A few weeks ago I wondered whether the yellow water bucket that we associate with poverty might actually symbolize respect for a limited resource.

Today I’m wondering whether places that lack “conveniences” are actually better off than we are. What begins as convenience ends up as infrastructure, like the one that locks us into using too much water every single day. So many interests are invested in this system that changing it is very, very difficult.

In the yellow bucket world, infrastructure is scarce and innovation is abundant. Greenfield is an emerging term for a place with little infrastructure. Says Wikipedia, “the analogy is to that of construction on greenfield land where there is no need to remodel or demolish an existing structure.”

In mobile technology, the African continent was a greenfield.  With few telephone poles and landlines, African countries quickly adapted cell phone technology, and today lead the world in mobile commerce. In places like Uganda, you can do all kinds of cool things on a phone—transfer cash, check the market price for your fish, text money to your family—without signing up for a pricey two-year contract!

In mobile commerce, African countries have leapfrogged many developed nations.

Leapfrogging is the process through which developing countries can actually develop faster, notes Wikipedia, “by skipping inferior, less efficient, more expensive or more polluting technologies and industries and move directly to more advanced ones… avoid environmentally harmful stages of development and [without needing to] follow the polluting development trajectory of industrialized countries.”

In other words, our “less developed” companions in ministry are poised to leapfrog, from their greenfields, right over us and our well-entrenched, wasteful, polluting ways!

So, who advises whom? Do we go on raising money to “fix problems” in other places, or do we start confessing that we’re stuck in a system that consumes too much of absolutely everything, and open ourselves to learning from—and celebrating—the leapfroggers? I’ve been feeling pretty pleased about the new, high-tech solartube in my roof, designed to brighten a dark hallway with daylight instead of a lightbulb. Looking around for examples for this post, I discovered that a plastic water bottle would have been just as effective, and cheaper. Wow!

Wouldn’t it be nice if, every time we launched a faith-based “development project,” we started by searching for leapfrog technologies to see what we could learn? Instead of raising money for 100 wells in African countries by actually wasting water (dunk tanks, throwing water balloons), could our next campaign give equal time to–or even showcase–the wisdom of companions on how to replace systems and habits that waste water  with something more efficient and respectful?

Yesterday, the New York Times posted a blog post called “What We Can Learn from Third World Healthcare.”  The theme is the same. We spend billions on medical bells and whistles, yet our health metrics are simply terrible. Concludes the blog’s author: “In other words, we have yet to deploy what could prove to be the most powerful weapon in the fight to contain costs and improve the quality of health care: our own humility.”

The world is telling us we’re not so very wise. Instead of being defensive about our way of life, shall we smile and join the leapfrog game?

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

People who take running water for granted  

use an average of 100 gallons per day

to accomplish the same tasks

that people who carry water achieve with 10 gallons.

For most of us, “carrying water” is synonymous with poverty and exploitation. If you carry water, you have none in your home. If you carry water, you have to walk miles, possibly barefoot. If you carry water, you can’t go to school. If you carry water, you are destitute.

But perhaps what yellow plastic water buckets really symbolize is respect. If you carry water, you use it carefully. Every drop is precious. You take care not to waste a single drop.

Could the kitchen faucet symbolize disrespect?  We turn on a faucet and water gushes out. It runs and runs and runs, while we move away and tackle another task. Because water shows up every time want it, we don’t treat it as precious at all.

Correction. We think it’s precious for other people, so we raise money for things like the ELCA World Hunger 100 Wells Challenge, and get excited when new wells are dedicated. But there’s no Challenge to our own attitudes and water use. Notice (my apologies, colleagues) that the “global water crisis” described on our web site happens someplace else.

If the accompaniment model calls us to mutual mission, shouldn’t our behaviors be part of water ministry? Shouldn’t we be creating an ELCA World Hunger 100 Gallon Challenge focused on us? Couldn’t we be installing water meters on our sinks and showers so we can see our water use in real time? Or plunking yellow water buckets on the counter, so that our companions’ reverence might convince us to turn off the tap?

What—and how—can we learn from the water carriers?

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Like typewriter or answering machine, the phrase simple living sounds a little quaint. Have you noticed how many faith-based and secular organizations devoted to scaling back lifestyles have called it quits? And how energy and attention have been gradually shifting from frugality towards creating sustainable lifestyles?

My life has been following this path, too. The Tightwad Gazette and Your Money or Your Life launched me along the journey described in Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal.  Those years of simple living culminated in the great paring down of 2009 described here and here.

Capturing rainwater for gardens is part of a sustainable NW home. The ReStore in Bellingham uses containers from a food processing plant to catch and store 800 gallons of water.

