“How was your year?” people at Holden Village ask.

They ask because they know that a year ago this month, I left my job, sold my house, saw my son off to grad school in a new city, and, after a few weeks at Holden, moved what was left of my stuff to a shed on a farm in Washington State.

While my stuff has stayed put, I’ve visited 13 states and 5 countries and stayed in 60 different places (many of them more than once), sometimes for one night, sometimes for a month. I’ve done all of this travel without owning a car and nearly all of it without borrowing one.

Few possessions and no rent or mortgage have made this peripatetic year possible. I’ve traveled unencumbered, and I haven’t missed my stuff. After decades of offering hospitality to others, I’ve enjoyed accepting it from others.

Eventually I will unpack, start a new garden, get a new dog, and be the hostess instead of the wanderer. But first, a few more adventures! And then, where I unpack will look a lot different than the home I packed up. It may be a very tiny home, or a mobile home, or a room in someone else’s place.

A year ago these options were hidden to middle-aged me. Young adults have permission to explore living in groups, teepees, or dorms. The very old are expected to shrink their lives down to a modest apartment or a single room. But the rest of us (in the American middle class, anyway) are stuck. Judged on the size of our house, the exclusivity of our address, our brand of car, we only try to own less or consume less when we “have to”—because the economy has gone south, or our job is toast.

Out here on the house-less, stuff-less fringes, I’m feeling free and having a great time.  Now that the eight place settings of sterling silver that used to whisper “you’re a grownup” are on the farm singing to the alfalfa, I can see lots of perfectly pleasant and responsible ways to be a grownup who owns very little.

How those options are described are critical. If I said, “Come with me to a tiny town in the remote wilderness where you can’t get a cell phone signal, you can’t drive your car, you won’t eat much meat, and you’ll have to share a bathroom,” you might politely refuse. But most people who come to Holden Village are too busy enjoying life in community to miss their car or cell phone.

Likewise, an invitation to downsize dressed up in “have to” language may not be appealing. How I wish we overfed, overweight, overscheduled, overconsuming Americans saw living with less not as deprivation but as freedom. Freedom to consider the question, how else might we live? What might we be able to feel, imagine, or experience if we were not so weighed down by our domiciles and possessions? How might we better love and serve one another?

If there’s a little voice in side you saying “this is too much,” pay attention. Nurture it. Consider it an invitation, and see where it takes you. And send me a postcard when you get there!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

Since we humans are so fond of expressing our goals and measuring our progress with numbers, today I offer a handful of measuring sticks for sustainability.

How are you doing on the 100-thing challenge—the quest to pare down your worldly goods to 100 items?

How’s your 100-mile diet going? If you have a big backyard and live in a warm climate, you might be able to enjoy a 100-foot diet.

Does your McMansion gobble up time, energy, and natural resources? How about living in 100 square feet? For a perspective on tiny living spaces OUTSIDE the United States, check out this slide show of residents living in 100-square foot rooms in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estate. [This blog on small living spaces is interesting, too.]

Your 100 things, 100-foot garden, and 100-foot house can find a happy home in a 20-minute neighborhood, a concept that is big in Portland, Oregon. (Though I must point out that in Chicago, I lived in a 5-minute neighborhood!) Kurt Hoelting on Whidbey Island determined that 62 miles was his circumference of home, and then spent a year exploring his home by foot, bike, canoe, bus  – staying out of cars for a year in a mostly rural area that is NOT well-served by public transportation. Trying to make our lives more local is important because our current rate of air travel is not sustainable. Watch this video to learn about love miles–a concept that can’t be quantified!

Now, how about getting your energy use down to 1000 watts per year? Begin by signing up for Wattzon and measuring exactly how many watts you use a year. Most of us use way, way, way more, and that’s a problem. For example, says Wattzon, a 12,000-watt lifestyle is 120 x 120 light bulbs burning permanently, around the clock. Alternative, clean energy sources cannot be ramped up in time to continue this kind of energy use. We have to pare down. Wattzon can help you do that. See a slide show on energy reduction here.

Add up all these numbers, and you get a sustainable, enjoyable, not-so-big life. Are you ready?

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

I’m on vacation. I’m having a great time. And it’s surprisingly sustainable.

Sustainable travel or green travel are expensive-sounding terms that imply vacations in exotic places like Bhutan or Costa Rica, places with jungles or peaks or dangerous rivers, places you fly to (earning fistfuls of carbon-offset credits) to do a dash of volunteering and engage another culture, preferably with a competent indigenous guide. In short, something other people do—other people with a whole lot more money.

