Everyone feels the happiness, the ease, of summer. This year I noticed something a bit new, though. I’ve spent the last several years developing a critique of current American “civilization” that began with a deepening awareness of the perilousness of climate change. It expanded–because I’m a critic by nature–to include my understanding of what Peak Oil was going to mean, to seeing the effects of our economic recession as a symptom of collapse, to a sense of the depth of cultural denial of the crisis. I’ve faced real despair about the path of human existence–not to put too fine a point on it! It’s been rough. And of course you’re all here with me, aren’t you?

And then, the summer of 2010 dawned, and I was happy. I was happy despite the heat, the ongoing saga of building the JP Green House, and some pretty serious family trouble. I was so happy creating my garden (out of a weedy and abandoned city lot) that I charged out each morning at dawn to work, and a couple times nearly fainted in the heat around noon. I was so pleased with my handsome, quirky sons that I took endless photographs of them to post on Facebook. I took pleasure, even, in the premature demise of my car, which gave me the opportunity to join Zipcar, study bus routes, and buy cool biking gear.

I think I discovered the practice of joy.

Or rediscovered. I know that joy is a practice, and not just a blessing randomly bestowed. The practice came alive for me through my garden, my children, my bicycle. But it was more noticeable in certain situations: Namely summer camp.

Now I’m a bit old for summer camp, but still I indulge. Each year my boys and I spend a week in Maine at a faith-based camp by the sea for families, where we sing, make art, worship and swim in the ocean with a crowd of regulars who come back every year at the same time. The other place I call “camp” is a family cottage in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, where my sisters and I gather our seven children (ages 2-13) for a month by the sea. Woods Hole can be described in a nutshell: We do nothing; it’s divine.

These two experiences have certain qualities in common: They involve groups of people of all ages, allow almost no personal space, are based outdoors, and involve ample unstructured time for play, exercise and creativity.

I hear people describe other such sweet places: Camps of all sorts, vacation homes, annual backpacking trips, music festivals. What they have in common are the same things I described above.
We retreat to these havens, have wonderful times, and we ask ourselves why all of life can’t be this way. Then we go home to the constricted lives we lead in school, at work, in the nuclear family (which I have come to feel is just too small to contain the big dramas of life.)

What internal forces of punishment deny us the life of an endless summer? It’s clear that we know how to live well, so why don’t we? We know that less is more, that the best things in life are not things. (Hey, cliches exist for a reason!) To top it all off is the clear fact that to live simply, in community, close to the land, is the very definition of sustainability.

And yes, Mom, I do realize we have to work, and that “life can’t be just one long vacation.”

I’d like to hear what you think. We seem to know exactly what we need–why don’t we make it happen?

Dmitry Orlov

Not much seems to ruffle Orlov, who describes his work as the “comparative theory of superpower collapse.” Russian-American and fluent in both cultures, Orlov has made his name on his blog ClubOrlov with beautifully reasoned comparisons of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the coming collapse of the United States (already underway, depending on how you view the recent economic crisis).

Orlov is a collapse theorist’s collapse theorist. He isn’t out to impress anyone with the facts behind peak oil or climate change — he leaves that to colleagues like Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler. You can read him or leave him — he doesn’t believe people are persuaded by logic or evidence.

“Contemporary mainstream culture and unbridled growth … is not now and was never a rational proposition. It is the realization of dark, irrational, self-destructive urges, which were programmed into us through some evolutionary accident, and which are now, and for a short time longer, being given their fullest expression by the availability of cheap and abundant energy,” he explains in one of his essays, “The Despotism of the Image.”

It’s not cheerful material. What makes Orlov more interesting than the many gloomy and over-credentialed scientists, sociologists, economists, and environmentalists producing a steady stream of books about climate change, peak oil, and economic collapse is his way of thinking things through with cool logic and telling detail.

For example, in “Thriving in the Age of Collapse,” Orlov describes the predicament and options of several typical Americans, including a middle-aged couple named Mike and Mary, with grown children:

Mike and Mary should brace themselves for some bad news. The first piece of bad news is that their retirement is going to be cancelled … If Mike and Mary’s plan is to live out their golden years in a suburban house, driving to and fro, then they clearly do not have a plan and will gradually lose control of their lives. Almost immediately, their house will become too expensive to heat. Next, it will become impossible for them to continue driving, due to gasoline rationing and shortages. Next, electricity will be cut off. For a time, they may continue to be supplied with food by some community-based service.

