So I read a lot about simplicity and “living lightly” on the earth. It’s a topic that has financial, environmental and spiritual implications. I’ve pondered in this space the gift and curse that is the iPhone–having the means to organize my life and respond to people and issues as they arise, yet finding it difficult to unplug.
I love the idea of simplicity and frugality, but some of the contradictions amuse me, others bug me. The fact that many aspects of “simple” living are incredibly inconvenient need not be said… except to say that I don’t have time to hang my clothes on a clothesline, and I certainly don’t have time to fight the homeowner’s association to allow me to do so.
Here are a few other examples:
- Keeping hand-me-down clothes and other items instead of buying all new stuff, which requires a lot of personal storage space on the one hand, yet not living in a house that’s much bigger than you really need on the other.
- Ditto growing your own food (necessitating a yard big enough to accomplish this). Aren’t we supposed to, like, live in town so we can walk everywhere and participate in the local economy? Yet we’re also supposed to grow stuff in our postage-stamp-sized yard.
- Buying locally grown and baked foods… and driving to 3-4 different places on a Saturday to acquire these items. (I know it’s still better than buying stuff that’s been shipped her from Chile, but still. It’s not simple.)
- Washing your clothes in cold water to save on energy costs, except for your sheets which must be washed in hot water to kill dust mites.
- “If it’s yellow, leave it mellow,” leading to a situation that “green” cleaning products are just not effective at alleviating. Enough said.
Can you think of others?
[Edited to add]: There’s also the one that encourages people to live near their work so they don’t have a long commute… but you’re also supposed to stay put in your house so as to put down roots in the community… so if you change jobs and the job is far from home…? You fail! FAIL!!!!!!!
Is the simplicity movement just another means of generating liberal guilt?
And how can spiritual communities help people take their commitments to the earth and their families seriously without setting the standards impossibly high and giving in to a greener-than-thou attitude?
Photo is from Walden Pond. By the way, I’ve heard that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.
26 Responses to “simplicity and contradictions”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 19th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
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ah! what a great blog! the subject matter is one that I think about often, except for those times when I manage an easy time living “simply” in which case I don’t find myself thinking about it at all!
It’s a constant walk, living “simply”. I have found it more useful to instead of living “simply” to strive to live in a “balance”.
It’s strange to think that even the beauty of “simplicity” is an extreme of sorts. Your blog talks about this perfectly. What appears to be simplest (growing your own food) may actually prove to be more complicated. The act itself is simple, but the action required is not. Certainly not how the world is now.
Simple doesn’t mean “easy” and complicated doesn’t mean “hard”, I guess.
I don’t buy all my produce organic or local, I just try to buy only what I need and not waste any.
I don’t buy new clothes because the old clothes fit me fine, but I also don’t grow unnecessary attachments to the old and welcome the new when it’s just time for it.
I attempt to keep my tastes simple, and from that position the rest seem to take care of itself.
Just my two banana peels.
I’ll be sure to compost those peels.
Your response is a great contribution to my thinking about the spiritual piece–that it’s not about the particular activities we undertake, but the mindfulness with which we do them.
I’m not ready to say that as long as one drives one’s Hummer H2 mindfully, one has got it all figured out… but it does seem very task-oriented of me to think about the activities over the intentions. If that makes sense.
This is a wonderful post - thank you.
I wish I could add something of substance to the conversation, but we have a baby who has decided she needs to wake up SIX TIMES every night. My brain is fried.
I have friends who work as environmentalists, and they’re often frustrated with the movement because they promote technologies before they’re perfected. Then, when people buy them and are irritated by them, it’s a really big setback.
The old CFLs that were difficult to read by.
The energy-saving dishwasher that works so poorly that you have to wash everything by hand before you put them in.
The water-saving toilet that you have to flush three times.
The environmentally-friendly washing machine that doesn’t get anything clean.
It makes it so that people get scared when they see the energy star label. They learn to distrust it.
They took a month long course on landscaping with local plants. After all that time, they went to every nursery in town and none of the plants were available.
Here’s an aspect to “buy local” that most don’t consider.
Just imagine that everyone in your town refused to buy Chilean fruit. Imagine it caught on and everyone in the country stopped buying Chilean fruit. Good for everyone, right?
