Sustainable Lifestyle Engineering; a more detailed overview
In my introduction to this project, Sustainable Lifestyle Engineering; an Introduction I gave a relatively brief intro and shared some basic ideas about using Sustainability as a decision-making tool, as well as a general way of living one's life. One of the key ideas I am working with here is that sustainability is not simply about the physical environment, although I am very interested in that facet. However, what sustainability really means is the conservation of resources. Obviously, a critical concept of environmentalism is conservation of resources, but the same concept can be applied to how we think about all resources; our time, energy, health, income, ability to generate more income, relationships, community, etc. In this post I will take a little more time, still in introduction mode, but not quite ready to move into specific topics.
Thesis: To inspire a large enough percentage of the world's population to contribute to the protection of the environment, we should encourage people to make more of their daily decisions from the perspective of sustainability.
Let's face it, there are way too many people in the world who simply don't care all that much about saving the planet from our own destruction. There are probably many reasons for this, and I am not qualified to articulate them. We in a race against time, and we need a very large percentage of the world's population to make some big changes. But how likely is it, in 2018, to get people to pull their heads out of the sand if they haven't already? What new information is going to convince a climate denier? Those of us who are appropriately concerned about our fate, and the fate of all the other creatures who live here, seem to now just be waiting for the catastrophes to hit a convincing level, but is that even going bring about the great change we need?
When I seriously considered what might influence a denier at this point in the game, I ended up considering what led me to the fairly radical decision to convert my home to solar. As much as I always loved the idea of owning a solar home someday, there simply wasn't any way I was going to do it if it had a negative impact on my already very modest income. I considered solar because the financial reward was significant. So I ended up taking a serious chunk out of my family's carbon footprint for a very selfish and self-serving reason, my own wealth.
From this perspective, I would like to focus a large part of my own environmental activism on a very different angle, which I call Sustainable Lifestyle Engineering (SLE). I think SLE is the key to getting the other side on board as quickly as possible, and hopefully before it is too late. At the same time, I think the only real way to have such an influence on others is to model the behavior, so this is also a call to all the environmentally minded people out there to consider what I am proposing.
Anyone reading this is likely already versed in the language of environmental sustainability, or at least has begun to develop that language, but I wonder how common it is for people to think about the concept of sustainability as it applies to personal, day-to-day decisions and activities. The vast majority of the world has accepted the validity of climate change, and those of us who fully embrace the reality before us (or at least understand the science that supports the belief that we are in grave danger) pull our hair and gnash our teeth wondering how we can influence the kind of global shift that will be required to stave off catastrophe. But how many of us seriously consider our own sustainability? Or our own ability to sustain ourselves, our bodies, or our lifestyles? Is it common for people to question things like their approach to physical fitness, or where to go on vacation, from a sustainability perspective? If we require a significant global shift in how we do things as humans on Earth, what about a significant shift in how we approach our own lives? Recycling, reducing and reusing are good practices, but I'm thinking bigger. I'm thinking about evaluating every decision I make through a lens of sustainability.
An easy example of how difficult it is to get a typical American to think in terms of conservation is credit card debt. The average personal debt carried by Americans is staggering, and paints a clear portrait of how humans, or at least Americans, are wired. Instant gratification. But the minority of people who live debt free know, without question, it is the only way to live. An interesting irony is that most people who actually live debt free probably had to pull themselves out of debt to get there. It's as if we have to rack up credit cards and hit rock bottom before we can enter a state of credit recovery. How far into the future the average person dwells is hard to guess, but it doesn't seem very far.
The average person is overworked, over-stressed, and in relatively poor physical shape. We work ourselves so hard that there isn't much time left over for family, fitness, and cultivating peace of mind. To give the simplest example, the typical American 40-hour/5-day work week is not sustainable. Think about it. How many people begin thinking about the weekend on Wednesday, if not Monday morning? And as we spend our work days pining for the weekend, when it finally arrives, do we thoroughly enjoy it? Even if Saturday is a joyous one, do you begin fretting over the looming Monday on Sunday morning?
And what about physical fitness? Many people are proud of themselves when they go to a gym three or four days a week for a couple hours. But as humans we are really designed to be moving all day long. Two hours of jogging on a treadmill, swimming and lifting some weights is not enough to counter our sedentary lifestyles.