At some point, if they are lucky, they will be evacuated to some hastily organized compound — most likely a dormitory or a barrack with cots and a television set in the corner, which is mostly off due to lack of electricity, and plenty of blank walls to stare at.

Just when you are thinking Orlov is heartless and a bit smug in describing the futures of most of us hapless Americans, he switches to a brighter mode. Mike and Mary might very well rise to the occasion of the crisis, putting their career skills as a teacher and businessman to work in their community by creating a school in their home, negotiating a rainwater-capture system for their neighborhood, and organizing rent strikes against absentee landlords. Orlov’s faith in human resilience is variable, but present.

At his best, Dmitry Orlov paints very credible visions of the future, many of them based on his observations of Russians in their time of crisis. Like almost every European I meet these days, he presumes that we all accept that Americans are foolish, coddled, and naive. (I usually just duck my head and nod humbly.) It’s worth the shaming to read some of the gems of his observations, like this one, from “Social Collapse Best Practices“:

My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.

Orlov has written two books — Reinventing Collapse, which recently won a silver medal Independent Publishers Award (watch for a second edition in the spring), and the samizdat Hold Your Applause. Most of his essays can be found on his blog ClubOrlov.  He says his future includes more writing, and — as soon as his sailboat is properly refitted — setting out on a sea voyage with no set point of return. He does not seem worried.

It was an easy decision to make, after I took my soon-to-be-ex car into the mechanic for a tune-up and came out minus $2,500; and after the 45-minute car trip to Chinatown (which is two miles away); and the stepped-up parking-ticket issuance of the past year (state budget crisis, perhaps?); and the gas prices; and getting the bumper dinged while it parked in front of my house. Plus the utter unlovliness of my car is at its most obvious in February, with a thin coating of salt and mud covering every outer surface, and the interior afflicted with the same, plus a heavy sprinkling of Goldfish-cracker crumbs.

There’s also the peer-pressure issue: None of the climate activists drive around here.  They bike, they walk, they tow their groceries and their babies for miles in fierce Boston traffic and fierce Boston winters. They’ve all been doored and flung and middle-fingered. And they’re all about 10 pounds lighter than I am.

Here’s another unimpressive reason: I’m just a cheapskate. The new less-mobile me should save $2,000 to $3,000 every year.

Yesterday, I used a long metro ride to consider all the pros and cons of car-free life. Got stuck trying to imagine getting the boys to hockey practice without wheels. Worried about how much our camping trips would cost with a rented vehicle. But then I had a lively taxi ride home with a Russian cabbie who was—like all Boston cab drivers–also a civil engineer, and spoke four languages.

Decided the hassles would be worth it. Oh, and then there’s that low-carbon thingy we’re into …

I was lucky to find an old friend on Facebook recently, and then to have breakfast with him in Washingon D.C., where we were both attending conferences.  Eric and I spent a summer together in NIcaragua in the 80s, and now he’s a professor of physics at a reputable university, and I am someone who is building a zero-carbon house, with thick padded walls, and making it known to all and sundry that I think we’re likely headed for social collapse.  It was Eric who suggested that I wear the tinfoil hat. I challenged him to a debate on the subject. Here’s my part of our email exchange, which summarizes my answer to his question “Do you really believe that we’re in a state of collapse?”

“The short answer is, yes I do, but I’d like to elaborate a bit, because I can see that you fall into a category of people in my life (friends and family), who are worried that I’ve become ungrounded and perhaps apocalyptic.

With people as educated as you, I generally just say “consider the evidence”, and leave it at that. With those I feel don’t have the interest in doing so, I change the subject. But it’s become clear that I need to be able to back myself up with facts and figures and reliable professional opinions, so I’m practicing doing that. Bear with me.

The economic crisis of last year–in which I lost 1/3 of my money which was invested in the stock market, and that was nothing compared to what I saw happen to friends and neighbors–was a major milestone in this process. The fact that the government has bailed out large banks and corporations with taxpayer money reveals the inherent corruption of the government, as does the Supreme Court decision of last week. Obama, however much we may like him, seems utterly stymied by the power of the corporate interests in government. Better heads than I have declared that we are living in a failed state. This isn’t so unusual–governments and empires collapse all the time.

