I just got home from 3 months on the road, and am in massive brain fog. But lucky you, that means a short post!
In her seminal book Limits to Growth, systems engineer and environmental scientist Donella Meadows wrote:
"People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth.
Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment."
Which reminded me of one of my spiritual teachers, the Zen Buddhist Adyeshanti, wrote:
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it.” [Gospel of Thomas 113] In other words, it’s already done. Everything is already perfect, even amidst the chaos, amidst the ups and downs and the tragedies and the triumph. All this happens within the Kingdom, within the ultimate state of freedom. When we forget this, we become lost in the world of appearances and bound to the world of time with its worries and its doubts and its anxieties. — Adyshanti
After I left being a lawyer and a Quaker school teacher, I worked in the sustainability world, preparing local governments and populations for climate change. What I realized is that everyone in sustainability talked about doing the same thing we’re currently doing, but “greener.” Transitioning from coal, gas, and oil to renewable energy, or buying from “environmentally-friendly companies.” Yes, there was lip service for reducing consumption. But it was a throwaway line before the real message: we can keep this show going. We can “save the planet,” while maintaining our “standard of living.” We want to continue working harder for more things. We want a greener hamster wheel.
Consuming more, but more gently?
We consume four times more per person in the US than we did in 1970. Globally we consume the natural resources of four planets.1 We’re not going to stop the upcoming crash by continuing to consume 3% more per year but only “environmentally-friendly products.” If the object is perpetual growth, there's no such thing as a "sustainable" hamster wheel.
No one in the professional environmental class really talks about a real reduction of demand because (1) you can't get paid to say so (2) no one in power will listen to you. No one is talking about lowering natural resource consumption by 75%, which is what ecologists say is really needed.2 If we keep doing this, collapse is foreseeable, tragic, and unavoidable. I know my views3 are unpopular and decidedly out of mainstream, but am I saying anything untrue?
Living is easy with eyes closed
Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things will always lead us to collapse. We all know it’s true but no one wants to admit it.4 It’s so sad. Sad on an ecological level and on a human level. Reducing our personal consumption by 75% seems impossible, so we turn away from it.5 And that is the universal pattern: you don't learn from getting it right, you learn from getting it wrong. But it's wrongness, and more importantly, its consequences, that lead to insight into the true nature of things.
“All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well...desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to deceive oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.”― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Once you understand that, you have spiritual autonomy and real inner authority. As Father Richard Rohr says, only transformed people transform the world. The weird paradoxical thing, on a mystical level: it is already done. Everything is already perfect, even amidst the chaos, amidst the ups and downs and the tragedies and the triumph. You don’t have to ride the merry-go round. You just have to let it go.
Americans consume four times more than the average global person and developing economies are trying to “catch up.”
The best I’ve heard any sustainability person advocate for is “decoupling” natural resource use from economic growth. In other words, keep growing at 3% while maintaining current resource consumption. Off by an inch, off by a mile.
If you want to read more, I wrote two posts about accepting environmental collapse as a spiritual truth in November 2022.
i.e. Addiction
My friend Annie Bickerton’s definition of spirituality is one of my favorites: “making friends with reality.”