At his carpet company, Ray Anderson has increased sales and doubled profits while turning the traditional “take / make / waste” industrial system on its head. In a gentle, understated way, he shares a powerful vision for sustainable commerce.
Notice the incredibly beneficial effect this company’s “Mission Zero” business plan has had on goodwill and market share.
Highlighting the dominant role that business currently plays in plundering the earth’s resources and stressing the potential for business as a solution to the problem, his message is clear:
“Theft of our children’s future will one day be a crime.”
Do create a 15 minute window in your day to benefit from the uplifting messages in this short video.
Ever since discovering The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, I’ve been mulling over the idea of how this fascinating book can guide me in choosing further training opportunities to equip me for the next few years. I want my learning to be enjoyable and fulfilling. I also would like to feel that I’m equipping myself to continue to earn a living from what I most enjoy doing – working in partnership with others on their personal and spiritual development. Another aim is to complete the conversion of our house and garden to a comfortable low carbon, low-waste home that is reasonably resilient to the external effects of climate change and resource depletion.
During my musings, I had a flashback to choosing my “O” level options. “O” levels, for those who are not quite as old as me, or who are not familiar with the British education system, were exams taken usually at age 16 in a broad range of subjects. The modern equivalent are known as GCSEs. The idea is to prove one’s competence and to qualify for further and higher education or for entry into the job market. At age 14, the “0” level options I chose were a few science subjects, maths, English, a couple of languages and music. If I’m honest, I didn’t so much “choose” these subjects as delete from my “options list” those subjects I thought I couldn’t possibly tolerate for another 2 years!
Nowadays, with the benefit of several decades more life experience under my belt and a completely free choice in what I learn, I can take a much more flexible and empowered approach. As a quick, fun exercise, I decided to choose some subject options now from an imaginary list of my own “Skills for a Changing World.” My choices didn’t include some skills and knowledge areas that I’d consider essential because I reckon I’m already competent enough to pass the exam ;o) These would be skills such as basic literacy and numeracy, growing and preparing food, making clothes and child rearing, ethical business practice, coaching, some basic communication and relationships skills.
Rather than that, what follows represent subjects where I have a little knowledge, enough to know I’d enjoy further study and practice, but where I’d like to know a lot more:
1. Permaculture design and implementation
2. Ayurveda
3. Vipassana Meditation
4. Non-Violent Communication (NVC)
5. Naturopathy
6. Mediation
I don’t think that there are GCSEs available in any of these (yet!), although I have found other courses for all of them, for adults only. Now, all I have to decide is when to do what and how to live long enough to make good use of them all!
If you were 14 again and had a completely free reign in what to study, what would you choose that would help equip you for life in a sustainable society?
What is most important to you when you consider the training options open to you now and what you’d most enjoy doing? Why?
When I first decided to go self-employed, about 20 years ago, one of the benefits I imagined I would get from working this way was more focus, greater clarity and fewer distractions. How wrong I was! Well, to begin with I wasn’t wrong. Since I started off with largely paper based business systems, with just one or two projects and very few clients, there was little demand on my time from the outside world – fewer distractions and so more time for me to organise my life how I wanted it.
As time has gone on and my work has become more internet based, I’ve started being inundated with emails, calls to network, tweet and blog, complete surveys and interviews, read “important information” related to my profession and areas of interest and so the list goes on. Along with many of my clients, I have started to find this overwhelming and ironically self-defeating. It almost seems as though the communication highways have become like our motorways – the more of them you build or widen, the busier and more congested they will get.
How on earth does anyone, especially those of us championing the idea of living and working more simply, deal with this communication overload?
From a space free of distractions, for the moment at least, I thought I’d share with you some reflections on what it is I believe motivates us to get caught in this particular manifestation of the rat race:
1. Fear of missing out and appearing unknowledgeable.
2. Fear of not keeping up (with the latest data, world news, technology, political moves, gossip etc)
3. Fear of appearing ineffective, inefficient, outdated, out of touch.
4. Fear, fear, fear…
My two favourite antidotes to fear are…love and action. What we need to remember is that fear is a major driver in the Industrial Growth Society, the old paradigm. It is a tool commonly employed in the rat race to disempower. One route to a Life Sustaining Society, the new paradigm, is to recognise our fear, decide instead to work from our love of life and of what we do and take action on that.
What does this look like when we apply it? We can:
1. Decide for ourselves how much time we want to spend reading (taking information in) each day and where our focus is going to be. If we still feel a twinge of the “fear of missing out” then we can make a reference file for “material to be read later”. (An interesting experiment is then to review this file after 3 months and see how much of what you wrote there is still important to you!)
2. Use the utmost discretion in answering any email that makes a request of us (and therefore is likely to add to our list of tasks to do.) Is this an opportunity? Is this in alignment with my business or personal mission? If not, we can train ourselves to say no, firmly but politely.
3. Use the smallest amount of the simplest technology we can in order to complete a task. This includes networking sites and methodologies.