I know much more about climate change than I do about the economy though, and I find the evidence that our way of life is unsustainable to be incontrovertible there. I keep up with the science pretty well, and follow the work of James Hansen, NASA climatologist, very closely. His conclusion, after years of research on glacial melting, ice-core samples, temperature data, etc., is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 must be kept to 350 parts per million or less in order to preserve the planet as we know it. Anything more is going to lead to runaway warming due to feedback loops (those are the natural mechanisms that accelerate warming once it’s already underway, such as melting permafrost, which releases methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas). Runaway warming will lead to sea-level rise, ocean acidification, massive extinction (already happening), drought and catastrophic weather events, etc. Right now the CO2 is at 387 ppm, and the promises made at Copenhagen by the major emitters, to cut their emissons, are so weak that they will lead us to 770 ppm within this century. It would be arrogant to assume that we can both survive that, and continue our way of life at the same time.

I think I can safely challenge you, because I remember that you enjoy a good debate! So here’s what I would say to you, or anyone with your smarts: What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?”

I didn’t get a good answer to that question “What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?” and it didn’t surprise me much.  Eric’s response was that he thought it unlikely that things would go bad all at once–he felt that positive change could happen over the course of a century or so, without great upheaval in the process.  But while I had given a good deal of the evidence that I find persuasive, Eric’s reply was only a few sentences. I felt as though I was being patted on the head reassuringly.

Many, many conversations with friends and family have ended with me changing the subject, and I did it because I found I was making people uncomfortable. The people I upset are always educated. They include my father, a decorated and highly respected professor or molecular biology, who doesn’t like to see me get upset. They include my writing class, a group of journalists with multiple publication credits, one of whom said to me, angrily “I don’t know why you think that climate change is any worse than anything else!  I feel like I hear about this all the time in the news. There’s a lot of stuff being done, you know–wasn’t there just a big conference in Copenhagen?”  They include a good friend, reeling from a divorce and a year of unemployment and an ex with breast-cancer, who says “I know about this stuff, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” Who can?

I prowl the internet for writing by psych professionals, or anyone really, on the emotional and spiritual effects of living with the threat of cataclysm.  What can we expect to see as typical reactions as the crisis progresses? What are the historical precedents?  How can people work, love and parent under these circumstances? Until about two years ago, I could find almost nothing written on this subject, and I felt isolated and fearful of my own mental health.

I”m a little embarassed to be talking about my communication problems with family and friends, but I’m doing it because I think it’s important to remember that the personal IS political. We are all involved in creating the story of our culture, and that story can be so powerful that it obscures the evident truth. The story of this culture, that we have all been steeped in for our whole lives, is that we are entitled to thrive, prosper and grow. Growth is in fact necessary for our well-being, for our powerful status in the world, and for our capacity to help the less fortunate. Many in this country believe that American prosperity and leadership is mandated by God. To suggest that all this success we have achieved and will achieve and seem destined to achieve, is actually failure, and will soon implode, is to contradict the story of our culture. But we can only change the story if we tell new ones.

This is an American story, and a conversation with almost any immigrant will turn it on its head. Most of the world’s poor already live in a state that we would call collapse. And even prosperous Europeans remember the Second World War in their homelands, and the countries formerly known as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and know that such disasters are possible.

I recently came across the work of Dmitriy Orlov, a Russian-American who saw the Soviet Union collapse up close, and has lived in the US for many years. His work compares the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the present US economic crisis, factoring in climate change and peak oil, as well as other resource depletion. It is particularly compelling to me because I witnessed the Soviet collapse from a closer vantage point than this — I was living in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s, in a post-communist society rebuilding itself to look more like ours.

Here’s an excerpt from Orlov’s essay “Thriving in an Age of Collapse”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.  First the dreams evaporate: the future starts looking worse than the present, and ever more uncertain. Then people are forced to withstand ever greater indignities and privations, which they tend to accept as their personal failings. The resulting stress causes them to experience a variety of physical and psychological symptoms. Our pride, our habits and expectations, and our unwillingness to adapt can kill us faster than any physical hardship. But eventually something has to give, and even if life does not get any easier, one morning we wake up, and not only has life all around us been transformed all out of recognition, but everyone we encounter recognizes that times have changed.  And we realize that none of this is about us personally, and feel better.”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.” Does this seem right? Can you picture unemployed friends? Whole communities losing homes to foreclosure? Families taken down by health-care costs? Detroit, maybe? Dmitriy Orlov’s writing struck me with the force of plain-spoken truth, based on what I know of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, what I know about the US economy at this time, what I know about the implications of climate change, and what I see around me. His story, which is about surviving, and even thriving, through collapse, is the one that compels me now.

