Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

19. Higher Laws

170 19 Higher Laws 1. Sustainability means to sustain the life of the entire planet for the time after we are gone. 2. Be aware of the environmental and the moral consequences of every personal action. 3. War and hatred are not sustainable. 4. Common interest comes before self-interest. 5. Try to make present circumstances better before building something new. 6. Study patterns that make things accessible, healthy, efficient, and sustainable and then replicate those patterns. 7. Keep it simple; simplicity gives an object its beauty. 8. Go lightly on the earth; use as little as possible. 9. Everything is in the act of becoming; nothing stays the same. I. Sustainability You can’t escape the idea of sustainability—it is everywhere in modern culture. The problem is that the popular and commercial use of the word seems to mean nothing more than a new way to sell and consume goods. Everything is “green”: from toilet paper to automobiles, from shampoo to kiddie toys, from junk food to appliances. Big business continues to prosper and consume re- 171 Higher Laws sources under the illusion that it is sustaining the earth’s resources ; instead, it is creating a society even more dependent on “improved ” consumer products. The popular concept of sustainability does not address how resources are protected, much less distributed; and it promotes the very values that got us into trouble in the first place. Sustainability isn’t simply about using the right lightbulb, buying “green” products , recycling, or even building an ecologically sensitive house. The real issue facing humankind is sustaining complicated, interwoven biotic communities, not sustaining a comfortable lifestyle for the privileged classes. Sustainability is most commonly thought of in economic terms: making and consuming goods while being sensitive to the capacity of the earth’s resources. The goal seems to be to keep modernization alive and well. Many environmentalists abhor such attitudes. For many, the common concept of sustainability fails to acknowledge the need for drastic changes in how we humans live. Just before we took the plunge and began construction, Linda and I had a long and frank talk about what such a house might mean to the way we lived our life. There would have to be changes in our habits: we’d have to become misers in our use of electricity , we’d have to be responsible for gathering firewood to heat the house in winter, we would have to take on regular and ongoing maintenance issues, and so on. By no means would we call our changes drastic, or even uncomfortable; yet many of our contemporaries would see such a lifestyle as an impossible sacrifice. In 1968 geneticist Garrett Hardin wrote an article entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he argued that unmanaged access to common resources resulted in a lawless and unethical future. He illustrated this human tendency toward greed by giving an example of a herdsman who is faced with the temptations of a common pasture. The herdsman will instinctively overload 172 Higher Laws it with his livestock. Likewise, as each greed-driven human tries to maximize resources for personal gain, the common resources collapse to the detriment of all. Such a bleak portrait of the decline of the earth’s “pastures” certainly seems to be happening in many places today. “Good-tasting water is going to disappear,” my mother said so long ago. “One day people will have to pay a lot of money for a drink.” Now water , life’s most precious common resource, is being sold like soda pop; it fills an entire isle of my local chain grocery store. Privatization of resources gives corporations sole access to what was once held in common by humans, while it lays the ill health and environmental costs on society. But Hardin’s tragic parable of a lawless, unethical future was only if the commons were unmanaged. A managed commons, though it may have other problems, will not automatically suffer the tragic fate of the unmanaged commons. Taxes, regulations, strict laws, and other restraints must be placed to prevent corporations from depleting our resources. If a handful of private corporations continue to monopolize the earth’s resources, while common people bear the ever-increasing costs, more and more social protests will arise into violent protest of that imbalance. “The threat to our future is not from greedy individuals ,” Hardin wrote, “but from unregulated voracious emissaries who...