Simple Living for the Environment Is for Suckers

You need more than one arrow in your quiver, more than one color on your palette. You need to conceptualize on both the personal and the global level. You need to understand at the gut level what you are promoting. It isn't buying organic veggies at the supermarket that were trucked across the nation (I'm in the east), it's growing them in your backyard. It's growing/buying when fruits and vegetables are in season and excess and preserving them. It's changing your lifestyle to be more self sufficient, and not falling into the distribution channel myth that they will provide all you need - what you need to do is work at a useless job earning money to buy their "stuff". Homemaking use to be an honorable task. But, yes, we need money or else Susie and Jimmy can't have their own cell phone, and how will we get 200 ridiculous channels on cable, and game boy, wii, etc. The localvore idea is good - short distribution areas based on 40-50 mile radius is a great start. I keep thinking Americans will wake up to food safety (Jensen id's ag as one of the two main culprits) with the next e coli scare, but they keep coming, and people keep trusting Big Ag to keep them fat and happy. Find a CSA, start an urban garden with your neighbors, do something that creates 'wealth', ie, convert human effort and renewable natural resources into useful products. How many families can eat off one vacant urban lot? (I'll shut up now.)

I live 'green' because I am cheap, not because of a political act. I don't want to pay high fuel bills, electric bills, mortgages. I don't want to feed the corporatocracy by being a consumer.

The single most mind blowing event leading to the current depression is that middle Americans chose to 'walk away' from their mortgages because when the value of their homes dropped below their mortgages. This is not possible anywhere else in the world, btw but look at the effect that this has had! Now, the govt response of course was to reward banks for their stupidity, not to recognize the power of the individuals who said f-you to the banks.

The point is, though, that individual action can bring down large corporations, which is what it is going to take before anything changes.

Americans are not yet outraged enough to realize that govt has been taken over and is no longer 'by the people, for the people'. When that happens and people take to the streets,
true change can begin to occur.

The point is, simple living can be part of a larger political stance. Of course we urgently need a change in our industries. We have for years and years.
Canvas bags in the grocery store help people wake up and get interested in realizing that we need some changes.
As does riding a bicycle and buying less crap to put in a landfill.
Of course we need to write letters, vote for leaders who will take sensible action, and head in sustainable direction. Voting with are pocketbooks and making visable choices in our lives are part of that.

Wow! What a dangerous idea to spread - that the individual can't make a difference. Small changes don't fix everything at once, so don't bother. As if people don't feel helpless and disenfranchised enough! It takes millions of drops of water to fill a reservoir, but no matter how big the quantity needed, it is still made up of drops. How many drops have you wasted today?

Well, this was an eye-opener. What a thought provoking and powerful piece. However, having said that, and fully agreeing with his overall premise, it is still critical that as individuals we do what we can not to waste resources, not to continue to use plastics and other items that will outlast us. That's just common sense.

Jansen is correct when he says that it was only through an all out commitment to confront the system and status quo that change occurred. But change also had to occur at the personal level. The personal is political was trite and true, as is all politics is local. We have to learn to live our principles, and to fight for them as well.