 I am talking about the difficulty of expressing the truth–or what I think is the truth–about how imperilled our country and our world is right now.  The news is unwelcome, it makes for deadened conversations, it furrows brows and it irks people. Responses to the bad news on the environment and the economy range from denial to rage to hopelessness. Many good folks do not think about this stuff, or change their lives in accordance with the new reality, because they have no idea what to do in the face of cataclysm. 

I have found solace in the words of Dmitriy Orlov and many others, and there are two reasons for this. One is that the voices of truth relieve our anxiety that the liars are right and we are crazy.  The truth, however awful, is safe and real. The other reason we can embrace the truth is that it allows us to move past denial into action.  I know that this is almost a cliche now, but I have found it a huge relief in my life to contemplate the reality of a world without cars, of local gardens and revived community and useless television sets. We may have to spend much of our energy finding food and water, maintaining our homes and taking care of our families; we may have to school our own children, tend to the ill without hospitals, and bury our own dead. But it’s our spiritual work to take this on now, to prepare, and that begins with acknowledging the truth.

But, as Orlov says, wryly, “Your participation in this program is optional.”

Five construction workers and I crowd around a covered picnic table outside a run-down little house on the outskirts of Boston. Formerly a 100-year-old neighborhood store called “Jack’s Corner Store,” the place was abandoned for five years before current owners Ken Ward and Andrée Zaleska purchased it in 2008. With a sinking foundation, rotting siding, and wood infested with various creatures, the house was an odd choice to become one of the first passive houses in New England.

The passive house design, which is relatively new in the U.S., is commonplace in Europe and required by law in Germany as the minimal standard for all new homes. Passive house buildings are ultra energy-efficient. In order to accomplish this, passive houses primarily attempt to minimize heat loss through super-insulating walls and windows and maximize heat gain by taking advantage of passive solar design. Using these methods, well-designed passive houses can often do away with central heating systems entirely, even in frozen New England winters. For the JP Green House, the goal is to become a zero-carbon home through passive house design that will reduce the need to burn fossil fuels, erecting solar panels on the roof to eventually remove it from the electrical grid, and supplying a large portion of their food using the quarter-acre backyard as a farm and chicken coop.

As a 22-year-old recent college graduate with a degree in environmental policy, and an intern for the JPGH family — a chaotic blend of two intense environmentalists and three rambunctious young boys, I expected to feel out of place having lunch with the group of construction workers from Placetailor — the firm that agreed to take on the daunting task of renovating a dilapidated hovel into an extraordinarily efficient green home. Yet, Placetailor is not your ordinary construction crew. Four out of the five workers biked to work today, the oldest member of the crew has not reached his 30th birthday, and two of them haven’t even graduated from college. Also, it’s Baked Goods Day.

The crew today is made up of five guys. Placetailor has a fairly unique hiring policy, as each member of the team has a background in both architectural design and hands-on construction. When the construction team can work together on scene to identify a problem or improve a design, the final product will ideally be much improved.

Simon Hare, the founder of Placetailor, has a unique history himself. Growing up in Israel, he always had a keen interest in how certain places affect the people who use them. A self-described autodidact, Hare is mostly self-taught in architectural design through traveling around the world, auditing courses at his local university in Israel, and lots of hands-on learning. By his early 20′s, he was already designing and building a passive solar home for himself in Sde Bokar, Israel. “To me, efficient design is just common sense,” Hare says. “It seems odd that anyone would not want to pursue such standards as Placetailor.” Growing up in a neighborhood where solar access to a building’s south façade is protected in local ordinance, he believes that the U.S. needs more families like Ken and Andrée’s to set a powerful example of the dramatic environmental improvement that can be achieved using current means and methods of construction.

Declan O’Keefe, the 23-year-old student and foreman of the team, has baked a delightful apple crisp. He’s been with Placetailor for a year and a half, and is in his third year at Boston Architectural College. A photographer, O’Keefe transferred from the Museum of Fine Arts, feeling a lack of academic fulfillment there. Architecture was the natural next step, combining the design aspect of art, the math/science aspect of academics, and the concrete ability to “build something with his hands that will actually perform at a higher level than other buildings around.”