Except the Chilean fruit farmer whose crop rots (which, by the way, releases a lot of carbon) in the field. THe Chilean fruit-pickers, by the way, would also go unemployed - as would the Chilean truck-drivers that take fruit to the processing facility. Of course, the processing facility would shut down, too. The dockworkers in Chile would also be sitting idle, as would the ships that carry fruit from there to here. THe process then works in reverse on our shore - dockworkers, processors, truck-drivers…
We are in a globalized world, and I think we need to come to terms on that. There are bad aspects to it, but one of the important good aspects is that it allows our wealth to trickle (and it is a trickle) out to people that would otherwise have even less.
This is not to say we should consume for the sake of consumption. But consumption is not “the enemy”. It is a necessary part of our lives that does a lot of good for a lot of people.
I have to say that I’m not big on personal recycling and stuff. If I throw my Coke bottle in the recycling bin, it will still get thrown in the ground somewhere just as if I threw it in the normal trash. The reason is that the plastic breaks down badly - as in dangerously - when heated enough to sterilize it for reuse. I’d much rather have glass Coke bottles that I could refill or return for sanitization and reuse. That just isn’t an option, though.
Additionally, much of the packaging that I throw away really isn’t very useful for recycling. The result is that our city’s recycling program is an expensive boondoggle that does little good. We’d be better off if we simply passed laws that required manufacturers to pay disposal costs for secondary packaging (like the plastic bag that holds the chicken fries that is inside the bag that has all the pretty colors and “nutritional” misinformation on it. Yeah, they’d pass the cost along to consumers, who would, in turn, consume a bit less.
In economics terms, it would mean “capturing the external costs of our lifestyle”.
We are now wading into areas beyond my expertise.
However, “we live in a globalized world” feels like a copout. Our patterns of consumption are taking a toll on the planet.
Is my buying produce from Chile, when there are viable alternatives closer to home, really the only way for the people of Chile to earn a fair living? I reject that.
whenever i hear these kinds of discussions, i always wonder what the people in Chile are eating.
It’s clearly my bedtime…
I’ve been trying to eat less meat, but if you order a burger to go it comes in a thin paper wrapper, whereas if you order a salad to go, it comes in ridiculous plastic containers, and you get several condiments, all individually wrapped also in little plastic containers. I’m never sure which is worse.
I know, probably no take out food would be the best way….
Very thought provoking.
The contradictions to the whole ‘living simple” thing are epitomized to me in the magazine “Simple Living”–which makes living simple look chic but expensive!
I think in some cases we do have to make choices–to live in a high density area and buy one’s food versus living on the land and growing one’s own–either choice could be a good one depending on other circumstances but you really can’t do both.
I heard one commentator say recently that buying locally grown produce or having one’s own garden may actually result in a larger footprint b/c it was less ‘efficient’ that large scale farming. Like you I reject the argument made about buying Chilean fruit, but are there other limits or arguments?
I worry about the move to all compact fluorescent bulbs to save energy when I’m not sure anyone has addressed adequately how we should dispose of them since they contain mercury.
Yes, there are lots of issues!
Hey, the most “efficient” way to get our food would be for everyone to take a daily pill that has all our requisite proteins, carbohydrates and fats.
I’m reading Animal Vegetable Miracle right now, and while her experiment is nothing I would undertake, like ever, I do think she’s right that part of the issue is our demand to have what we want when we want it. Craving strawberries in December? It can happen. It comes at a cost though. XT’s comment suggests there are economic benefits. I just wonder whether those benefits can be derived some other way.
Things can be taken to extremes and can get quite confusing. I actually read a blog post yesterday that said that you’re selfish and killing the planet if you choose to have a child. I can’t buy into that.
We catch our rain water and use it for our garden and plants, both indoor and out. We do not water our lawn, even in the brownest of brown of the summer. (I’m all for giving up cutting it in general!)
On recycling - if people commit to it, it works. Montgomery County, MD, actually MAKES money from their recycling programs! Businesses are required and homes are encouraged, and it seems to be working.
RM asks: “Is my buying produce from Chile, when there are viable alternatives closer to home, really the only way for the people of Chile to earn a fair living? I reject that.”
The answer is that for those involved in the production and transportation of agricultural products, the only way to make a fair living is to sell us their products. Could they do something else? Possibly. But farming is fairly easy and has a low start-up cost - with the benefit of at least feeding your family if you can’t sell the extra.
The problem is a bit more difficult than buying local strawberries or Chilean strawberries. Because of opposing growing seasons, it is usually a choice of buying Chilean strawberries or just going without strawberries for a few more months. Of course one could potentially substitute something locally grown - but I’m not sure what that would be. Probably frozen strawberries (who knows where they come from?).