The sun sets over the meadow

No jungles here. My brother and I only drove up to South Lake Tahoe to spend the week at a family member’s unrented rental house. It was a cheap – okay, make that free – opportunity to hang out in the mountains in exchange for a little midsummer cleaning.

The big surprise has been how the car has stayed put as we have explored Tahoe’s greatly expanding bike trails and public transportation system.

Like many cities, South Lake Tahoe is working on sustainability. As it implements a sustainability plan designed to “increase its livability and prosperity, reduce the ecological footprint of its residents and improve human and ecological health,” it is beefing up “increased mobility options” to “reduce dependence on the automobile.”

The trolley waits for us at the South Y Transit Center

Their work shows. One day we biked to Camp Richardson and Fallen Leaf Lake on safe, quiet roads and separate paths, loading our bikes onto a water taxi when we traveled back to town. We spent another day swimming, hiking, and exploring the Emerald Bay area thanks to the BlueGo #50 bus route and the summer-only “Nifty 50 Trolley.” The $5 all-day bus pass meant we didn’t have to compete with thousands of other people for the few parking spots along Highway 89.

Every evening I have walked along the beautiful Upper Truckee Marsh, a 513-acre wetlands restored by city and state agencies in order to filter out nutrients and pollutants that threaten Tahoe’s clear blue water. During the day I have walked past heavy equipment operators upgrading the stormwater management system—part of South Lake Tahoe’s plans for “infrastructure that improves water and air quality.”

Just about the only stated sustainability goal I haven’t seen much evidence of is local food. As the city’s plan says, “Climate and elevation make local food production a challenge.” So do tourist expectations of abundant, gambling-subsidized meals. And I confess, I enjoyed every last non-local, non-organic, completely unsustainable bite of the ample Forest Buffet at Harrah’s Stateline!

I didn’t expect to live sustainably at Tahoe. In fact, I was thinking, oh well, we’re driving there and back, and this is the land of the RV and the jet ski, so for a week, I’ll just set aside my own practices and enjoy what’s available, and maybe we’ll drive the recycling back home. What a delight to discover that South Lake Tahoe is going more than half way to meet me, doing the hard work of envisioning, planning, and setting up systems that make it easier for people to live or visit sustainably.

So, entirely by accident, I ended up taking my principles with me on vacation. You can do it on purpose. Where are you vacationing this summer? How are you getting there? Can you avoid flying, and drive or take the train instead? When you get there, what kind of systems can you participate in to avoid driving, generating waste, polluting or overusing water, and overconsuming local resources?

Do your research ahead of time, because alternatives may still be “alternative” and underpublicized. I had to work to find the Nifty50 Trolley schedule, in part because, with only one an hour, the transit system really can’t handle a big passenger load. It’s a great first step, but it will take many more riders and lots of publicity to make it grow.

If you can’t find any alternatives to the tried-and-true, to individual transportation, to unsorted garbage, to chain-store purchases, then you can spend your vacation politely asking for them. Create the demand.

May all of our vacations help nurture another community’s sustainability goals along with our own commitments, so that sustainable travel becomes the way all of us go on vacation.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

“He smote the bank!” cackles Jean Stapleton, after John Travolta, as the archangel Michael, casually unleashes a bolt of lightning in the movie “Michael.”

Earthquakes, oil spills, floods, droughts—there’s a lot of smiting going on, and a lot of preparing for it, not with sackcloth and ashes but catastrophe scenarios and emergency response plans and drills.

I discovered this last week at a talk on the Great Storm of 1861-1862—the one that turned California’s Central Valley into a 300-mile long puddle; the one that forced the California state government to move to San Francisco; the one that damaged 7/8^ths of all housing and destroyed one out of every eight homes and a third of all taxable property in California.

Sacramento in 1862

This fascinating, safely distant story of a smitten state was followed by an anxiety-generating winter storm scenario that the U.S. Geological Survey is creating. The hypothetical date of this “extreme precipitation event” is January 2011; May 2011 is when the agencies and emergency managers and responders will hold their practice drill. Based on the understanding that California has a “mega storm” every 300 years (and destructive as it was, 1861-62 wasn’t a mega storm), these experts are:

…examining the possibility, cost, and consequences of floods, landslides, coastal erosion and inundation; debris flows; biologic impacts; physical damage such as property loss from wind, flood, and landslide; and lifeline impacts such as bridge scour [when the sand and rocks around a bridge give way, leading to collapse], road closures, and levee failures. Consideration is given to the disruption of water supply and the impacts on ground-water pumping, seawater intrusion and water supply degradation. The scenario is depicting the economic consequences of these damages in terms of repair costs and business interruption, public-health implications, and emergency response.