My theory is that anything more than this could be classed as a distraction and that we can use the time, space and energy we’ve just created to re-connect to our truth and to give to others.
What do you think?
What type of communication is a distraction for you?
What would you deem to be an essential?
Chatting with people recently and listening to their stories and their aspirations, one trend I’ve noticed is a kind of restlessness about the perceived need to have a dream, to have something concrete and tangible to aim for, and the sadness amongst some of those who believe they don’t have a dream.
Whilst downshifting or aspiring to live more sustainably can seem on the surface to be like a dream, in reality what I, and many of my clients, find is that it’s more of an interesting journey than a dream to be achieved. So, ironically, even striving towards the goal of a “sustainable living dream” can be counter productive. What guides us on the right path of our journey I would call a vision rather than a dream.
When we feel that we don’t have something tangible to aim for, that our future holds little in a material sense for us to obtain, what is really happening is that we are encountering obstacles on our journey that are obscuring our view of our vision.
1. Being in the rat race and having no time for quiet reflection.
2. Feeling too stressed out, tired, or ill for contemplation.
3. Believing that we have to bow to pressure from others – loved ones, friends, work colleagues so that we fail to contemplate what we’d actually like for ourselves.
4. Believing that we have no choice.
5. Being in uncontrolled debt (which is in effect another form of point 3.)
6. Living in fear.
What happens when we clear the obstacles on our route is that we start to take responsibility for the way in which we experience the circumstances of our lives and a vision starts to emerge of the path we’re already on.
1. Spending a day or longer away from the computer.
2. Having a complete break from the media (T.V., newspapers and magazines, internet, mobile phones etc)
3. Having some time alone, away from other people and in a peaceful environment.
4. Honouring our bodies through quietly eating nourishing food and taking gentle, enjoyable exercise.
5. Practising gratitude. Finding some time each day to silently, or openly, appreciate the people, events, circumstances, environments that we are grateful for in our lives.
6. Remembering to include a regular dose of inspiration in our week, through reading material, film, poetry, music or whatever works for us.
7. Establishing a regular, committed, spiritual practice e.g. meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, prayer, Yoga.
We create some space in our lives for the truth, our vision of our future, to break through and make itself apparent. We know when this happens because we feel on course, more balanced and clear and quite possibly a sense of relief and ease.
Downshifting, or voluntary simplicity is all about clearing obstacles from our natural path, rather than striving for something material. In the rat race we have money, success, winning, meeting budgets and deadlines that are supposed to motivate us. They don’t of course, past scaring us into submission and depleting our energy. A more sustainable way of living favours happiness, health, community, meaning and fulfilment as part of our vision for the future. These are qualities that we each have a conscious choice in, in terms of how we choose to experience and act on what we are given. This therefore leads to us feeling more empowered, valued and energised.
You might have spotted that the practical ideas for getting us back on track to a simpler, less stressful way of life are much more about living in the present than making things happen in the future. Is this at odds with engaging in any planning? Actually, I would suggest that it isn’t. Living in the present is necessary in order to enjoy each moment, cope with crisis, make wise decisions, cultivate peace of mind and serenity. We do need to plan for the future too otherwise we are like a ship without a compass. If we think of the future as being a collection of successive moments in time, then we can actually do both – plan and enjoy the present - by making wise choices in every moment whilst being aware of the principles we prefer to live by. This is what I mean by having a vision rather than striving towards a dream. This is why unearthing a vision can be more satisfying than setting goals. Having goals tends to lead us into establishing some kind of dependence on the outcome of our decisions and our actions. Having a vision frees us to live for each moment, to aspire to “be” a certain way rather than to achieve a particular, materialistic goal.
Our path is then defined by the choices we make and the vision we hold in each moment.
Enjoy the journey!
A while ago I tentatively broached the subject of what I saw as the link between terrorism and our materialistic lifestyle. What prompted this was my fascination with the simple phrase “Live more simply, so that others may simply live.” So, I suggested in the article that maybe living and working in a way that was more sustainable might be some kind of antidote to terrorism – a way to even out the balance between rich and poor and the tension and resentments that are fuelled by the widening gap between those who have those who have not.
In this inspiring and challenging talk, Karen Armstrong, a writer and commentator on religion, explains her wish for a Charter for Compassion.
There is the possibility, as she sees it, for religion to become a force for harmony, through the widespread re-adoption of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is a teaching that is central to all religions – do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. The Golden Rule is fundamentally about compassion – our ability to feel with the other, to “de-throne ourselves and put someone else at the centre of our lives” as she expresses it. Compassion, not conflict, she explains, is a route to happiness and harmony.
For me, “living more simply so that others may simply live” is a way to modify our behaviour every day in the recognition that there are others in the world who desperately need us to do so, just to survive.
This site seeks to explore the heart and soul of downshifting to a more sustainable, ethical and holistic way of living and working, in keeping with the needs of the planet, humanity as a whole and ourselves as individuals. (read more)
