One answer to this, Ghandi's, was "Live simply, SO THAT others may simply live."

Personally, I prefer changing the system rather than asking people to change their lives.  But I won't criticize the people who do change their lives.

    The truth (as it seems to me anyhow) is that American society, like every society, makes choices about how to spend it's money.  The society as a whole makes choices about spending money on things like bus service, highways, airports, government buildings, wars, education, health care, and programs we lump together under "welfare" or as a social safety net.

    As individuals, we make choices about what to consume, if we have the ability to choose.  Ms. Chin is merely pointing out that there is a vast disparity between those of us who have to worry about "over consumption" and people who don't get to consume much of anything, even in America.  I think it is useful to consider what it means to be in one of the two categories (dealing with overconsumption, or dealing with underconsumption).

    I used to have closets full of clothes.  Several in fact.  More t-shirts than I could ever usefully use, more of every kind of clothes.  And I don't even care about clothes!!!  What was that about in my life??  They kind of crept up.  I also had more books, more of pretty much everything than I could ever really "use".  Why??  Mainly because I could afford them.  When that changed, so did the number and type of my possessions.  

    Often times it seems to me that too much of the discussion about the environment in America is how to "consume" in a more environmentally friendly manner.  That's okay, if you are going to consume, it is a good thing to think about.  But, hey, it is useful to realize that much of the world faces different choices.

    Are we responsible for them?  We have to decide if we are or not.  It often seems to me, though, that telling people they are responsible for nature, but not for other people, carries a certain amount of risk.  If I am not responsible for other human beings, why should I care about some butterfly or owl far away?

Re responsibility, who tells "people they are responsible for nature, but not for other people"?  The existence of wealthy people is what causes poverty, and I haven't seen anyone on this site try to deny that fact.  The fact that some of us care more about nature than about humans doesn't mean that we think that people have no responsibility for their actions toward their fellow humans.

Jeff Hoffman

I think Chin raises valuable questions about how (or whether) to file these sorts of lifestyle choices in amongst our political tools.  

a.  Are they things that we do that actually contribute to change?

b.  Are they things that we do to maintain a lower order of cognative dissonance between our world-view and our world presence?

Or,

c. Are they not politics at all, but merely a set of choices we can make from among the vast buffet of choices in lifestyles that wealth and priviledge provide?  In other words, is it what Chin suggests, a sign of our privilidge that we can chose to live simply?

My immediate reaction is to say that my choices are made to diminish my impact and footprint on the globe.  Therefore, I want to reject the notion that these choices have no effect on improving the world's environments.

But, I cannot.  Because when I think about my overall presence, I realize that I am not an economic island.  My 'lifestyle' decisions and the choice to live simply still comes at the enormous cost of living in a (the?) modern commercial society.  I am not living off the land, or living sustainably, or doing anything more than shifting my purchases from one sector to another.  I still contribute a large share of my earnings to state and federal governments, who don't appear to be very interested in the same kinds of changes I have manifest in my own life.

The rest of my money passes along into a political economy that survives on my spending and your spending and everyone else's spending; it doesn't care what we buy, but THAT we buy.  The better part of the value I create passes into other people's hands.  And for all my good intentions, I am really just a small participant in a much larger political economy.  My lifestyle choices don't exclude me from that fact.

Henry Thoreau pointed out in "Civil Disobedience," that the challenge of ethical politics isn't avoiding active participation - that's relatively easy - the challenge is to overcome your passive participation, to figure out how to generate active non-participation.

And to me, active non-participation requires the kind of re-questioning and re-visioning that Chin suggests.  Do we have an obligation to humanity?  I'd say we do.

Thoreau said, "Under a government that imprisons any unjustly, the only place for a just man is in prison."

ML King said, "Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere."

And I wonder, along the same lines, how we can honestly expect to create a a world of healthy environments and thriving ecosystems if we cannot attend to the deep social crisis that sits at the heart of today's failing human habitats?

Thanks for a great piece, Elizabeth!

Peace,
Kip

    Thanks for clarifying your position.  For me, there is no difference in caring about nature and caring about humans.  I don't see humans as separate from nature (and no, I am not accusing you of doing so, but merely trying to tell you that I don't understand the dichotomy).

    My take on Elizabeth Chin's article was not that she was against people trying to simplify their lives, but rather trying to show the contrast between viewpoints from different economic classes.  I thought it helpful for us to be reminded of this.

    It seems to me that if we want to have a broad based environmental movement, we need to consider the different needs of different segments of society.  Currently, there are two American environmental movements, one which is largely white and middle class, and one which is based in the social justice (or environmental justice) movement.  We don't work so well together.  If we did, we would be stronger and more effective.

    As to who tells people that they are responsible for nature, but not for other people, maybe nobody does.  But the impression that the middle class environmental movement gives is often just that.  Maybe it is not intentional, but it is how many poorer people perceive us.  This perception can contribute to the difficulties we have working together.

Patrick

    I agree with many of your comments.  But I think that in one area, the environmental movement misses the point.  A lot of what we see as lifestyle choices are dictated by economic and social constraints that we don't control.

    For example, right now, the federal government rewards home ownership by offering massive tax breaks to home owners.  Anyone who can afford to own a home would be crazy not to take advantage of this chance.  Local governments, through zoning, dictate that home ownership will mostly consist of single family stand alone homes on relatively large lots. Thus, in order to take advantage of the federal subsidies associated with home ownership, people will naturally have to live in sprawling suburbs.  This is a choice constrained by the federal rules and local zoning practices.

    Now, imagine that 90% of your rent was tax deductable if you lived in an apartment in a city, and that futher, the government put say, $3000 a year in an IRA for you.  Whooo doggie, a whole bunch of people would abandon the burbs for apartments, since they would want to take advantage of the Federal largess.  (Not everyone, but really, probably lots and lots, at this point in time, we don't know (smile)).

    So again, often our choices are poor.  One of the things we need to do is add more green options to our choices.

    But we also need to look beyond indvidual choices to see institutional choices.  Institutional consumption (here I mean business, church, unions, government, NGOs, universities, everyone who is not a single person) and choices play a critical role in overall American consumption, and need to be addressed as well.  Too often we put all the blame and decisions on individuals, and let institutions off the hook.

Patrick

Reading what someone else writes and finding flaws in it is easier than seeing them in one's own writing.  With that in mind, I wish Chin had not used Mother's Day, a holiday created for selling sentiment, as an example of something Davy couldn't afford a present for.  Reading Affluenza has sensitized me.  

One solution to overconsumerism is very, very simple: turn off your television. Like the poster above who couldn't fathom why she had so many clothes and books, TV--both commercials and programs--has an insidious way of making us want things we don't need, making us feel inadequate for not possessing the latest car/deodorant/beer/toothpaste. Madison Ave execs don't pull down six figures for nothing--they are very, very good at their jobs, and most of us, especially children, do not have the defenses or critical analysis skills to make us as immune to this assault as we might think. Try turning off your TV and see if you don't start worrying less about what you don't have.

Believe it or not, some students already had nostalgia for the activist 60s, and would airily say from time to time, between puffs, "Money doesn't matter."  The few of us who actually knew whether money mattered or not would say to each other (when we were alone): "Money doesn't matter unless you don't have it."

Ms. Chin's piece reminded me of that idea rather well.  She reminded me of the time when I finally got a date one summer evening, but my dad's car wouldn't start, and we lived in the rural south, where no bus lines operate, so I had to call and cancel, but it didn't occur to me that day that we were still much wealthier than the vast majority of our fellow earthlings.  I felt really poor.

Thanks for the view point.  'Tis a complex issue.
Still, something does have to change, here in the USA.