If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves. Zig Ziglar
If there is one thing that characterizes how ‘civilized’ humans have lived this past 500 years (at least) on this planet, it is that they have treated the natural world as something inert and merely something to be used – a very anthropocentric (human centered) cosmology (see earlier post Richard’s Research on Worldviews and why he is optimistic about a transformation.) The last 150 years has seen emerging cosmologies such as biocentrism and ecocentrism valuing more the natural world, the economic and corporate paradigms that run our lives are still decidedly anthropocentric. Modern [anthropocentric] scientific cosmology needs to be valued not just for what it tells us about the universe, but for how what it tells us and informs the ways that people think and behave in wider culture – Intechopen.com. I would argue that the anthropocentric cosmology through which classical physicists and astronomers have created an image of an inert universe that dismisses the large amounts of transdisciplinary information that exists telling us of a universe that is conscious and more alive than we realize. What has this to do with how we live? Everything!
We have become so wrapped up in defending a mythical Standard of Living (SOL) that we somehow missed when Quality of Life (QOL) went down the drain. Those promoting SOL as QOL have a vested interest in keeping us believing that. Yet, even though comforts and luxuries seem to be somewhat comforting to our bodies, we know that something has gone terribly wrong with modern consumer living. In a previous post (Manifesting a New Global Society while keeping our diverse global cultures 6 – Hofstedt’s Cultural Dimensions) I explain how everything we now do in westernized societies is commodified. The simple result of this is to continue to keep us separated from each other. How many of us even know or interact more than casually with the maintenance or repair people who enter our homes to fix things that have broken. This is one of the hidden consequences of living life based on a SOL perspective tied directly to money. At the end of the last post, I asked the reader to “consider what you would accept as a good standard of living where your community was sustainably self-sufficient?” Now the key idea in that sentence that many miss as they try to describe a sustainable society will be the self-sufficiency part. Just taking two major aspects of modern living, energy/power and food as a focus to describe living in a sustainable society shows us the problem clearly. Our SOL is based on a globalized system. Your energy or power is on a grid system that is generated for the most part within a larger region where you live connections to other regions that guarantee a power source that remains somewhat stable. Your food on average has likely travelled up to 2000 miles before it gets to your home (anywhere from relatively local to across the other side of the world). The current SOL means nearly everything comes from somewhere else. Readers of this blog will know that I am talking about the need for relocalization as a first step in creating a sustainable society – control our energy and food locally. That’s a great first step, yet, the need to rethink what we want as a QOL needs to be paramount in what society needs to consider.
When asked, most people will admit that they would prefer a cooperative society instead of a dog-eat-dog kind of competitive society that we currently live within. I would argue that QOL comes from connection to community and the natural world. There is no shortage of research that shows human well-being benefits from connection – it’s how we are all hard-wired. The research shows that is also true for connections to the natural world. To stay focused for the moment on sustainable communities we find that people who tend and care for gardens have healthier outlooks than those consumed with modern living. It’s not my contention that we must all go back to becoming growers of food. What I am emphasizing is that we do need to be surrounded by natural setting and so even in cities must find more space in which the natural world is integrated into our communities. And I am not talking about just a few more parks and an acre of lawn and flowers surrounding our houses (especially true of the North America). We need to have wild nature and farm land integrated into the areas in which we live.
Our homes in general have got to stop getting larger (again, more true in North America). In the 1950s the average American home was 980 square feet and today it is 2700 square feet. The crazy thing is that the size of families in these larger homes shrank over the same period. In most other countries, apartments are commonly accepted as normal with larger homes reserved for people with more money. This may take the bigger adjustment for people used to larger homes and spacious gardens and lawns. And as for this status symbol called a lawn, what a waste of space and a source of chemical pollution as home owners plow money into keeping them green and trim, especially in climates that are totally incapable of growing lawns without excessive water and chemical treatments. The only lawns I saw growing up (in the northern UK) were in local parks, many of which had once been the private grounds of wealthy textile merchant homes.
A bit of rambling today with my emphasis on needing to rethink what we need as homes, along with all areas, including dense towns and cities, to integrate natural areas and local farming (both traditional and growing of more urban farms) with power generated locally. That would be the first step in moving towards sustainable communities. Failure to recognize the fragility of our energy and food systems sets us up for a catastrophe scenario, which I would rather avoid, thank you very much. I live next door to an urban farm that has a few sheep, a couple of dozen chickens, and rabbits and extensive raised bed gardens that provide for most of their annual food. I removed over 1000 square feet of what little lawn I have and converted it to a food garden. I still have flower beds and trees on my one-third acre home, and would quite happily convert much more of it to growing food I could share with my neighbors. Now imagine of all the homes did this. These are all just principles and not a bulleted list of what needs to happen. It would require decentralizing at least on the local scale. Staying focused on the consumer life style means burying one’s head in the sand and pretending that nothing will change in the future except technology. The powers that control us want us to believe that everything is wonderful and will continue to be so. Times they are a changing as Dylan used to sing. And not just politically. More about our conditioning next.
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