Why would two gainfully employed people quit their jobs in
Dallas, Texas and move to rural Tennessee? By most people’s
standards we are successful people living the American dream. However, after
years of working in the city we became convinced that the nine-to-five
corporate job, while living in the suburbs, was for us an unfulfilling, stressful
and mind-numbing way of living.
I would calculate how much time I spent in the car each day,
or each week traveling to and from work. I spent about two and half hours each
day in the car. That adds up to over 50 hours each month spent driving to or
from a job. Over a weeks’ worth of labor each month was wasted just to get to and
from the job. I was spending most of my life trying to earn money to pay for
the car and gas that I need to get to the job, to buy the food that I can’t
grow myself and pay for the house that was left empty most of the time. It
seems a rather silly way to exchange day after day of my life. 1
More and more of our modern life, especially in the city, is
based on consumption. Once all of the basic human needs are met, how is an
economic engine supposed to keep growing? In part, by a continuous barrage of
marketing messages that have the effect of manufacturing ‘wants’ and promoting
overconsumption.2 Even before a child starts school, they are
imprinted with thousands and thousands of corporate marketing messages almost
ensuring that they will grow up thinking that they need to eat a certain type
of food, or wear better shoes, or even take a certain kind of drug just to be
normal.3 We end up thinking
we won’t be complete, or won’t be as happy as we could be unless we have ‘more’.
This type of marketing actually changes the way a person thinks about him or
herself and the world in which he lives. In the last 30 years we have gone from
being citizens to being consumers.
In our economy, the more problems we have the more
opportunities there are to make money. It is kind of absurd that we are part of
an economy that systemically seeks out or promotes inherently bad things, but
upon examination, our economy is decoupled from the well-being and health of the
people and nature. GDP growth and thus our financial health doesn't take into
account resource depletion, or dirty water, deforestation, species extinction,
or climate change4. Those are called negative externalities in the pseudo-science
of economics, and the social cost of those externalities are not paid for by the
corporations that caused the problems5. If a fishing industry wipes
out the Cod population, they don’t have to pay the cost of replacing it. If the
tobacco industry’s products kill over 400,000 people a year6 they
aren't paying the full social costs of all of those deaths. Even in a different context, a train wreck has a
positive impact on the Gross Domestic Product. Someone has to rebuild the
track, the train and replace the goods lost in the wreck. Natural disasters
have a net positive impact on GDP. All those homes have to be rebuilt and all
the infrastructure repaired. A litigious culture has a positive impact on GDP.
All the lawyers, and consultants have to grow their businesses too. A complex tax
code has a positive impact on GDP. Most of those CPA’s and IRS agents would be
unemployed if we had a simplified system of taxation. An increasingly sick
population has a positive impact on GDP. The medical industry is booming right
now. There is very little money to be made in healthcare if we are a healthy
population7. And on it goes like a snake eating its own tail, but
unaware that it’s doing so.
In the city I couldn't grow my own food, I had to pay for
it. The cheap food is frequently subsidized8, and will eventually make you
sick, thus the healthy food costs more up front. The processed food is cheap
but nutrient deficient and is engineered to make you crave more of it.9 The chemically grown, and GMO foods are
also cheaper than organic, but there are health risks with eating them10.
In the city I couldn't get my own water, I had to pay for it. Most of the municipal
water has toxins in it 11 and people pay twice for water. Once for
tap water and again for bottled water. The bottled water is frequently hoarded
from local water supplies even in times of drought by large corporations12.
In the city I couldn't generate my own electricity, I had to pay for it. Entire
mountain tops are being removed for coal. You can see them on Google Earth; they look like lunar landscapes. The people who live close to the mountain top
removal sites are much sicker than average.13 The marketing from the
coal companies promote ‘clean coal’, but that is an oxymoron of huge proportion.14
In the city I couldn't dispose of my own waste, I had to pay for it. Wastewater
is treated and released into our waterways to be used again, but it still
contains harmful chemicals.15 Landfills are not designed to
breakdown garbage, but rather just to contain it, and they frequently leak
toxins into the ground.16 The biomass that goes into a landfill is frequently
wasted when it could be used in compost instead of buying chemical fertilizers.
In the city I couldn't affordably build my own house, I had to pay someone else
to do it. With all the building codes, restrictions and high property costs it
would have cost a fortune to build my own house in the city. It seems that city
living is very much like being a part of a large dependent community. One in
which each person has to spend an enormous amount of his or her time trying to make
lots of money just to provide the basics of life.
I didn’t want to take on a 15 to 30 year mortgage in order
to live in the city. The word mortgage is derived from the old French ‘mort’
which means dead or death, and ‘gage’ which means pledge, which equates to
death pledge. A home mortgage is such a huge debt that for many working people
that debt is with them until they die. I didn’t want to give up 30 years of my
life, if I live that long, to pay a bank twice what I borrowed. It is no
accident that most online mortgage calculator from banks don’t actually show you
the total cost of the loan. A 30 year mortgage on $100,000 at 5.0% interest
will cost me over $93,000 in interest payments alone.
In 2010 I got rid of my cable TV. I started spending some of that extra time reading books. I
gravitated towards non-fiction, I guess because I like to figure out how things
work. I started to read about finance, religion, healthcare, psychology, science,
politics, natural resources, food production and business. I started to realize
just how unsustainable my way of life, our economy and our predominant
worldview really is. Initially I began blaming others for not implementing all the
possible solutions from this new information (new to me anyway). I thought that
if politicians would only do these things all would be well. If only
corporations would do these certain things that we could be much happier. If
the media would only change to support certain values we would all be better
off. If Americans would embrace a healthier lifestyle we could have much better
lives. All of these things were what other people should do to make our lives
better. I didn’t want to live my life being bitter about what everyone else
should do, but wasn’t doing, to fix our problems. What am I responsible for? I
can only control my own mind, and that is a bit of stretch most days. Instead
of looking outside for change, it would be better to look inside and make the
changes in my own life without depending on someone else.
Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by
fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” It turns
out that the new model that most intrigued me isn’t that new, and has been
around since the 70’s. It isn’t some religion or political ideology. It is
called permaculture. It is derived from “permanent culture” or “permanent
agriculture” depending on the source. It can be defined as a design system for
sustainable living and land use. I’ve heard it described as “a revolution disguised
as ecological gardening”. In many ways it’s a comprehensive array of old and
new solutions that offers a way of living that anyone can do in order to
provide for themselves, their community and nature. Regardless of the debate
about climate change, population growth, resource depletion, or the global financial
crisis the more I studied permaculture the more it made sense to me that this
is what I should be doing. Maitri Homestead is the beginning of this new way of
living for us.
You can read more about permaculture, here. You can watch some YouTube videos
that give a really good introduction, here.
- Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominquez
- Affluenza, by John de Graff and David Wann
- Consuming Kids (documentary)
- The End of Growth, by Richard Heinberg
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- http://www.lung.org/associations/states/colorado/tobacco/
- Food Matters (documentary)
- The Omnivore's Dilemna, by Michael Pollan
- Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
- Food Matters (documentary)
- Healing the Gerson Way, by Charlotte Gerson
- Blue Gold (documentary)
- The Last Mountain (documentary)
- http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870599,00.html
- The Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins
- http://earth911.com/news/2009/03/30/the-lowdown-on-landfills/
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