed. If we persist on our present course, we may suffer from immense changes in climate, air and water quality, and available fuel, food, water, and soil. Certainly the diversity, health and beauty of the earth will be deeply compromised.

Sustainable living proposes to find and choose alternatives that will assure a healthy planet and its many members, including us, its dominating specie. The key is to integrate human settlements and human needs with the vast energies, materials, and food of the natural world. We could follow a basic etiquette of only taking our share, respecting all life, and cleaning up after ourselves. I think we would then discover that a win-win scenario is not only possible, but deeply satisfying since it insures a good life for future generations.

How nature works

Living things are able to regenerate their own kind by living within the flows and limits of nature. Thus, they are sustainable. Nature does this by its very nature; machines cannot do this; and humans no longer do. If we can learn to cooperate with nature and natural systems and thus insure the perpetual regeneration of life, one would say we are practicing sustainable living. Sustainable living enjoys and insures life not just for human beings but for the entire planet.

Living organisms can’t regenerate themselves alone; they depend on a web of other organisms, circulating nutrients, and incoming energy. Together, they turn “waste” or “dead” matter into something that lives and breathes, and eventually the organisms inhabit and replenish the biosphere, six miles up and six miles down. This sphere contains many ecosystems that both compete and cooperative with one another in creative interplay. Together they manifest the miracle of life as a web of life, a process and form so complex that we are just beginning to understand and appreciate it.

A little history…

Humans used to live in greater harmony with the natural world. For most of our two million year history, innumerable and small human societies figured out how to draw their sustenance from nature and to celebrate this relationship in ritual and story. On our American continent ten million people, our native Americans, maintained a balance with nature that was only occasionally disrupted by an exploitation of another species.

We don’t need to romanticize our ancestors. They, like us, needed food and shelter and wanted comfort and security, and they figured out a practical and satisfying way of life that was anything but primitive.

Now this exploitation is commonplace; in fact, it is a necessity for maintaining our way of life. Rather than respect natural systems as our natural allies, we extract, dissect, degrade and pollute them. Thus we deny nature its ability to regenerate, and so risk the future of all life.

Humans have forgotten how to go with the flow! Ever since the agricultural revolution began 10,000 years ago and was revved into high gear by the industrial revolution several hundred years ago, we have rejected many of nature’s sustainable cyclical flows and substituted our own unsustainable linear ones.

Our linear strategies depend on constant and increasing amounts of materials and energy that we convert into our buildings, cars, and gadgets. We use a disproportionate amount and waste even more, and we claim success as long as we stay one step ahead of the Piper. This strategy has brought us unimaginable wealth, technologies, and power, but at a great cost.

Two stories for humankind…

We believe that the resources of the earth are inexhaustible and, more importantly, that they are here for us. Even today, most humans walk around with a story in our head, entitled, “The world is made for us.” We learn this story from our religious, philosophical and even scientific traditions that teach us that God, reason, or evolution privilege our species. We are naïve enough to believe this story and continuously recite it.

Nature also has a story and humans adopted it for their first two million years. It bears a title something like, “We are all made for each other.” Or in relation to humans, “We humans are made for the world.”

Tribal societies passed along the story, “We are made for the world” or something like this for two million years. During the early centuries of agriculture and human settlements the story still held. Then it gave way to an irrepressible wave of concentrated and coercive power that gave us our first cities, standing armies, and priesthoods, and eventually factories, industrialized agriculture, and TV.

If you had been born into a tribal society (and there are still humans doing just that), you would learn how to operationalize the story, you would learn how to co-exist with other beings and still lead a comfortable and happy life. You would practice, along with your tribal members, sustainable living. The nature that surrounded you could continue to regenerate itself and evolution would continue to spin out more creative solutions to the demands of changing environments.

Where did we go wrong, some theories…

Why humans turned to agriculture and population growth, and from there to cities and pollution, is a vexing issue. Why give up a leisurely life (the best estimates picture a 20 hour work week of hunting and gathering) in contact with nature for the much harder life of settled, agrarian societies? Most anthropologists no longer assume that the change was inevitable as if there was a “law of progress” in operation. Others argue that the stored food of agrarian societies did not offer more security than the astounding diversity of foodstuffs that surrounded tribal societies and were intelligently managed by them. And many other anthropologists maintain that climatic changes forced mobile groups to settle down.