The USGS guy painted the picture starkly and dramatically. When he finished, the room was silent. Finally the emcee stood to thank the speakers and said, a little shakily, “well, I guess it’s time we all move to the foothills.” We took home delightful reading: “The ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario,” which modeled the aftereffects of a hypothetical 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault as the morning rush hour was ending. That Southern California earthquake drill, involving 5000 emergency responders and 5 million citizens, has already taken place. (Watch this USGS video on the earthquake scenario and  the ARkStorm winter storm project, and check out the Old Testament imagery.)

Appalled and intrigued, I went to the Internet, and discovered I could learn how a New Madrid mega-earthquake would affect the Midwest, where almost no anti-seismic measures are in place. Briefly, five to eight states would be affected; local mutual aid would not work; bridges over the Mississippi could be uncrossable for several hundred miles, for years; transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity to much of the east coast would be affected for many months, along with the supply of wheat and grains to other parts of the world; there would be significant out-migration. (Question for discussion in this FEMA exercise: what could or would emergency managers in one local jurisdiction like Memphis do when faced with such a catastrophe?)

Or I could choose a scenario for a slow-developing catastrophe like Lake Mead going dry, leaving 22 million people in three states without water. (Discussion question: How can emergency managers in Las Vegas prepare to respond?)

Or I could browse peak gas scenarios, 2012 Armageddon scenarios, global warming scenarios, armchair quarterback analyses of the Black Plague, the Irish Potato Famine, the 1917 Influenza Pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, or Limits to Growth, the 1972 scenario published by the Club of Rome that projected nine different outcomes based on the variables of world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Only one of those nine is hopeful; the others are so dire, a catastrophe response plan would be pointless.  Recent studies confirm (says Wikipedia) that current “changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book’s predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21^st century.”

Things are not looking good.

It’s tempting to call my efforts to live a sustainable life foolish. To quit trying to support alternative systems and behavior. To chuck  my bicycle for a really big car. But I think I’ll stay the course.

Why? For starters, imagining catastrophe is the first step in trying to mitigate it. The literature of catastrophe helps us grasp the scope of what we face, and discern what part of it is in our control. The silver lining to spending a sunny  afternoon imagining my hometown underwater was learning just how many people are collaborating on the response.

Second, letting go of the idea that everything is in our control is just plain healthy. No amount of clean living and recycling can prevent an earthquake!

Third, there is power in individual and collective action. Martin Luther thought so, too. Asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he said, “Plant an apple tree today.”

Smiting happens. But faith kicks in where reason ends. I’m voting for faith, for the apple tree, for the bicycle helmet. And I’m  spending tomorrow curled up with “A Guide to Emergency Preparedness for Sacramento County.”

Anne Basye,  Sustaining Simplicity

I really appreciated Mark Goetz’s June 11 post, “Ziplock Bags and Deliberated Choices” about decisions that we don’t make ourselves but let the dominant cultural “flow” determine for us.

Swimming upstream is hard work. Ridicule is usually involved, as Mark has discovered as a washer and reuser of plastic bags. But take heart, Mark! Your commitment can help turn around a culture.

Mr. and Mrs. Barham were the parents of my best friend Janet. Today they would be Abe and Val, but in 1970, one didn’t address one’s friends’ parents by their first names. One also took for granted that smokers could light up whenever and wherever they pleased: grocery stores, movie theaters, offices, everywhere but church!

In California in 1970, it was more acceptable to march against the Vietnam War than to ask someone to extinguish a cigarette. When a dinner guest drew out a pack and asked my anti-war, non-smoking parents, “mind if I smoke?” they were too polite to refuse.

The Barhams weren’t. Early members of GASP—the Group Against Smoking in Public—they put up signs, passed out fliers, and lobbied city hall and state government to begin considering the rights of non-smokers. For teens like Janet and me, trying to fit in with the prevailing culture, their passion and commitment were really embarrassing. I would shrink down low in the car whenever they stopped to pick up a new batch of supplies.

Forty years later, the clouds of smoke that once fogged restaurants and church social halls have been banished forever. And the Barhams did this! Their willingness not just to resist but be considered wackos invited others to question and eventually dismantle one huge cultural assumption and replace it with a new one. Now the rights of non-smokers are upheld by a whole system of laws and customs and behaviors that relieve shy people of the need to say, “why yes, I do mind.”