Baked Goods Day is a tradition at the two-year-old company — every Thursday, a different person is in charge of bringing in a homemade dessert. Highlights in the recent past include lemon meringue pie, cookies, and the occasional homemade ice cream. In separate interviews, each member of the team confides in me that Baked Goods Day is really the best part of Placetailor. “If there’s anything from the Placetailor model that should be moved to every other construction model, it should be Baked Goods Day.”

As O’Keefe concludes, “You’re not going to go to any other construction site and find five guys who are totally OK with baking. We’re taking on this task of construction and design from a completely different perspective. We’re not using any of the predetermined rules for how things need to be done and I think it’s allowing us to gracefully enter this new world of passive house and be successful in this depressed economy.”

Family and crew show their climate commitment at the JP Green House.As I write this, the Northeast is methodically being blanketed with a thick blessing of snow, shutting everything down, as if the earth knows we need comfort and beauty after this horrible week.

The crisis of our planet manifested at Copenhagen. We held a vigil for 350, singing Dylan into the howling winds of downtown Boston, outside of John Kerry’s empty office. We fasted at the request of 350.org. We followed the grim updates with little expectation, and we rejoiced at the protests of the people and the righteous rage of the global South.

Down at the house, Monday morning we found only two of our work-team, looking grim. Placetailor is a design-build firm that specializes in Passive House design. They’re serious, purposeful, knowledgeable young men who ride their bikes onto the site each day because they eschew unnecessary use of fossil fuels. They work on one project at a time, meticulously, getting it right. Over the weekend their upcoming project had fallen apart, and with nothing else on the horizon once they complete work on the JPGH next month, they had to lay off most of the staff. Mitch, Michael, and Tony were gone, off to look for other building work in a tough economy.

Though there are both state- and utilities-sponsored programs to support and promote green building in our area, the JP Green House and Placetailor have failed to qualify. Going well beyond weatherizing and insulation, into the realm of zero-carbon, perhaps inspires anxiety in funders? We have to ask: Where is the real impetus and funding to build the houses of the future? Where is the bailout for the planet–and shouldn’t this be a part of it?

Worse still, Ken and I seem to be ready to fall victim to the stereotype that building houses ruins relationships. For a year we have struggled with the mounting costs of this project, which has come out at 10 times the cost we originally (naively) projected. I have the full-time job and most of the capital, and Ken has the vision, the carpentry skills, the fundraising experience. It seemed workable, but the reality of the past year has been a constant struggle  to procure the right amounts of money at the right time, costing us both much of our retirement funds.

In a fallen economy, and with the level of denial pervading our society about climate change, there is little work for a radical environmental campaigner. And we have chosen to put our political energy behind 350.org, the most effective, and least-funded environmental campaign ever seen. My job, too, has suffered from the fracturing of my attention and commitments. It can be difficult to take anything not related to climate seriously. We risk underemployment if not unemployment by taking on this commitment to activism.

New siding, fresh snow.We both carry marriages behind us like bags of bones, and I, in particular, have such abiding doubts about the institution itself that I refuse to ever consider remarriage. I have been prone to spells of witchiness, wherein I rage and stomp and declare that I never intended to take in a homeless environmentalist and his child. I have insisted on binding contracts to codify what each of us owes the other, and the project itself. Ken has fairly countered that he cannot live with the unpredictability of my anger, and that we must act as a team going forward, or not go forward.

We have tried to take the thing apart, reduce it to its essence–which for us seems to be love and activism. Perhaps that essence will remain even if the relationship fails. We have, if nothing else, always been able to envision a very different future.

The JP Green House stands majestically with the snow against the beautiful red siding, the huge Canadian windows opening the south side to the light. Last week we were offered a great deal on two wind-turbines. Generous gifts and loans have been coming our way, and a community is watching. It’s our job to make this happen for our kids, if nothing else. It’s bigger than we are, and it stands for a real, livable future–we couldn’t abandon that.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

As I scrolled down through some 50 replies, I found nothing but rage and denial at the scientists’ findings, with a lot of righteous citing of the recent ClimateGate “scandal” around the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia.  Here’s a few typical quotes:

“There is absolutely no truth to this whatsoever. Go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/James Delingpole or http://www.jamesdelingpole.com. The scam is just ‘the tip of the iceberg.’ Global warming is a conspiracy by left wing loonier scientists looking for $$$ and nothing else from all Gov’ts.”

and

“Climate change is a proven, coordinated fraud that’s been foisted upon the masses by politicans and corporations. The NY Times, Fox and others are reporting on the recently uncovered shenanigans of the “climate researchers,” yet the Globe is still pounding the drum of hypothetical hysteria. $463B worth of damage here in Boston? When? Ridiculous.”

