Bill McKibben says we’re stuffed

We’ve eaten, developed and drilled to near oblivion, says the environmental writer. It’s time to realize that having more stuff is not the road to paradise. Oh, really?

…The supply of fossil fuels that has put an end to scarcity in much of the Western world and continues to drive the dizzying economic growth of China and India, McKibben argues, is “a one-time gift.” And rather than continue to gorge, we ought to be investing our surplus in figuring out how to live on less. The good news is that while we have already made our planet sick, we are beginning to notice when we have consumed enough: when more no longer makes us happier. Here and there we have begun to scale back our economies, to try to get more of what we need from our neighbors, both because we want to do less damage and because we enjoy it.

McKibben takes up the cause championed by the economist E.F. Schumacher in his classic book “Small Is Beautiful” and by the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry (to whom the book is dedicated) and gives it fresh urgency and a human face. He chronicles a year spent eating exclusively from the valley around Lake Champlain in Vermont, where he works as a writer in residence at Middlebury College — mainly to prove to himself that it can be done without suffering too great a deprivation. He visits with local farmers, politicians and brewers, but also makes trips to factories and sprawling cities in China and a tiny refusenik village in Bangladesh to see how the oil-mad global economy and its alternatives are playing out in the developing world.

“Somewhere there’s a sweet spot,” McKibben writes, “that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time, here and around the world.”

Salon.com