Ideas for a Livable Tomorrow
7 Notions for New Year
by Jan Lundberg
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Jan Lundberg founded the Sustainable Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988.
It promotes and practices cultural change as key to sustainability. Does economic growth via fossil fuels and materialism provide real security? A sustainable society features car-free living and growing food locally. Communities must return to self-sufficiency for food and energy.
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First off, defeat polluting. You can complain about capitalism, but that leaves bureaucracies and individual "consumers" happy to keep degrading the planet. Today's industrial culture equals the speeding up of entropy. So, each person must defeat the polluter within (oneself and within one's family and community and nation), and then see how to change the rest of the world righteously. More on defeating polluting in the other six nifty notions for sustainability below:
Fix your health. If you destroy your body with cigarettes, eat processed junk that relies on sugar and salt to make palatable, and sit around in a car or in front of a TV, you're deadening yourself and becoming a burden on whomever will be stuck taking care of you. Destroy what destroys you. How can you claim to have good thoughts and claim to be trying to improve your life, your family's well-being, and saving the world from militarism and pollution when you're compromising your health? Or when you tolerate your community's toxification and health-destruction by some bossy employer lording it over the town?
Promote population stabilization. More people ain't what the Earth needs! You can say "it's not the number of people, but their habits" (scarfing down hamburgers, for example) that matter much more. Well, if other species could talk, they'd say they'd like to have some room too please-and I don't mean our creations like the cattle, cats, et al. Also consider, while the U.S. is the gigantic super polluter, and only industrial nation gaining in population, try and have Congress scale way back the massively high legal immigration that pleases the corporate union-busting employers so much. Try adopting a kid rather than getting into somebody's jeans to spread your genes.
Grow your food, learn to forage for it. Additionally, when you buy some, don't buy the fruit from South America if you're in North America or anywhere else outside South America! Next, notice where in the U.S. your food is from. Trucking oranges from Florida to the West Coast is insane, except for the profiteer who can occasionally compete with the West Coast citrus grower. The average piece of food purchased by the eater in the United States travels 1,300 miles. Buy non-packaged foods, bring bulk containers to the market, and pedal or walk-driving can be avoided daily in most places in the U.S.
Move closer to your work, or quit and work closer or in the home, if you drive to work. Surely you don't like the idea of killing Iraqis and Afghanis for their oil. Or rewarding the patriotic car companies and oil corporations. Perhaps you don't know the arithmetic: the average speed of the U.S. motorist is less than 5 MPH (five miles per hour), when all the hours of car-related time (working for money to buy the car, to buy the insurance, to pay for repairs, etc.) are divided into the miles driven. If you don't drive far away most days, you'll know what happens in your community. You'll actually have a community, rather than having an address where you sleep and just enjoy furloughs from the salt mines.
Be an artist or poet. Recognize your humanity and sensitivity, and flaunt it. If you don't think others would be impressed, you're probably right. But that doesn't mean you can't do your art for yourself in your bedroom or under the bridge. And then you could get good at it, and eventually be fun for others when you turn off their TV (or the energy dries up and the power goes down). If you tried the piano, guitar, trombone and singing, and it didn't stick, maybe you had only to try the violin. Ask someone if he or she can play the violin, and the person should at least say, "I don't know, I never tried." When people bring creative skills to share, they shape their own future and improve ties between fellow villagers or neighbors.
You pick number seven. This way I cannot be attacked for forgetting all kinds of great ideas such as "Picket the military recruitment office" or "Depave the nearest parking lot and plant a food garden." "Meditate and do yoga"? I believe in that, especially when I don't have something more fun to do. I am not going to say, for a nomination of number seven, "Turn on your computer and work on your website," or "send an email." I hate computers. But if you're going to email me, and I like you, then I hope you will join me in hypocrisy and send me an email. Then turn off your computer and get a life. I promise to do the same some day. Wasn't there a new song we wanted to concentrate on?
As long as your computer is connected, see the Culture Change website's new ideas by visiting www.CultureChange.org
- – Jan Lundberg
Issue #10, January 1, 2003. Published by the Sustainable Energy Institute.
The Pledge for Climate Protection has 10 steps for sustainable living, and can be seen at Global Warming Pledge
For our No War for Oil webpage, see Not In Our Name
If you are interested in receiving Culture Change's e-letter you can sign up to get Culture Change Letter directly, by clicking here: E-Letter
Jan Lundberg, co-founded the Lundberg Letter, called "the bible of the oil industry," in 1973. Mr. Lundberg ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated for the petroleum industry, utilities and government. He founded the Sustainable Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988.
We promote and practice cultural change as key to sustainability. Does economic growth via fossil fuels and materialism provide real security? A sustainable society features car-free living and growing food locally. Communities must return to self-sufficiency for food and energy.
Culture Change and SEI:
P.O. Box 4347
Arcata
California 95518
USA
Telephone: (707) 826-7775
Fax: (603) 825-2696
E-mail: info@culturechange.org
Website: www.CultureChange.org
Published by Sustainable Energy Institute, a nonprofit charity 501(c)(3) California corporation.
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