I wanted to help out, but by the time I got to the end of the multi-author screed, I was nauseous and had nothing to say.  But I’ve got something to say now, and I will address it to the deniers themselves.

I want to make it clear to those of you who doubt the science that tells you our world is warming dangerously due to human burning of fossil fuels–so much so that civilization itself, and up to half of the earth’s species are threatened by a cataclysm that we may have little power left to effect– that we agree with you. I am speaking for the activists, the scientists, the writers and pundits who keep throwing this climate change thing in your faces. We are absolutely, 100% with you, and though you perceive a conflict of interests, political or existential or otherwise, there is NO conflict.  We do not want this, we do not want to believe this, and we would give anything in the world to be wrong. If you see (correctly) that there are big egos invested in promoting the idea of climate change, then be assured that they are only there, puffed up all out of proportion, to counter the big egos of the opposition (coal and oil industry CEOs–egos, what?)

It may be a different process for others, but I think most of us who stare directly into the bright sun of climate change are convinced that the scientific method–rigorous, peer-reviewed, replicable data–if not the scientists themselves, is sound and leads to the truth, however hard it may be. Science is bigger than the will or desire of any scientist, and though not infallible, it is ethical. It is worthy of our faith and our humility, and it repeatedly reveals the persistent will of the earth to follow its own laws, and not ours.

I can let the scientists and the activists speak for themselves, and they have done so already.  I’m only weighing in here to make one point, and that is that there is no conflict. We should call off any battles we think we are waging.

Activists–remember your own fear and denial. Deniers–please note that no one on earth could possibly want this…and then consider the facts.

For the last year and a half, Ken Ward and Andrée Zaleska have been rehabbing a 100-year-old former neighborhood store in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. They’re converting it into a home for their combined family, a community gathering place, and a zero-carbon demonstration home to inspire others — and sharing their journey in the special series Coming Home: Chronicling the (re)invention of the JP Green House.

The firm overseeing the project, Placetailor, specializes in creating homes on the Passive House model, in which supertight insulation and careful use of passive solar create a building that requires no heating source. The JP Green House will be one of the first Passive House rehabs in the U.S. Photographer Leise Jones has documented the work as it progresses.

I don’t dislike No Impact Man. He is more intentionally political than his detractors portray him to be, and I think his yearlong stunt of living without toilet paper in NYC has been eye-opening for a lot of people, and amusing for many others. I admit that the “happy green” genre of books that are appearing a lot now, exemplified by Sleeping Naked is Green (by Vanessa Farquharson), make me nauseous: a hot twentysomething journalist makes sacrifices such as “buying only green cosmetics” while traveling to eco-resorts by plane and making amends with carbon offsets. But I was, until recently, a less ostentatious personification of the same middle-class green guilt, and I understand the way we anxiously try to bargain with our angry planet by promising to be better consumers. No one wants to admit that we may not be consumers at all in a few years.

What I want to point out here is that simple living, simple people, are everywhere, and always have been. We recognize the extreme varieties: back-to-the-land types, monastics, Mother Teresa and Ralph Nader, not to mention the homeless, addicts, that crazy lady who takes in all the stray cats. Really they live among us, quite unobtrusive in most cases, and most of them are sane.

My friend Catherine has worked all her adult life in administrative jobs, minimizing her material needs and ignoring most external definitions of success, in order to write poetry. She’s needed to get off the computer for health reasons lately, and is diligently working to set up a small business as a personal organizer (if you’re in Boston and having trouble finding your passport in that firetrap you call your office, check out Catherine’s services at ARoomofOnesOwnOrganizing.com). Another friend, Rick Zemlin, lives on $10,000 a year in San Diego. He feels that working more than 20 hours/week is unhealthy and leaves no room for his spiritual development, which is the focus of his very intentional life. Rick doesn’t write a snappy blog, or have a book contract that I know of, but his Facebook posts are honest and detailed. He did write a disarming article for his church newsletter, detailing his personal expenses, and he’s allowing me to cite it here.

