Published by the Center for a New American Dream

A quarterly report on consumption, quality of life and the environment

No. 14, Winter 2000/2001 ◆ $3

Page 3
Letter from
Betsy Taylor
Saving the Earth, Saving our Souls
By Gordon Aeschliman
Page 4

W
e’re about to enter the season of portionality.” This is illustrated aptly at one
1,500 Thanks to
America’s perennial headache. For extreme by an event that occurred with a juve-
Our Members
many of us, thankfully, it’s a time of nile in Los Angeles where I used to live: the
Page 5 real community, generosity and good memories child wanted to own the name-label shoes
Local Heroes of people we love who are no longer belonging to a peer. The prestige
with us. There’ll be chestnuts associated with that prize was
Page 6 roasting, Santa sleighing, enough to motivate the
Online Chat: Simplify Jesus not crying, and child to murder his
the Holidays snow on our Tennessee peer in order to
roofs. Unfortunately acquire his shoes. There is
Page 8
there’ll also be the no doubt in our minds
Mary Pipher Essay:
ka-ching at the till that the tradeoff is severely
All That Glitters and the credit card out of balance. And yet to
Page 10 statements that send this child it seemed a rea-
Bad, Good and proverbial chills down sonable enough exchange.
Truly Ridiculous our spines. Moms and There is a sense in which
dads will be encouraged all of us in the modern materialistic-
Page 12 by advertisers to spend based culture of the West participate
Resources way too much on junk, to in this same distorted sense
buy love for kids who know of proportionality. It has
Page 13 you can’t buy love but don’t to do with how we assign
Buying Green: mind receiving the fruits of those value to the acquisitions of
Weatherizing Your frail attempts anyway. Lovers will try our life and routines, and it
Home/Fun Box to seal their commitments with the often comes down to a dis-
Page 14 enthusiastic help of DeBeers, and tinction between affordability
Madison Avenue will giggle all the ANNA and cost.
Step by Step: WHIT
way to the bank. E I do the weekly grocery shopping for
E-Holiday Cards
Exhausted, overspent, underappreciated our family. I love fruit, so of course I lollygag
Page 15 and without a parking spot close to the mall around the fruit bins at length, asking myself if
Readers Respond/ entrance, we’ll all sigh relief in early January and our family budget can manage the price of some
Orwell’s Corner go back to work with a sense that we were of the lovely product reaching out to me from
ripped off. Some of us will be honest enough to the bins.
say we did it to ourselves. This pre-season “Can I afford those mangos?”
moment is not a bad time for Americans to ask A simple enough question. But exactly the
why we consume so much, and to ask what it wrong question if I am concerned about pro-
does to our souls. Some reflection could very portionality. The better question would be,
well restore some joy to the daze ahead. “What do those mangos cost?”
Our society suffers from a problem of “pro- continued on page 2
Saving the Earth, Saving Our Souls
continued from page 1
Sounds as if I’m playing a game of semantics? Stay
with me on this because the difference between afford-
ability and cost is life and death.
Our organization, Target Earth, sends interns
throughout the world to placements that are directly
linked to the Earth and the poor. Specifically, these
interns will spend from six to fourteen weeks working
among people who live on less than a dollar a day (there
are a billion such people in the world today), people
whose poverty is directly related to environmental
degradation. At the end of their internship the students
write a reflective paper that becomes a means of inte-
grating their minds and spirits into the field experience.
These internships are transforming experiences for
North Americans who have lived a rather insulated life
concerning environmental degradation and extreme
poverty. Our first ever intern, Kurt, spent fourteen
weeks with banana growers in Central America. At the
end of his placement he submitted a 20-page paper. And
on the last page he summed up his entire internship in
the single sentence: I will never again in my life eat
another banana.
Kurt had moved from the realm of affordability to
the reality of cost. At one level he studied a business
enterprise that delivers produce to the public in the
greatest possible quantity for the highest possible profit.
Business models have to ask what the market can bear
(what the consumer can afford) and then design prod-
uct creation and delivery around those findings. At no
point does the traditional business model concern itself
with the true cost of its products. Our national measure
of wealth, the GDP, is being challenged by environ-
mental groups for being an inappropriate standard of
true wealth. The GDP simply measures the total
exchange of goods and services over a specific time
period.
So, as in the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, mil-
lions of dollars were exchanged in goods and services to
clean up a mess that killed countless fish, birds and
mammals and violated waterways and forests. Those
deaths and degradations are part of the actual cost of
the product and should be factored into the GDP as a
negative. Yet in the national measure of financial health,
the Valdez accident turned out to be good for the
country. It’s a false measure that does not look at the
true costs of doing business. Likewise, the oil that is
refined and transformed into fuel for my car comes at a
purchase price that does not reflect the actual environ-
2 ◆ WINTER 2000/2001
mental cost — a cost I don’t really want to bear for the
convenience of transportation.
What Kurt found out after fourteen weeks of
interning with poor banana laborers is that the true cost
of a banana is not fourteen cents. The true cost is pesti-
cides and herbicides
that cause permanent
lung damage, cripple Our national
joints, deform fetuses
me a s ur e of we a l t h ,
and deteriorate arterial
walls leading to inter- t h e GDP, i s b e i n g
nal bleeding and sud-
den death. Those same c h a l l e n g e d by
agricultural inputs e nv i r o n m e n t a l
destroy local ground
water and kill several groups for being an
species that would nor-
mally thrive in the
inappropriate st an -
region. And the true d a r d of t r u e
cost of those bananas
even includes inden- we a l t h.
tured service to the