My early simple life unfolded in a city—a complex system with an infrastructure and buildings shaped around assumptions from a hundred years ago. There wasn’t much I could change about my urban environment (or so I thought), so I focused on decluttering my home and calendar; lowering my expenses; seeing what, personally, my son and I could live without; and organizing our lives around people and personal interests rather than mass market dictates.

All that changed when I moved closer to family in the northwest. Surrounded by fields, hills and rivers instead of brick and mortar, I wondered about the systems around me.  Where did my water, electricity, and propane come from? Where did my garbage go? How did my septic system work? What were my farmer neighbors growing, and who ate it? How could I ride a bicycle in the rain?

To create a life that complemented or enhanced those natural systems, I would need to learn a whole new set of skills around gardening, composting, and reducing and generating energy. That’s why this spring my simple life is way, way over budget. I’m rehabbing a 40-year old, single-story family home into a green, energy-efficient dwelling with the tiniest possible footprint. Everything I’ve read about green building is turning into practice as the rehab team tightens the building envelope, increases ventilation, and adds high-efficiency heating, a 50-year roof, low-flow everything, compact fluorescent and LED lighting and low-VOC or recycled paint. All while reusing, recycling or composting as much construction debris as possible.

In Chicago I did the laundry in a corner of the basement under a single 60-watt light bulb. Now I have daily discussions about ambient versus task lighting for a dedicated bathroom/utility room, dual- versus single-flush toilets, and radiant heat versus heat pumps. A basement washing machine under a dim light feels pretty Lutheran and pretty simple. It’s modest, straightforward, and leaves lots of time for loving your neighbor. Sifting through lighting choices feels scandalously self-centered, self-indulgent, and not Lutheran at all! Is this really me???

Decisions, decisions, decisions!

When pesky building specs overwhelm me, I remember: Changing any life habit takes time and attention. Someday, all of us will live in homes that consume few resources and even produce their own power—in the country and the city. We’ll have made our existing homes greener, and green building practices will be standard. But we’re not there yet. Contractors and customers still face a steep learning curve. Dissecting lighting (xenon, LED, solar tubes?), I hope, speeds it up a little.

Eventually, my house will stop being a full-time project and just be my home. Insides its sustainable envelope I can resume my regular simple life. I can get back to being Lutheran and loving neighbors I don’t know. But for the next nine weeks, the carpenters, the plumber, the electrician, the heating contractor, the roofer, and the insulation/air sealing guy are the neighbors I’m called to respect and listen to with patience as we tackle a million details and create a green home.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Just last week in my local high school’s cafeteria, eager young volunteers stationed themselves with scales in front of garbage cans. Weighing and examining every item about to be thrown away, they came up with a gross tonnage of discards and determined that only 5% of the “garbage” needed to go to the landfill. The other 95% could be recycled or composted.

While some of the compostable items were napkins and paper plates, most of it was food.

Food tossed into the cafeteria garbage can is considered food waste— food wasted at the level of consumption, that we prepare and eat in our homes, stores, and high schools, the ELCA Churchwide Office, our congregations, offices, and countless other  institutions.

Food loss, on the other hand, takes place at the level of production. Failed crops are a good example. So are shortages triggered by hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, war and violence, and diseases like potato blight or wheat rust.

Through ELCA World Hunger, we’re all committed to addressing food loss. But the food waste that takes place in our own kitchens? Invisible, unchallenged, it’s our dirty little secret. Some might defend it as a privilege of our prosperity! Food loss happens everywhere. Food waste happens in high-income regions. Although this chart is a little hard to see, just look at the proportion of red to blue. Blue is food loss. Red is food waste. We North Americans have the biggest red chunk. (To see a larger chart, go to a cool blog called Discard Studies: Exploring Throw-Away Culture, also my source for the food loss/food waste distinction.)

So, fellow hunger advocates. What’s the plan for making our food waste as visible—and as reprehensible—as the world’s food loss?

For including our own shame in campaigns that focus on the world’s shame?

For adding a photo of our excess to the gallery of photos of other people’s lack?

For including our own practices in the hunger equation?

For looking at ourselves?

I can’t wait to hear.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Just getting up in the morning can be a struggle. Seeking justice, championing a world in which people flourish, trying to discern God’s will and live into God’s culture in our (or any) times? Exhausting, and often discouraging. But then comes Easter. Refreshed, we start anew!

To celebrate, this wonderful poem by Ronald Wallace:

Blessings

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.

Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me
***

May the Easter season infuse us with hope and renew our commitment to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our Lord all the days of our lives. He is risen indeed!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

I used to wish for a giant returns counter where I could exchange stuff I didn’t need  for stuff I did need. Behind the counter would be a system for redistributing, reusing, or recycling goods, so that no “returns” were ever junked. We’d all get what we needed, less perfectly good stuff would sit idle in closets and garages, and a lot less new stuff would have to be made.

My dream is coming true. It’s called “collaborative consumption” – a trendy new term for the timeworn habit of sharing.

For more details, watch this fabulous TED talk or read this Sunset magazine article on the economy of sharing. But the bottom line is, a world with too much stuff is an opportunity for people to share, swap or pool instead of buying more and more. We are born and bred to share and cooperate, says Rachel Botsman, the young economist leading the TED talk. Hyperconsumption interrupted that pattern, but the internet is bringing it back in a big way in three new forms:

1. “Redistribution markets” that are moving used or pre-owned items from where they aren’t used to where they will be used. Think Craig’s List or swaptree.com, whose slogan is “turn what you have into what you want.” (The 3 Rs are now five: reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose and—implementing my returns counter—redistribute!).
2. “Collaborative lifestyles,” in which people work, live, and stay intentionally. Are you familiar with coworking, where independent workers share an office space and creativity? Couch surfing, which matches budget travelers and homeowners with rooms or couches to spare? Landsharing, which matches gardeners and small farmers with underused yards and acreage? They are fast becoming household terms!
3. “Product service systems” like car sharing that let people pay for the benefit of a product without having to own it  outright—a great option for things with “high idling capacity” like cars and power tools. The typical homeowner will use a power drill for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. Says Botsman, “You need the hole, not the drill!”  So why not rent it from or to someone else?

Collaborative consumption built this community cooker in a Nairobi slum

Does this trend benefit only rich folks with video games to spare? No. Collaborative consumption relies on trust and has always been practiced in communities rich in trust and relationship. Check out this trash-burning community cooker developed in a Nairobi slum, and think about the state of our trust, relationships, and communities.

Collaborative consumption sounds like a basic Christian practice. It’s our job to give away our extra coats and sponsor food pantries. But I wonder whether all that giving keeps us locked in paternalism: I have something, you don’t, you can have mine and I’ll feel good. Collaborative consumption invites us into a more mutual model: I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade. We’re equally gifted: let’s share.

On the ground, hunger programs are brought to life less by money than by people’s dignity, resourcefulness, and willingness to work hard. Their assets contribute to a process you could call “collaborative construction.” But it’s funny how other people’s gifts vanish when we talk about hunger in congregations. We stick to the same old trope, contrasting our abundance with other people’s lack. We have money, they don’t; therefore they are needy and you should write a check.

I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade  or I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s create something new together frees us to see new, more collaborative ministries. Collaboration is harder. It takes a lot more time than writing a check. It changes the relationships between the people involved. It also changes the stories we tell about one another. (David explored this in his post contrasting two videos—one focused on a little boy playing in the dirt with a bleach bottle, and one in which “underprivileged” Native American teens named their strengths.) And it changes us.

The collaborative consumption concept is changing my vision of the giant returns counter. Now I see that showing up with a toaster I don’t need is just the first step. I have to be able to vouch for the condition of my toaster. I have to trust the person offering whatever I swap it for, be it a working radio, five pounds of green beans, or an hour of sewing. If I choose the hour of sewing, I might have to get to know someone new. And it will be slower than buying in the drive-through lane or pulling $20 from an ATM machine….but I think it will be a whole lot more satisfying.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A  Journal

After 10 car-free years, I am a car owner once again.

Shedding my car meant mastering new ways of moving around the world. The alternatives come naturally now, which is why so many of my posts try to encourage—hector, even—readers to take up their carbon-dependent, gas-guzzling beds and walk, ride a bike, or take the bus.

But for a year now I have suffered from what transportation planners call the “last mile” problem. My wonderful local transit hub can get me around and between towns from Canada to Portland, Oregon. But only a handful of buses can get me the three miles to the Skagit Station—all before 6 pm, and never on Sundays. Bicycling is a great option for good weather and daylight savings time, but from November to April my biking day ends by 5 pm—and snow, ice, showers, or 40-mile-per-hour gusts can keep it from starting at all.

My new challenge is to own a car without lapsing back into blind dependence on it. To stay committed to biking, walking, and taking buses FIRST instead of lazily letting the convenience of my car gradually eclipse the other options. To continue to SEE the options and to start figuring out how to overcome that last-mile—or last-three-mile—problem.

