– frugality is back in fashion

It used to be that frugal cheapskates like us were the odd ones out.   Now we’re trendy.  And we have a historian.

Could we actually be on the cusp of a new era of living sustainably and within our means?  Let’s hope.

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– ditching the consumer society for one that’s sustainable

Fans of living for reasons other than shopping — among which we include ourselves  — are enjoying the curent swathe of commentary addressing (finally!) the problem of how to create an economic recovery that’s also sustainable.

So we have Douglas Coupland worrying in a slightly incoherent fashion about what we will all come to in the Times.  Benjamin Barber in the Nation, though, is a lot more cogent on the subject.

James Kunstler imagines us entering the era of ‘yard-sale nation’ – a happy prospect for those of us who love nothing more than bargain hunting among our neighbors’ left-overs.  Kunstler’s vision is pretty dark, though.  The comments to the version of his article posted at Alternet (linked to above), however, offer a few rays of hope.

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– now in vogue: Green Economics

We’re happy to see the Nation devote an entire week of stories to the issue of green economics.  Important stuff there to check out.

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– the tree thieves; a must-read

It’s a busy life being an EarthQuaker — especially if you aspire to live it slow, to some degree.  So we’re just now reading last month’s New Yorkers and found this fascinating but depressing insiders look at the growing trade in illegally-logged timber.  It’s essential reading.

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– hurray for frugality’s new-found hipness!

Every US newspaper, magazine or website with anything resembling a ‘home’ section these days has been suddenly won over, it seems, to the cause of frugality.  And of course it meshes nicely with the living-green trend they’ve all been pushing for a while now.

We welcome this, naturally, but wonder if the virtues of reducing, reusing and recycling will still be so widely extolled once advertisers start raising their ad buys again.

Still, for now, the idea of living for something other than pure consumption is getting some airtime, for which we are grateful.  Here are two recent dispatches from the trend-face:

While the New York Times today ponders the confusions we all face when we really start trying to save money (like figuring out how far to drive for the sake of a bargain or whether buying in bulk at Costco really makes sense), there’s a far more radical solution at hand.

Vermonter Jim Merkel manages to live on just $5,000 a year — a level that means he doesn’t even pay federal taxes.  That’s an added plus for the weapons engineer turned pacifist who didn’t want to pay for US weapons programs anymore.  Truly a model for all us EarthQuakers, too.

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– an economics of regeneration

“We must restructure our economy from a foundation built on consumption to regeneration and maintenance,” say Rebekah and Stephen Hren in the Huffington Post this week.

It’s a plea for ‘ecological economics’ — and one we EarthQuakers pretty much share.

Any hope it will come with the Obama administration?  Not a huge amount, but we might move a hair in that direction and that momentum — such as it is — may actually be something to build on.  EarthCare, Sustainabilty, Stewardship, Ecological Economics: we’re at least now putting names to visions that don’t so much want to do away with conventional global corporate capitalism as radically refine it.

If we can just get economists to add environmental impacts when they calculate costs, for example (and it’s insane that governmental economists, at least, don’t do that when they consider policy alternatives), we’d be a long way towards an economics of regeneration.  There would be new corporate winners and losers for sure, but the capitalist system wouldn’t need to end while the planet and its people would sure reap the benefit.

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– after Krugman, Wendell Berry!

Farmer-poet Berry has this stanza in his poem ‘Some Further Words,’ published in his recent collection ‘Given.’

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, “Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!” I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

(This is a cross post from my posterous site.)

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– a new ‘Limits to Growth’ . . .

In the last few years we’ve seen little opposition to the idea that economic growth, however defined, is what national economies should be aiming for above all else.  That’s long concerned us EarthQuakers — we both challenge the ways in which economic costs are usually calculated and wonder how the earth can sustainably support its every inhabitant at American levels of resource consumption.

While many of the more apocalyptic predictions of the Club of Rome’s 1972 original ‘Limits to Growth’ report have not come to pass, the actual arrival of then-feared global warming makes it worth revisiting the arguments made by people who warned of its coming.

It’s time, perhaps, to ask again if there are some limits to growth.  And it certainly seems time to question how we define growth.

The PRI radio show The World ran a usefully succinct item about this very issue today, which you can find at http://www.theworld.org/audio/1015081.mp3

The best stuff starts a few minutes in.

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– as oil dries up, should we expect no landscape to be sacred?

Here’s just a tiny example of what’s likely to be a growing phenomenon — increased pressure to extract oil from much-loved, environmentally sensitive areas all over the world.

It’s not just vast wildernesses like ANWR that will be threatened as oil prices soar.

As this plan to drill in the UK shows, we can expect that pressure to occur on the micro-scale also.

What’s at threat in Southern England is just 2.5 acres of woodland. But it’s in an area likely to soon be designated as a national park. And in a country where just about every square mile of land has been managed for millennia, any woodland has the status of national treasure.

How many such places will we be prepared to destroy in the name of extracting the last few usable barrels of oil left to us? How, too, can we create a proper accounting structure for that extraction, so that we factor the cost of the amenity destroyed (not to mention its history, ecology, intrinsic beauty etc.)  against the income derived from the small amount of petroleum that it will yield?

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– obese people worsen global warming!

It stands to reason that larger people eat more than smaller ones, which means that it takes more agricultural production — a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions — to feed them, too.

Basic physics also tells us that it takes more energy to move larger people around in planes, trains or automobiles. And unless that transport is driven by sustainably-sourced power, it makes sense that the bigger people are, the bigger (on average) are their contributions to transportation-derived climate change.

That thesis is codified in this week’s edition of the medical journal, the Lancet, by a team from the London School Hygiene & Tropical Medicine which finds that global obesity is a contributing factor to global warming.

“The researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese,” reports Reuters. That’s a lot of extra food and fossil fuel being consumed that could be saved if people just had healthier body mass indices.

This statement of the somewhat obvious might have the unfortunate effect of contributing to prejudices against the obese, for whom achieving a healthy weight is often far more than a mere matter of will power.

But it might drive something positive, too, in the shape of further pressure upon us all to ask hard questions about why so many people make the kind of nutritional and lifestyle choices that result in their becoming obese. If this research helps further discredit the US subsidization of ‘junk’ calories that reside in products like high-fructose corn syrup, for example, we might be able to both help slow the warming of our planet and give its human citizens a healthier, and longer, life upon it.

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