Current Annual Personal Consumption Expenses

5,200 Rent & utilities (bedroom in a 2 bedroom apt. in high-priced California. House phone. No cell.)
1,500 Food (lacto-ovo vegetarian, with an emphasis on good nutrition)
100 Misc household and personal items
100 Clothes (thrift stores provide all of my clothing)
1,000 Health care & supplements (no health insurance)
750 Transportation (public transit fares & tennis shoes. No car)
500 Recreation (movies, eating out, retreats, coffee shops, etc.)
650 Travel: to see family & friends
550 Gifts consumed (items received gratis & low income medical discounts)
—– 10,350

I say disarming because Rick’s expenses are remarkably low. He has obviously given up much of what defines the rest of us, including owning a home and having children. But he has a special clarity and warmth, and he seems to be enjoying his life as much as anyone I know. Here’s Rick’s philosophy: “I believe we are each on a journey with our Creator, moving deeper and deeper into the gift of our lives — into the fullness of living. This core life purpose of living fully is joined by a second one, equally important: to help create a world where all are able to do so — a world in which all 6.8 billion of us can thrive. I see this thriving world as the Grand Dream that God holds for us. I believe that we are given all that we need to live into this vision for the world, and that because God is infinitely patient with us we will eventually arrive. It is our destiny, our home. It’s going to cost us, though. (And I think we will gladly pay … one day.)” Read Rick’s full article here.

I learned a lot about the relative definitions of prosperity by living in Europe in my twenties. (Czechoslovakia, 1990-92, the Czech Republic 1992-95. Same town, same apartment.) When I arrived, shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a four-member family was typically living in a high-rise apartment with one or two bedrooms. No kudos to the repressive and corrupt regimes of communist Eastern Europe, but material prosperity was adequate, and no one seems much happier 20 years later now that they all have new cars and TVs and debt.

These friends, these memories of other places, and my own experiences of living out of a car or a backpack, are comforting to me now in moments when I’m anxiously scrutinizing the household budget, or wondering where that last 30k we need for the house is going to come from. I remember to breathe deeply and recite my mantra, “In the end, it’s six by six and nothing more.”

On a recent work day at the JP Green House, volunteers came out of the woodwork.Leise Jones

Most people thought it was a mid-life crisis when I left my marriage, determined to devote myself to full-time work on climate change. I’m sure it was, but I clung to the Jungian notion that our shadow rises in midlife and forces us to confront our unlived lives. Within three years I was divorced, working full-time as a community organizer, and building the JP Green House with Ken Ward, another casualty of truth and principles.

I had meanwhile been through that tangle of denial/despair/rage and bargaining that seems to afflict those newly acquainted with the realities we face. Like a person faced with terminal illness, there is no easy path through, and there is no reasonable order or timeframe to these feelings. I have spent several months in a robotic depressed state, struggling to remain functional for my kids. There are times when I still “bargain”: I read about some new techno-fix to cool the planet and I think, “Thank God, maybe this will save us!” And denial is just a necessity in everyday life: None of us can really hold the sense that our children’s lives may be hell on earth in our minds while we do the grocery shopping and run the carpool. All this was, and is, going on while I was falling in love, raising children, making a living, and building a house.

Ladder-day saints.Leise JonesI proposed to write about the best part about climate change here, ironic as it may seem, so here it is: courage. All over the world, and throughout history, people have faced down dictators, protested war and conquest, put their lives at risk defending their principles.  Remember the Abolitionists who sheltered slaves, the Europeans who hid and protected Jews during World War II, ordinary Tibetans. American life, at first glance, seems to offer little opportunity for real courage, for sacrifice of comfort in order to live in truth. Climate change, the company of activists, has offered me that, and I think it offers us all this opportunity. In order to turn our world around, save ourselves, we have to fight complacency, denial, political expediency, and our own love of excess.

When you are in the right place, you meet the right people.  The photographs you see here are of one of our recent “Work Days” at the JP Green House. With minimal publicity, we turned out 40 people who did not know us, to spend a day doing hard labor on a house that will demonstrate the best-case scenario of our future. We are the fearful, the despairing, the worried, and we are doing the only thing we can — planting ourselves in a place of truth and getting to work.

Vaclav Havel, dissident and then president of Czechoslovakia, was the hero of my twenties, which I spent living in the Czech Republic. Havel’s message was that we all “live in truth,” to above all not accept the totalitarian conquest of our souls. His conclusion is where you land after the climate crisis hits you personally.