Val Barham died a year ago; Abe Barham died in May. I wonder how many old GASP posters and bumper stickers are turning up this week, as Janet and her sisters clean out the house where they lived for 55 years.

When people feel discouraged about whether we’ll ever stop driving, ever stop polluting, ever stop throwing things away, ever stop doing whatever dismays them and start doing something healthier and fairer, I bring up the Barhams. To me, they’re proof that when individual commitment links to a larger process of advocacy, the fringe becomes the vanguard becomes the status quo.

Keep washing those plastic bags, Mark!

Anne Basye,  Sustaining Simplicity

For me, the prime benefit of the accompaniment approach to global mission and development is how it prods us to replace  “over there” thinking (as in, “let’s pray or send money to those poor folks suffering somewhere else from a problem we have nothing to do with”) with a “right here” attitude (as in, “how might our own political and economic structures and personal habits be connected to that terrible problem afflicting people somewhere else? And how is that same problem present right here?”).

So I’m glad to see that at least some people are connecting the dots between our personal driving habits and our national catastrophe in the Gulf. And I was happy that blog follower Aleta Chossek of Milwaukee lifted up this “I Am” prayer for the Gulf from Frederic and MaryAnn Brussat.

As they say on their website, “Spirituality and Practice: Resources for Spiritual Journeys,”  “The spiritual truth is this: We are the polluted water of the Gulf and we are the polluters.”  In all our responses to the oil spill, may we not lose sight of this truth–and instead of screaming at BP, may we calmly put down our car keys and pick up a bus pass or a bicycle instead.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

In Guyana and Suriname, it’s hot. Mosquitos and rain are my constant companions. Right now, I’ve got one eye on the sky, so I can grab the sheets and towels from the line before the rain begins. The longer they can hang outdoors, the better, because it’s so humid, it can take two days for clothes to dry. It rains so often and so copiously, I don’t feel guilty taking several showers a day.

I’m sweating inside the “Lungs of the Planet”–the Suriname-Guyana portion of the Amazon rainforest, home to a multitude of plant and animal species, and an important ally in fending off global warming, as these trees recycle carbon dioxide into 20% of the world’s oxygen.

95% of Suriname and 75% of Guyana are covered by rainforest. Considered developing countries (scoring  #97 and #114 respectively on the Human Development Index, out of a possible182), they are urged by conventional economists to increase their wealth by kissing their forests goodbye. Guyana listened to the World Bank and the IMF in 1991, and awarded a 50-year, gazillion-dollar contract to a Malaysian logging company. That’s one reason why it has so much less forest than Suriname today.

Now that contract has been revoked, and Guyana’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo, is promoting an alternative point of view. Instead of earning money by destroying our rain forest, he’s asking, why not keep our forests intact, and focus on harvesting their renewable products like nuts, fruits, medicinal plants? Better yet, how about paying us to leave those forests alone? For his advocacy, Mr. Jagdeo was recently named a “Champion of the Earth” by the United Nations.

In Guyana, people are very proud of the president's new title and international recognition

What Mr. Jagdeo is talking about is a concept called ecological or ecosystems services. From this perspective, the rainforest doesn’t have to be turned into furniture in order to have value. It’s intrinsically economically valuable, because it takes carbon dioxide out of the air, and sustains animal, plant, and human life. Also, the services it provides would be expensive or impossible for humans to duplicate, like figuring out how to turn all that CO2 back into oxygen by ourselves.

The concept of paying something to do nothing with a natural asset is hard to grasp for people like us, who are used to paying for something in order to consume or do something with it.  By contrast, this is not buying, but paying just to let something… be.

I’m excited about it, though. In my view, the economic paradigm that demands continual growth is going to have to change if we are to adopt more sustainable ways of living. Ecosystems services is an early sign that our whole idea of what constitutes profit and success will shift.

You can read more about payments for the ecological services of rainforests here For rainforest countries, these are important tools for preserving the forest and earning much-needed income.

Consumers like us need tools that help reduce our consumption of rainforest products. At the website of Rainforest Relief: exposing and challenging rainforest consumption you can learn how to avoid buying tropical wood products,  and see who the world’s biggest buyers are. How astonishing to learn that the government of New York City is the biggest consumer of tropical hardwoods in the US! It uses the wood for outdoor boardwalks.

It’s a two-step process. As Suriname, Guyana and other countries get paid for the intrinsic ecological value of their resources, fewer tropical wood products will be sold.  Demand will go down as we convince NYC and others to replace tropical wood with recycled plastic lumber, but income in rainforest countries will rise as alternative compensation becomes more common.