If we decide to rethink things a little, where is the best place to start? If you had the luxury of starting from scratch, what aspect of your life should be held as the priority? This isn't a rhetorical question, as there is some science behind it. A 75-year Harvard study revealed that our greatest asset when engineering a sustainable happy life is maintaining quality close relationships. The study showed that a high number of relationships is not important. Marriage and other traditional relationships also do not seem to be a factor. Just a personal assessment that one's closest relationship or relationships are of a high quality.
If we situate quality relationship as our number one priority and hold it at the center of everything else, then we can begin to ask ourselves, what comes next? Maybe some people can work 80 hours a week, and have that quality relationship with someone else who also works a lot. I can't. And I imagine most people can't. Obviously I am not saying people should quit their jobs for the sake of relationship, as that likely will not work either, but we do have an almost magical tendency to move toward the intentions we hold firmly in our minds. My own current example of that is I am very focused on cutting back to a 50% course load in my teaching position in another 8 years, at age 55. I have a wonderful job with amazing benefits (which I spent a long time working to be able to secure), and one perk is that I can go half time at 55 and still keep 100% of my health benefits. Working half time is going to be a challenge, but a few years ago I thought it was a pipe dream. But once I started holding the goal firmly in my mind, I began making all sorts of small decisions that are actually starting to make the idea look more and more possible, if not likely. I don't wish to stop working at 55, but I would definitely like to try some new way of generating income, so I have 8 years to lay down the groundwork to make it possible, without having a negative impact on my family.
A great inspiration for thinking about how you can restructure your life around better priorities is the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. He provides all sorts of great ideas about how we use our time, and how to rethink our potential to make an income. His ideas are helpful to people who would like to make themselves very wealthy, but very powerful to someone like me, who is content to make enough money to support a happy, sustainable life that includes some high quality relationships.
I will go into to more detail about relationships and other specific topics in future posts, but one more example for this one is in regard to fitness. If the Harvard study reveals that quality relationship is the biggest key to happiness, I would venture that health and fitness are a close second. It might be helpful to bracket relationship out for a moment to seriously consider, if your physical health was the most important priority, what types of changes could you make to support it fully?
One change I have made came as a result of reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. In his monumental book, McDougall writes about the Tarrahumara Indians that reside in the Copper Canyon of Mexico. The book reveals the insight that running is natural to humans, and there is no reason we can't use our own feet for transportation all day long. The Tarrahumara laugh at the marathon, because running 26.2 miles is nothing to them. After reading the book, it hit me like a ton of bricks that instead of driving to the train station, and then walking from the train to work, I could just run. I had been a runner for a while, but always thought about it as exercise, and something to do with a training purpose in mind. I knew to start a new running program slowly, so I started running to the train station, and then running about a mile from the train to work, two to three times a week. I gradually increased, and eventually it became completely natural to run five days per week, and I began getting off the train early to increase the run distance. Eventually my route came to include the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia from New Jersey, and sometimes I run the entire 8.5 miles from my house to my school (but only now and then and usually when I am preparing for an annual 10-miler my wife and I do every year).
That might sound crazy, but it was something I managed to incorporate into my life by Gradual Progress, a concept from the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Change). If we let go of the need to accomplish something in a certain time frame, we can develop the practice in its due time. The greatest thing about my practice of running to work is that when I keep it up regularly, I end up getting about an hour of running in every day, but my commute only increases by a few minutes. I worry that the universe will catch on and punish me in some way for cheating! I am kidding, but sometimes it does feel that way.
These are just examples that I do not intend as specific things I am saying anyone else should do. Instead, and I will go into more detail in future posts, I encourage people to just think about the priorities of a sustainable lifestyle with quality relationship and health at the center. From there, it becomes easier an easier to apply the sustainability perspective to other areas like nutrition, home finances, career, vacation, activism and volunteerism, home and garden, etc.
One final thought before closing this post -- I also believe that if we are more grounded in sustainability on a personal level, we inevitably see the world around us more in terms of justice, equality, and fairness, and appreciate qualities like diversity, and the institutions that promote all of those things. So along with saving the environment, I believe that sustainability can be a key to a bigger social movement that breaks down some of the arbitrary divisions that our modern politics have fostered. Also for another post!
Cheers!