Fortunately, trends are going my way. Google Transit is taking the mystery out of planning a public transit trip. Cities like New York and Mexico City declare some areas car-free on weekends. More than half a million members share almost 8000 cars in car-sharing programs across the U.S. (Find the closest to you here) General Motors itself is a partner in the new RelayRides program in San Francisco, a system through which private car owners profit by sharing (for a fee) their cars with neighbors who have been vetted and screened.

I see my car ownership as temporary, a sort of bridge to the world I have been trying to create by not owning one. Perhaps I’ll persuade more people to take my country bus line so we can extend its hours. Perhaps I’ll organize a small car-sharing group among my country neighbors. I have lots of allies, especially among the young.  A recent New York Times article noted that 46 percent of people 18 to 24 would choose access to the Internet over access to their own car. Only 15 percent of their baby-boom parents felt that way. “The iphone is the Ford Mustang of today,” quipped an automotive analyst.

Even more exciting, car ownership is declining among the young. In 1978, 50 percent of 16-year-old Americans obtained their first driver’s license. In 2008, only 30 percent did. My son was over 18 when he got his first license, and at 24, he still has no car. Those with licenses drive less, said the Times:  21- to 30-year-olds now drive eight percent fewer miles than they did in 1995.

Life without a car takes ingenuity, creativity, and commitment. It also costs a lot less. (Buying, registering, insuring, fixing, and fueling a 14-year-old-car in the last six weeks of the year boosted my 2011 expenses by 11 percent.) And it’s getting easier.

My 2012 resolution is to own a car that stays off the road as much as possible. Here’s where I get back to hectoring. Won’t you join me? Get to know your local bus system. Walk to the store. Set up a carpool. Urge your mayor to declare a popular part of town car-free for an afternoon. Dust off your bike. Keep your car, but drive it less. Broaden your transportation strategy to include some more active choices. Together we can figure out the last-mile problem.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

On December 6, St. Nicholas put presents in the shoes of Dutch children. On December 13, candlelit girls in Sweden brought their parents breakfast in bed. Eight days of Hanukkah gift-giving started at sundown on Tuesday the 20th. And we’re cruising into the gift-heavy Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Kwanzaa, and, on January 6, El Día de los Reyes Magos—Three Kings Day.

Gift giving is much older than Christmas. We’ve been giving one another gifts since time immemorial, anthropologists suggest, in order to establish bonds with one another or to show hospitality. Giving a gift can show honor and respect–or intimidate by parading wealth and power. Psychologists say it’s good for us, and that there’s as much pleasure in giving as receiving. Maybe more, said Jean Paul Sartre, who called giving an act of aggression, because it puts the recipient under obligation to the giver. If that’s true, Americans are incredibly aggressive. Don’t you sometimes feel like raising your arms to fend off that barrage of Christmas presents—especially the ones you don’t need or like?

In the days when I wrote and talked about simplifying Christmas, the aggression of shopping and giving bugged me. But no more. I’m in Christmas no-person’s-land – the long empty stretch after kids and before grandkids, when there’s no one around to delight. My decorations are in storage and there’s no tree. I left my musical responsibilities in Chicago and have no choirs to accompany or Christmas Eve services to prepare. Freelancers like me have no staff party. The people on my gift list don’t need much—just a few bars of goat soap and beeswax candles and, of course, a year-end World Hunger gift. This year the holidays are feeling a little too simple!

In the midst of this dullness an online article (which article? which magazine? I lost the link and can’t tell you) asked a startling question: How have we been gifts this year?

Ticking off to-do lists and measuring year-end accomplishments and “progress” feels natural to me. So does totting up what I spent and what I gave. But to reflect on my inherent giftedness—who I have been and what I brought to God’s world in 2011 just by breathing—that’s tough. And profound. Goodbye, gripes about gifts as commodities, braggadocio, and aggression; hello, holy and gift-filled weekend.  Jesus may be the miracle, but all of us are gifts. Blemished, kicked around, miles from perfect—but gifts to one another, even if we don’t know why.

But I do know something about the gifts evident in this blog. Thanks to David, for using scripture to illuminate the systemic injustices that surround us. To Mikka, for her cheerful, practical, I-can-deal-with-this-too optimism about 7 billion earthlings and a 99/1 percent schism. To Jessica, for her passion about ending malaria. To faithful blog readers and commenters and World Hunger network people, for your commitment to walking your talk—a huge gift in our spin-happy world.

Gifts, all of you. And no purchase necessary!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

In October a friend from Holden Village spent a few days with me on her way to Alaska. It was like having a prophet visit. To my dinner table she brought her life as a worker for the Mennonite Central Committee in El Salvador, as a resident of a Catholic Worker house in Portland, Oregon, and as a peace activist who—like her fellow Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren—earns only enough to support herself but not so much that she has to pay the ‘war tax.’

