More & Better...a book about water & oil
The book I'm reading now is "Deep Economy". It starts out by saying that "two birds MORE and BETTER used to roost on the same branch"... but the way our world has evolved, you now have to choose between them. Either MORE. or BETTER. And he makes the point that MORE has landed us in the predicament we now face.
The chapter I was reading last night talked about happiness. Or satisfaction more to the point. It seems that once the basic needs are met, the degree of satisfaction does NOT rise with more money. He points out the life satisfaction of pavement dwellers- that is, homeless people -in Calcutta was among the lowest recorded, but it almost doubled when they mved into a slum, at which point they were basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from forty-seven nations.".."In general researchers report that money consistenly buys happiness right up to about $10,000 per capita income, and that after that point the correlation disappears." On the list of important mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty high up. A single-minded focus on increasing wealth has driven the planet's ecological systems to the brink of failure, without making us happier.
(He gives the examle of a Chinese girl in a factory who wishes for a stuffed animal. When the author brought one back to her, there were tears in her eyes. It was a zenith moment. And her co-workers were also happy for her. Unlike his daughter, who had a room full of beanie babies. Another stuffed animal? really? So what? One reason our approach to Christmas doesn't work very well. The polls say we dread it because it adds more stuff to our lives. Amen to that!)
This is one of the things I notice with living in Globe. It is less about the stuff. I am exhausted by the choices and the distractions I find in Tucson or Phoenix. Fun - but overwhelming. It's nice to live in a town with one shoe store. And when we get a new movie theater, it will be greeted with the same intensity as the little girl and her stuffed animal. It will be COOL!. Not, like the cities where a new 12-plex can go up with barely a yawn.
"The economists, and the political leaders they advise, have developed a wonderful set of tools for getting more.Achieving ever greater econmies of scale. ..."
But there is something we give up, trade off and loose in that process. Take the food chain for instance..
*...The average bite of American food has traveled more than 1500 miles before it reaches your lips, changing hands an average of six times along the way. ...75% of the apples for sale in New York City come from the West Coast or overseas, even though New York State produces ten times as many apples as the residents of the Big Apple consume."
"Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging reipes would surely be more efficient!"
In the interest of efficiencies we have created huge farms for everything from apples to pigs to wheat.
Did you know..FOUR companies slaughter 81% of the beef in ths country, and 2 American companies control 75% of the globe's grain trade? Archer Daniels and Cargill. And huge pig farms? There is one in North Carolina which handles 1.5 million hogs and produces more sewage than Los Angeles!
As McKibben points out...we may beable to fix the sewage problems and distribution issues. But there are two things that BIG AG relies on which is running out: Water and Oil. And there is no "fixing" those without shifting our view and our practices as to what constitutes MORE and BETTER.
I talked to one of the owners recently of a local Mexican restuarant. She tells me a sack of flour has gone from $15 to over $60! It makes me think there might come a time - very soon- where we appreciate just ONE flour tortilla for what it is...rather than take even the smallest thing for granted.
