[pf] Diversity in people's activities.

At 13:12 20/9/2000 -0700, Priscilla Richter wrote, with Subject:
Re: [pf] Montana -- David's questions (& income worries)
> ...
>I'm always struggling to live on less.  With a kid in college, paying 
>rent and high utilities (though I am as frugal as I can be here) and 
>having to get around by car (though I monitor my trips as carefully 
>as I can), it's always a real struggle.
>

· This note is more on the non-necessity of everyone being the same (that
meme creates pressure for conformity, as well as being ridiculously
unrealistic).

· Years ago I wrote, in: "diversity in small groups" :-
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/DiversityInSmallGroups00644.html
  (original:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/deep-ecology/jun99/msg00644.html ) :-

“.. I want to explore the possibility that, at least in small groups,
sufficient "flourishing" for most people could be a result of significant
_differences_ in consumption, within the group. As examples, I look to: (1)
the Lord of a Manor and his serfs; (2) our family of 4 or 5; (3) a village
in Europe ten years after the Black Death (bubonic plague).
**  It's an attempt to put a "real life" overlay onto the patently false
"everyone on earth being the same" statements I and many others use.”

· Now I want to consider this idea as applied to /one/ person, over time.
Priscilla and others with families may feel more guilty about
over-consumption than they need to. Not only is the family consumption
spread over the members of the family, and therefore probably is less per
person than it feels like to the one doing most of the buying, but I would
guess that that adult (let's say) bought less when they were young, and has
the evident freedom to buy less in the future, when their family
responsibilities have diminished or vanished.

· It is the /average/ that matters in the bigger picture; this was the
point I was making in that September 30 1999 post. And now I'm saying that
one can "over-consume" for a few years of one's life, but one is building
up a deficit which should be repaid by "under-consuming" in other (later)
parts of one's life. As Arnie is now doing (see his of: 15:11 20/9/2000
-0700, where he says: "Hopefully  we CAN _just cut down_!", and many
earlier posts). And as I am, now that I've had a good life (generally doing
sustainable things like teaching, gliding, sailing and hiking), and have no
/need/ do do anything.

· My wife and I have been considering what technology we "can't do
without", as we plan, then build, her retirement house. It's actually very
little, out of the huge excess of technological stuff that has proliferated
during the ascendency of the exploitative current economic system. (I am
old enough to remember from before this "produce /more/ - consume /more/"
system came in.)

· We're both words-and-ideas addicts, so we "can't" do without at least
e-mail and probably at least a search engine like Google. We both grew up
before automatic washing machines, but now wouldn't do without it. Both of
these require a certain small amount of electricity, which I can now supply
from my photovoltaic solar panels, batteries and inverter. But beyond that,
virtually nothing. We'll be within one-and-a-half hour's walking distance
of the shops and a small-town library, so we don't actually need mechanised
transport, though we'd probably be happy to take a lift with a neighbour
who's going in to Thames. In the future, that might mean one
(hybrid-engined) car shared between 3 to 6 families. I grew up that way,
during the second world war - it's nothing strange to me.

· What else? I can't think of anything else that the last hundred years has
produced, that we'd want to use. I'd be quite happy to go by ship to
Australia to visit our son, maybe once every 5 or 10 years. This "freedom"
to travel wherever and whenever you feel like, is a major excess; quite
unnecessary. And as you should know by now, I'm well aware that the idea of
the ordinary "man in the street" having a "right" to private property, is
relatively recent; IMO the government confers that right, so the government
can just as easily remove that right. I certainly don't consider private
property or gun-carrying as evidences of freedom. They're just ways to make
yourself feel more important, more powerful; you feel like a "somebody"
rather than a "nobody".

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/index.html#top
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