Because she doesn’t own a car, she didn’t find my carless life strange. She was fine riding the bus and bikes everywhere and sleeping on the floor of my teeny little house. Many details of my existence that strike people as odd were completely familiar to her. But watching her move through life with such principle sent me back to my Bible of simple living, Doris Janzen Longacre’s 1980 book, Living More with Less.

This classic taps the wisdom of Mennonite missionaries who refined their simple living skills on international assignments and kept living that way when they came home. Like my Alaska-bound friend Lisa, they always, always walked their talk.

Rejecting the term lifestyle, Doris proposed that Christians should seek to live by five Life Standards. Her book offers wise suggestions for implementing each one of these standards:

1. Do justice. Living by this standard will always draw us more deeply into economics and politics. It’s up to us to draw the lines that link our consumer ways with environmental and justice consequences around the world.
2. Learn from the world community. Our global partners have a lot to share, if we would only listen instead of continually insisting we know it all! Longacre’s book lifts up “overdevelopment” projects proposed by global Mennonites who would like to minister to North Americans drowning in materialism and “maldevelopment.”
3. Nurture people. What could happen if we cared more about other people than we cared about price, convenience, or comfort?
4. Cherish the natural order. What could happen if we remembered that we are stewards, not owners—that God’s world demands our respect, not our thoughtless consumption?
5. Nonconform freely. What could happen if we were more like my friend Lisa and the Mennonites, and a little less worried about what other people think?

Longacre’s gospel-based Life Standards offer a path out of the lifestyle that is choking us. They are also a tool we can us to “occupy ourselves,” as David Creech suggested (quoting David Brooks) in this post. Occupying ourselves can mean recognizing the consequences of our own habits, actions and purchases instead of reflexively seeking to blame scapegoats.

Mikka said the other day that, from a global perspective, almost all of us reading this blog are the One Percent. Instead of insisting we’re not privileged, asking “who, me?” and pointing fingers, let’s start Advent by following what Longacre calls “the path of health outlined by faith: Repent by recognizing and accepting our guilt, be forgiven, and change!”

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

“All those delicious Brussels sprouts, rotting!” I griped to my brother about a neighbor’s garden.

He shrugged and said, “Get used to it.”

In rural western Washington, not everything gets harvested. Something is always left over. There may be no time to cut something or no place to store it. Too much or too little rain. Too many or too few warm dry days. Nobody to pick. Or nobody to buy, if a crop tastes good but looks horrible, or because the same crop ripened elsewhere first—like potatoes in Idaho, this year—and the supermarket buyers have already filled their contracts.

So I’m glad the word gleaning has busted out of the Bible color plate of Ruth in Boaz’s field and is elbowing its way into national consciousness.  When I promised my mother in March  that the fruit trees on our farm wouldn’t just rot on the ground, I didn’t know I’d discover a national movement to connect what’s left in fields with food pantries and soup kitchens. After I tracked down Harvest for Hope of Skagit, which organizes and dispatches gleaners in our valley, I read Nancy Michaelis’s blog about Ample Harvest, matching gardeners and food banks on the national level.

Not the image I remember, but the right gleaning story!

This fall I’ve been living by Ample Harvest’s slogan: “No food left behind!” On a bike errand, I stopped to pick a bag of carrots declared too homely to sell by their growers. Every couple of days I help myself to zinnias and sunflowers whose flower farmer stopped cutting and told me, “Enjoy!” Gleaning for Harvest for Hope, I made new friends and froze a fall of beans for me. Harvest for Hope accepted the 12 pounds of beans I gleaned from my landlady’s garden and will accept the last of the apples from our family tree. (Thank goodness, because apples are the zucchini of Washington state: so plentiful you can’t give them away.)

At one end of this gleaning stand the field, the farmer, and the willing volunteer. At the other end must be cooks and canners—people who can prepare and preserve food—as well as food pantries with freezers, refrigerators, and efficient distribution systems. Without this important element, the beans I glean in Mt. Vernon will rot somewhere else. Fortunately a couple of activists helped persuade US food pantries to retool themselves to accept and distribute fresh produce. Goodbye, commodity cheese. Hello, beets and carrots.

“Canning is the new knitting,” someone said recently. And just in time, because almost everybody has forgotten how. Food preservation classes are popping up everywhere as people like me decide to recover the lost skills of freezing, canning and dehydrating. Or how to use every single scrap of a vegetable, as the New York Times feature  “That’s not trash, that’s dinner!” demonstrates.

Now if only I can convince my neighbor to let me glean her Brussels sprouts…

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity