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from Natural Life Magazine, November/December 2003 Simplicity of living is not a new idea. It has deep roots in history and finds expression in all of the world’s wisdom traditions. More than two thousand years ago, in the same historical period that Christians were saying “Give me neither poverty nor wealth,” (Proverbs 30:8), the Taoists were asserting “He who knows he has enough is rich” (Lao Tzu), Plato and Aristotle were proclaiming the importance of the “golden mean” of a path through life with neither excess nor deficit, and the Buddhists were encouraging a “middle way” between poverty and mindless accumulation. Clearly, the simple life is not a new social invention. What is new are the radically changing ecological, social and psycho-spiritual circumstances of the modern world.
The push toward simpler ways of living was clearly described in 1992 when over 1,600 of the world’s senior scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences, signed an unprecedented “Warning to Humanity.” In this historic statement, they declared that, “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course . . . that may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” They concluded that: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” Roughly a decade later came a related warning from 100 Nobel Prize winners who said, “The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed.” As these two warnings by the world’s elder scientists indicate, powerful adversity trends (such as global climate change, the depletion of key resources such as water and cheap oil, a burgeoning population, and a growing gap between the rich and poor) are converging into a whole-systems crisis, creating the possibility of an evolutionary crash within this generation. If we are to create instead an evolutionary bounce or leap forward, it will surely include a shift toward simpler, more sustainable and satisfying ways of living. Although the pushes toward simpler ways of living are strong, the pulls toward this way of life ... To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's online edition. Duane Elgin is a futurist and author of “Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity’s Future” (Morrow, 2000), “Awakening Earth” (Morrow, 1993) and “Voluntary Simplicity” (Morrow, 1981). He has anticipated some of the most important trends of our time. As project leader of The Millennium Project, he was the primary author of its report “Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm”. Previously he was also the co-founder and director of Choosing Our Future, a non-partisan organization created to “revitalize the conversation of democracy by mobilizing our tools of mass communication”, which worked to revitalize citizen participation in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
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