Or you could buy enough locally-grown produce that you could home-can some strawberries. It’s easy enough with a pressure cooker and some Ball jars (or Mason jars, if you prefer).
But, if one doesn’t have the time to home-can food, if they don’t want to deal with the artificial dies and preservatives in produce, and if they really don’t want to wait seven more months for a strawberry (I’ll agree that a big part of it is wanting anything we desire to be immediately available), then the Chilean strawberry is there and it provides some benefits along with the drawbacks.
Are you telling me that the produce I buy from South America comes from small family farms? Really?
Bingo
I did a little digging around on the google today to try to find the environmental implications of buying local vs. not. There was some stuff suggesting it’s a wash, but one study out of the UK was comparing, say, a tomato grown in Spain with one grown locally in the UK using a greenhouse (which has its own environmental impact). Which is not really what I am talking about. The better comparison is relying on local indigenous stuff when possible vs. buying whatever you want, whenever you want, from wherever.
I also read that there are some aspects of this that are counter-intuitive; for example, here on the East Coast we are better off buying wine from France than from California in terms of the fossil fuels required to ship it here. I think the “break-even” place was in Indiana somewhere!
So this is all very complicated.
Just thought of another one: is it better to replace a perfectly serviceable car with a car with lower gas mileage… given that the process of producing a new car creates toxic emissions.
I’ve got a million of ‘em!
This is the discussion I dream of! That I live for! Now, mind you, I get enormous pleasure out of answering questions like the above for *myself* so I am perhaps not the best person to be diving in here. But I want to affirm two things: as you say in response to Lukee, RM, it is about the mindfulness. And second, it is very difficult to say what is “better” in all circumstances. Is it better to replace a serviceable car? Probably not. I read a blog post a while back from a guy who lives in the Ontario town where they make the batteries for Priuses. It is, he says, an enormous, mind-boggling dead zone, because the nickle processing is so toxic. On the other hand, is it better to replace a serviceable car when you’re truly struggling to put gas into it, if not indeed struggling to pay it off? Well, that’s a different bowl of fruit. I think anyone who thinks Chilean fruit growers have the best interests of the Chilean people at heart needs to read a history of, say, the United Fruit Company in Central and South America, but on the other hand, we might consider moving at a deliberate pace as we make changes in our lifestyles–there are poor people who will be affected by a whiplash-quick boycott of non-local food, just as there are poor people suffering now because we diverted an enormous stream of corn into making ethanol in the name of “green energy,” even though ethanol and bio-fuels are *not* energy efficient. OK, it’s impolite for me to rant in the middle of someone else’s blog post. But I do want to say that simplicity is never a matter of one-size-fits-all. I do hang my laundry out because I work at home during the summer, but I drive way too much. RM, I’ll bet your driving footprint is smaller. Simplicity is not a matter of perfection. It’s a practice.
I apologize for my bad manners on the soapbox. But two more things: Rev Dr Mom: CFLs taken to a reputable recycler (Ikea is one, but not very handy for people outside major metro areas) are disassembled and their mercury recovered for further use. Here’s a good argument in favor of CFLs that covers the mercury issue: http://www.grist.org/advice/ask/2007/07/16/cflmercury/index.html. Second, it is difficult to see how having a home garden or even, within limits, buying locally grown produce (unless it requires one to run out to the exurbs every other day the way one used to run to the store for milk) could create a bigger footprint than produce hauled coast to coast. I’d be interested in hearing that commentator’s data.
I now return this blog to its rightful and gracious owner.
Not at all Simpleton… come back and “pontificate” anytime!
My working theory is that anyone who takes their kids 24 miles to and from preschool in a bike trailer gets to leave the air conditioner on all day.
This is not at all self-serving.
Absolutely.
That kind of karmic equation goes both ways. I’ll be recycling and composting from here to eternity to offset 18,000 disposable diapers in landfills.
That’s a real number, isn’t it.
I read that somewhere. I wish it were hyperbole.
If it turns out to be less, it’ll only be because we are kinda half-assed about changing them as often when they’re older… (that there is a pun waiting to happen)
I guess in a way, we’re both fundamentalists.
If so, we put the fun in fundamentalism.
So who’s responsible for the mental?
Iron Maiden?
Oh wait, that’s metal.