I see two things at work: human imagination and the allure of power. Our self-reflective and imaginative intelligence carries within it the seeds of other worlds and other forms of human organization. It asks, What if? and projects hope and its designs on any landscape. Thus the Hinean Cave, a cave of sufficient depth and height and hospitable location, seized a tribe’s imagination 10,000 years ago and became the first human settlement.

It was initially an experiment, much like nature experiments with new variations. This experiment produced a new form of organization, one of hierarchy and this translated into power for some and subjugation for many. That is, the agricultural revolution was not about food; it was about power.

Before agriculture and permanent settlements, power was shared between humans and butterflies, men and women, gods and goddesses, or hunters and gatherers. With agriculture a new, non-productive class invented a new form of power, a linear form that required nature and its human subjects to work for it. This form of power would eventually rule the world and dictate the new story, “The world (and the little people of the world) is made for us.” We, in the 21st century, are the descendents of this tradition.

Does this mean that if we want to live sustainably, we must return to the tribal way of life? No. In fact, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. But we can imagine an analogous way of life that depends on shared power and cyclical flows. This is the task of sustainable living.

Sustainable Living for Modern People

Sustainable living is possible on several levels, beginning with the personal and moving along to one’s home, neighborhood, city, bioregion and eventually the entire biosphere. From the small to the large, each level “nests” in the larger one and gives it energy, diversity and stability, and each larger level “nests” in the smaller one giving it order and context. There are so many of these chains, interacting in infinite ways, that it is better to think of them as a web. And so we have a “web of life” fitting together, yet always changing. A web characterized as much by disorder as order.

Most of us begin living sustainably on a personal level; we choose to do it. We are not born into it, because our society is itself unsustainable.

But how? As I said, nature does this naturally; modern humans must do it intentionally, by design. We can use the same tools that created the problem, imagination and power, only this time we will design with nature and we will reconceptualize power as the ability to live sustainably within the web of life.

For instance, our ever-consuming homes can become generators of energy, storehouses of water, cleaners of waste, synthesizers of fuel, and gardens of food. Our cities can become like rain forests, reaching far beyond their boundaries with beneficial rather than malevolent influences. Our power will not be the force to control life, but the wisdom to let life regenerate itself while we take from the surplus of its abundance.

My story…

I began with small decisions and small efforts. In a short presentation a Permaculture design advocate talked about storing water for future use. I was intrigued and began to study Permaculture. I put in a no-till garden in the front yard and pear trees down the side. I knew I wanted a home surrounded by a garden, not grass. My wife and I wanted to capture our rain water and grow our own food while still living in the city. We added fruit trees, bamboo structures, and small ponds made with thin plastic and used carpet. Soon we had encircled our home with a thriving, beautiful and low-maintenance garden. We spread the word through workshops and soon had a steady flow of people attending workshops and visiting the garden. In time, we were recognized as an urban farm on our region’s annual Farm Tour.

Here are two pictures taken a decade ago, one of the house as it was and another during the first year of the front garden. What a difference!

Changing my own home deeply affected me. I began to develop environmental courses at the university where I teach part-time. In these I met many young people and adults eager to learn about ecological design and sustainable living. I then began my work with schools, first at Elon Home for Children and presently at Greensboro Montessori School. One venture led to another; now sustainable living is uppermost on my mind.

For someone else the initial effort may revolve around switching to organic and local food, or as I like to call it, slow food. I had a student for whom the deficiencies of our food system were a disturbing revelation. Little by little she made changes in her food and eating habits. She frequented the farmer’s market, asked questions, talked with friends, and eventually began to garden. Today she hopes to run a small, organic farm. Another student went through major changes during a class in simple living. He had never connected his consumption patterns with the earth, and he had never imagined that the earth would enter into his theatre training. But both happened. For his senior project he wrote and directed an Eco-Theatre of his own creation, and as a graduate he plans to take it his theatre on tour.

Each of us can begin by choosing alternatives. Each of us can begin sustainable living today by adopting a new story and by cooperating with nature in some small way. It may begin as recycling or eating organic food or simplifying one’s life. As we do so we will begin to reinvent ourselves; eventually we will meet others who are making similar changes, forming a community of life that encourages diversity, change, and abundance. In practical terms sustainable living will harmonize our concerns for a thriving economy, social conviviality, and ecological integrity. If sustainable living is to work at all it must address the whole person and the whole society. That is the task of ecological design.

For further reading:

• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
• Thomas Berry, The Great Work and The Universe Story
• Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
• Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
• David Shi, The Simple Life, a History
• Ed., Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• John De Graaf, et al., Affluenza