Making the Good Life Last: Four Keys to Sustainable Living (BK Life) - Softcover

Schuler, Michael

 
9781576755709: Making the Good Life Last: Four Keys to Sustainable Living (BK Life)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1576755703 ISBN 13: 9781576755709
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In our materialist culture, the idea of “the good life”—fancy cars, designer clothes, once-in-a-lifetime vacations—leaves even those few who can afford it feeling anxious, empty, and dissatisfied. Michael Schuler deconstructs the assumption that consumption and constant stimulation equal happiness. He shows how, by applying the principles of sustainability to our personal lives, we can discover treasures of perennial value: a beautiful and healthy earth home, enduring relationships, strong communities, work that contributes to the common good, and play that restores our bodies and lifts our souls.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A fifth-generation native of Dixon, Illinois, a modest town straddling the Rock River, Michael A. Schuler returned with his family to the upper reaches of the same watershed in 1988, after an absence of twenty years. Since then, they have made their home in Madison, Wisconsin, where Michael has served as senior minister of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, a congregation that has grown from 500 to 1,500 adult members during his tenure. In the fall of 2008 the Society completed a sustainably designed, LEED- certified, 23,000-square-foot addition to its original Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Meeting House in keeping with the organic principles that America’s greatest architect once championed.

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A Personal Awakening

A four-month sabbatical in late 2005 lent both substance and a sense of urgency to a question that had been nagging at me for quite some time: what would it take, and what would it mean, to move toward a more sustainable way of living?

My wife, Trina, and I were fortunate to have been offered the use of a lovely home in northwest Tucson for this period of writing and reflection. Tucson is the second largest city in Arizona and reputedly the most progressive metropolis in the desert Southwest. Its neighborhoods literally fill the cavity between four rugged mountain ranges. Fast-moving traffic hums along the wide thoroughfares that crisscross the desert, connecting the urban area’s growing population to a plethora of strip malls, office complexes, and recreational facilities. New residential and commercial developments continue to spring up at the peripheries, scaling the Santa Catalina foothills and fingering north through the Sonora Desert toward Phoenix.

Over 700,000 human beings now live in the Tucson area, and for Pima County as a whole the numbers climb to almost a million. Historically, the inhospitable climate of southern Arizona made it unattractive to all but the hardiest of indigenous peoples, the 2Tohono O’odham. Even the Spanish found little in the area to recommend permanent settlement, at least not on the scale of an El Paso or a Santa Fe.

Tucson is, therefore, a fairly young city by southwestern standards. A settlement of little consequence until the 1880s, it has existed as a viable center of human habitation for less than a century and a quarter. But with the presence of a major university and a nearby military installation, and with a steady influx of legions of sun lovers from the continent’s colder regions, Tucson has grown rapidly and somewhat randomly since World War II.

The community’s popularity has produced its share of negative results. Gazing south from the Catalina foothills during morning rush hour, one often has difficulty locating the downtown through a low-lying bank of unhealthy-looking yellow smog, a phenomenon created almost exclusively by a flood of auto commuters. The standard of living in Tucson is woefully unbalanced; as a result, crimes against property are climbing, and in their wake, the number of economically segregated, gated communities is growing. Residents express worry about such developments, as well as the steady deterioration of Tucson’s unique southwestern ambience and its overall quality of life. Still, any effort to control growth or intelligently manage further development inevitably falters before the irrefutable claims of the free market and the individual citizen’s presumed right to personal gain. Prior to the 2008–09 recession, officials estimated that Greater Tucson would gain another half million residents in the next thirty to forty years—a prospect that had local construction and real estate interests licking their lips in anticipatory delight.

However, for a Sun Belt community Tucson does seem relatively enlightened. While Greater Phoenix appears to be determined to repudiate its native desert environment, Tucson has chosen to accept and even to embrace it. Houses in Tucson almost without exception eschew green turf and feature natural, desert plantings. Drip irrigation systems are the rule, and per capita water consumption is significantly lower than in comparable southwestern cities.1

Furthermore, while its public transportation system is unexceptional, Tucson has established and continues to expand an 3admirable network of bike routes (of which many citizens take full advantage). The city is reasonably clean, its public parks attractive, and the populace generally friendly and conscientious.

Perhaps because I lived there only temporarily and have no personal stake in Tucson, it was easier for me to size up the situation and ponder the question that too few of the city’s residents seem to be asking: Is this community truly sustainable?

Tucsonans could not possibly, in their current numbers, live off the land. The environment itself is capable of sustaining only a very few human beings. The community ultimately and absolutely depends upon imported power and commodities and, most crucially, the wholesale extraction of what in the Southwest is essentially a nonrenewable resource: fresh water. Like that of its southwestern counterparts, Tucson’s success has been achieved not by embracing but by defiantly opposing the harsh laws of the local ecosystem. For this community to remain viable, it must receive huge daily transfusions of lifeblood from elsewhere. This explains how it has managed to grow to such staggering proportions and to create an immense oasis of comfort and prosperity in the bleakest of environments.

These facts receive only occasional and cursory mention in the local media, and generally they are rebutted by politicians, entrepreneurs, and journalists extolling the desirability—nay, the necessity—of further growth (the lead editorial in the November 14, 2005, edition of the Arizona Daily Star cordially invited Californians fleeing that state and its high home prices to relocate in affordable southern Arizona). Nevertheless, I have the impression that people in Tucson do sense the precariousness of their situation and realize how little it would take for the prickly pear and saguaro to reclaim their ancient dominion. But as long as faucets are flowing and the air conditioners are keeping the blazing desert sun at bay, it remains possible to bracket such fears and go blithely about one’s daily business, and even invite more business.


A Day of Reckoning?

Who can say when the systems of artificial life-support upon which Tucson and a half-dozen other overzealous and overbuilt southwestern communities depend will begin to fail? I am certainly 4no authority on such matters, but simple common sense tells me that the day of reckoning is not too distant. The populations have grown too large and are far too profligate for the status quo to be maintained, much less improved upon.

Nor are the peoples of arid Arizona the only ones who need to ask this question. Florida has become an environmental basket case. In few places has growth occurred so rapidly and in such haphazard fashion. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, of 3,400 applications for a permit to destroy a Florida wetland submitted in 2003, the Corps of Engineers denied only one. A developer’s paradise, Florida has sacrificed so much of its natural heritage and become so crowded and congested that someone like me, who came of age on its southwest coast just three decades ago, barely recognizes his old haunts. Ironically, further development may soon be stymied in Florida and throughout the drought-stricken Southeast by a dearth of fresh water.


Problems in the Heartland

Unfortunately, it is by no means necessary to travel to Cactus Country or to the Sunshine State to appreciate the scope and depth of this problem. My family’s home for the past twenty years has been Madison, Wisconsin—a relatively small, stable, and compact city by comparison with sprawling Tucson or Orlando. Nevertheless, the Greater Madison area has grown significantly during my time here, with land-hungry suburbs and exurbs gobbling up prime farmland and air quality advisories becoming increasingly common on sultry summer days. Frankly, I never thought I’d see the day when Madison residents would be urged to curtail outdoor exercise because of high ozone readings.

Equally unsettling has been the deterioration of the local watershed. Historically, Madison has been known and frequently lauded as the “City of the Lakes.” Even today, it isn’t uncommon for an angler to hook a...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576755703
ISBN 13 
9781576755709
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
248
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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