The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [124]
Three Reasons to Reactivate Your Inner Citizen
1. Participating in strong, vibrant communities makes us happier and healthier.
There’s lots of evidence that the single biggest contribution to our happiness is the quality of our social relationships.86 People with strong social ties tend to live longer and be healthier. Strong communities also have less crime and survive disasters better because neighbors watch out for one another and are more likely to raise a voice when they see a potential problem.
As just one example: the environmentalist filmmaker Judith Helfand is making a film about a massive heat wave in Chicago in 1995 that killed about six hundred people.87 She explains that the greatest common denominator among the victims was that they were socially isolated. They didn’t have friends or family or trusted neighbors to notice they hadn’t been out of their house lately, or to check that their air conditioners were working well.88 In fact, three-quarters of all Americans don’t know their neighbors.89 Judith argues that the best way to prevent deaths from future heat waves is not the policy of handing out discount air conditioner coupons, but pro viding community-building activities that strengthen social ties throughout the year.
2. A vibrant community lifestyle, as opposed to a strong individualist lifestyle, lessens our toll on the planet.
Having stronger local communities means we buy less Stuff, use less energy, consume fewer resources because we can share things and help one another. The more resources we can get locally—from vegetables to borrowed hand tools—the less energy is spent transporting this Stuff all over the planet. Some great examples of this idea being put into practice are the success of farmers markets across the country, or the Tool Lending Library in the Berkeley Public Library system: anyone with a library card can borrow hammers, drills, ladders—for free!
3. Reinvigorating that citizen muscle will rebuild public participation in politics and generate real collective solutions to the considerable problems we’re facing on this planet.
This point is really important. When we allow the consumer part of ourselves to dominate, our thinking about anything—from which product to buy to attitudes about recycling or global warming—skews toward favoring ourselves as individuals (or families), rather than as part of the larger community. Then the option that seems best is always the fastest, cheapest, easiest, and safest for me and my family. But when we act from our community or citizen selves, we can think more broadly. We consider the impacts of our actions (i.e., how will this purchase or this action influence the broader environment, workers, the climate, communities?) and, importantly, we can broaden our thinking about strategies to make change. We can go beyond that limiting arena of consumer action, which is what we really need to do, since the solutions we need simply aren’t for sale in the store! So, instead of “What can I, as an individual consumer, do?” we can ask, “What can we, as a community, as citizens, do to fix this problem once and for all?”
And you know what is good about that? Joining up with others around a shared goal is fun! It makes us happy. Richard Layard, economist and pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says that “the greatest happiness comes from absorbing yourself in some goal outside yourself.”90 How fortunate that the very thing that will solve challenges like universal health care, poverty, climate chaos, and water scarcity turns out to be the thing that makes us most happy! Imagine the positive feedback loop: if we spend less time watching TV and shopping, and more time building community and engaging in civil society, then our community and our world become better, more fulfilling, more fun, so we want to engage with them more. Who wants to watch five hours of TV a day when we could instead be gathered around a big dinner table with neighbors and friends?
Equalizing Consumption
So. A big part of the solution is