company, sexual exploitation, child labor and lack of
protection from the national labor laws because the
workers — living in the country as alien labor — do not
qualify for the protection of just labor standards.
That cost of the banana was too expensive for Kurt.
To eat that product would be to commit a kind of spiri-
tual suicide to his soul. He knew people by name, drank
their tea with them in their inadequate homes, sat
through rain and heat in their yards, listened to woes
and facts that only a hard-hearted person could endure
without impact, and tried to intervene medically and
legally on their behalf.
Much of the advice we get for reworking our con-
sumptive lifestyles is budget-based. Those encouraging
voluntary simplicity ask us to think of all the freedom
we could experience in our schedules, our holidays,
with our families and friends were we not so devoted to
the lure of conspicuous consumption, were our emo-
tions somehow free of the balm buying seems to give.
At one level this is really good advice. It is practical,
strategic input for people who need to learn some of
the basic budget rules that used to be standard practice
for people who lived through depressions and war time
economies. Additionally, this advice helps us understand
the hollow promise of status or social standing: who
says we should organize our lives around the acceptance
continued on page 11
Saving the Earth, Saving Our Souls
continued from page 2
of arbitrarily stated rules of appropriate living? Keeping
up with the Joneses turns out to be nothing more than
obeying the call of Madison Avenue.
The problem with a good amount of the literature
and the approach to a simpler lifestyle is its self-cen-
tered orientation. Surprising, isn’t it? I become the
main point — my leisure time, my personal goals, my
private values are what are pursued. I assume that con-
sumption is about my life. And yet there is nothing
about consuming that is private or personal, that is sin-
gular. All consumption is linked to the rest of the
world, be it through watersheds, diverse species, air,
oceans, villages, children, women, alien workers, rain
forests or prairies. Every purchase I commit is a com-
munal act. Someone or something else is paying the
actual cost of the product. I am simply purchasing the
product at a highly discounted rate.
As we try to commit to a truer measure of consum-
ing, we will be motivated to live a just life — one that
does not oppress others or destroy the creation in order
to satisfy our needs or wants. But in this pursuit, we
cannot have the goal of living a pure life. There is no
such prize. We are members of a messy global society.
The pure life is an impossible vision. Everything we
touch has in some manner already traveled through a
disproportionate web of true costs against reasonable,
moral benefits. We commit to cruel costs just by being
alive. Moral consuming (character, if you please) cannot
be defined by a withdrawal from society. I think the
truly moral approach would be to live humbly with the
fact that we all deliver death — because thus have we
made the world — and then with this attitude of humil-
ity to commit to a purposeful, reasonable life that
engages fewer and lesser costs.
In my own Christian tradition I find guidance for
this kind of lifestyle in biblical words such as “Love does
no harm to its neighbor,” or “Love is the fulfillment of
the law,” and “Love your neighbor as you love your-
self.” These are costly words in our modern post-indus-
trial age. If I commit simply to the call to do no harm to
my neighbor, I will have de facto adopted a simple
lifestyle. Indeed, my Christian tradition makes it impos-
sible for me to be a person of faith unless I adopt the
simple, reasonable lifestyle — the Scripture asks the par-
ticularly stinging question: “How can you claim to love
God whom you cannot see if you do not love your
brother or sister whom you do see?” Ouch. I cannot be
both a good Christian and be a conspicuous consumer.
It turns out those are incompatible identities. Good
consuming, it turns out, is about love. It’s not, in the
final point, about living a less cluttered life, finding
more time for friends and hobbies or living free of debt
payments. It’s about a journey that is honest, a journey
that is measured by our connection to the entire social
and natural order in today’s world, a journey that says I
truly care about the entire process that leads up to the
point of purchase. Good, loving consuming asks me to
accept a rigorous sense of my peers — that community
of people and the creation that gives itself up (unjustly
or unwillingly) to the development of the products I
acquire. American consumers, comprising four percent
of the global population, consume one third of the
world’s resources. We also produce one-third of the
world’s waste. Every time we are at the till we are inad-
vertently participating in costs that are not very pretty.
For me good consuming is to live the good journey —
one that takes my feet, my mind, my heart and my spir-
it through an environmentally ravished village in
Burma, a dump in the Philippines, a toxic town in New
Jersey, a depleted rain forest in Belize, a crumbling
housing project in Mexico. In that journey I find myself
more truthfully connected to those that the Christian
scriptures refer to as “the least of these” and the “voice-
less.” Those people and ecosystems who have no ability
to influence the decisions and policies of corporations
and governments that locate in their community to the
detriment of its inhabitants, bypassing responsible
behavior toward the earth and its inhabitants.
There is no suggestion here that we extract our-
selves from the world. As I have said, our journey is a
messy journey. But if done honestly with love, it is a
journey that will transform us into people who
acknowledge the true cost of our deeds, who measure
the true worth of communities that are degraded in
order for us to consume. And if we do our journey
well, we too, like Kurt, will find ourselves with symbolic
commitments to say enough is enough — not because
it helps us address our hectic lifestyles, but because it
helps us live in a manner that will both save the Earth
and save our souls.
Gordon Aeschliman is president of Target Earth and a
member of the Center’s Advisory Council for Faith-Based
Outreach. Target Earth serves the earth and the poor in
regions of the world where people live on less than a dollar
a day.
WINTER 2000/2001 ◆ 11