I look forward to the day when I can profit in all senses from the very existence of the rainforest. Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple more weeks of sweaty, firsthand appreciation ahead of me!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Cellphones are everywhere in Guatemala. You might see one peeking from the skirt of a girl in beautiful, traditional traje, on the dashboard of a bus, or in the shirt pocket of the man collecting quetzales from passengers squeezing out of an overstuffed microbus. Cellphones and texts intensify connections in a society that is already very communal. Ipods, which I only see used by young tourists from Europe and North America, sever us from the surroundings we paid so much to reach.  And when we are lost in our music, what are we missing? The late poet Bill Holm wonders in this little poem, which appeals to my luddite side.

EARBUD

Earbud–a tiny marble sheathed in foam
to wear like an interior earring so you
can enjoy private noises wherever you go,
protected from any sudden silence.
Only check your batteries, then copy
a thousand secret songs and stories
on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket.
You are safe now from other noises made
by other people, other machines, by chance,
noises you have not chosen as your own.
To get your attention, I touch your arm
to show you the tornado or the polar bear.
Sometimes I catch you humming or talking to the air
as if to a shrunken lover waiting in your ear.

Bill Holm. Playing the Black Piano. Milkweed Editions, 2004.

Enjoy your old-fashioned ears today, and all that they bring you.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

What does living for a year outside your own culture–eating, sleeping, working, and playing in another language–teach you about your own cultural assumptions? Last Saturday I found out, as three participants in the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission program met me for coffee in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Stuff

“I’m learning the difference between needs and wants,” said Katherine, who tutors children in a very low-income area. “At home I would be saying ‘I need shoes,’ but in my job, I think ‘I need duct tape!” All three young people agreed that Mexico is teaching them how to save and re-use things. “There is no Salvation Army here, where people take their excess goods.” But, notes Peter, as consumerism creeps in, “there are more disposable products and more garbage, and the trucks pick up more often.” Peter is working with a group that is trying to close a municipal landfill that does not meet environmental standards and is contaminating water downstream. Katie, meanwhile, has been working with an indigenous group in Guerrero that uses plastic bags as a weaving material.

Energy and natural resources

Living in homes where water is received only 2 or 3 days a week (it gets pumped from city pipes up to a storage tank on the roof, where it is dispensed through a home’s plumbing), all three young people (and me, too!)  learned to take “dry showers.” You turn on the water to get wet, turn it off to soap up, and turn it back on to rinse. Pete, who lives in a rural area, builds a fire in order to heat his water. “You see the energy it takes to get hot water if you have to make a fire! I hadn’t really thought, before, that the energy it takes to heat water has to come from somewhere.”  All three will take their awareness of finite water supply back to the states.

Community and hospitality

“The hospitality shown to strangers in Mexico is amazing,” Katherine told me. “You are offered food, drink, and a seat at the table even when they don’t know you! In the US we are more guarded. You need an invitation first.¨ In the indigenous community of Tlalma where Katie has been working, Katie is learning about the importance of touch, of connecting with others, of sharing the day, of learning from others.  Experiencing this depth of community makes returning to the U.S. difficult, I learned while participating in nine years of ELCA Summer Missionary Conferences. One day you’re immersed in a community where everything is shared–and the next day you’re in a place where doors are closed. “I’m lonely,” one returning missionary told me. “People don’t invite us home for dinner. All they do is ask us out for coffee.”

What is development?

Acknowledging that their host families faced real economic difficulties and that water can be scarce, the YAGM youth reflected on what “authentic development” might look like. “Does everything in Mexico have to look like our touristy idea of it before people will consider it developed? Can we measure relationship, and how authentically people are growing in community?” asked one. “The U.S. and Canada are not the standard for measuring others,” said Katie, who has seen how judgmental visitors can be about garbage  in her indigenous community. “Our garbage is just better hidden!” she said.

“The owners of the problem are the people affected by it, not us,” Katie concluded. “But Americans and Canadians can’t put themselves in a place where we see what it is like to be told ‘this is what you lack, this is what you need.'”  

These three young people work in supporting roles alongside Mexican colleagues who are owners of the problem. They share their lives with Mexican host families, and meet monthly to reflect on their experiences. In July, they will return to the States, taking with them their new perspectives on the world and how to live in it as a Christian. Give thanks for their valor, their integrity, their enthusiasm, and their commitment to carving out alternatives!

Anne Basye, “Sustaining Simplicity“