Embedded Files
“When I imagine the world in a right relationship, it’s a love story between our species and this earth and among us.”
“When I imagine the world in a right relationship, it’s a love story between our species and this earth and among us.”
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown
If we are to address the climate crisis, we must fundamentally change our dysfunctional relationship with the Earth. Our current relationship to the planet is marked by domination, extraction, and degradation. We have been trained to think in hierarchies that elevate the human above all. We overvalue our own place within the vast ecosystems of the Earth, when instead we must recognize that we are but one small piece of an intricate, dynamic planet.
Modern Western society is largely based on an ethos of ever-increasing growth. Indeed, this is the lifeblood of capitalism, which continually calls out for more, more, more. It is reliant on economies of extraction and oppression in which environmental and human destruction and death - through mining, through pollution, through economic inequality and poverty, through enslavement - were historically considered acceptable byproducts of commerce. Unintentional, perhaps, but also unimportant. As Saidiya Hartman suggests, this “has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost.” We continue to accept such degradations.
At the same time, we are fueled by consumption, asked to keep purchasing more and more stuff. Recent studies reveal shocking facts:
There are 300,000 items in the average American home.
The average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years.
And still, 1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage—the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades.
25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle.
3.1% of the world’s children live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally
The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, they owned 9. Women will spend more than eight years of their lives shopping.
The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually, and throws away 65 pounds of clothing per year.
Clothing landfills, such as the one in Chile’s Atacama Desert, are visible from space.
Nearly half of American households do not save any money.
Americans spend $100 billion on shoes, jewelry, and watches, more than on higher education.
Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods.
Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items.We lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 items in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list.
“But this age is poor in so many ways–there is so much loneliness and disconnection, from love, friendship, community, from the natural world, from moral and visual beauty, so much hopelessness, so many who don’t have enough in a world full of people who have too much.”
“But this age is poor in so many ways–there is so much loneliness and disconnection, from love, friendship, community, from the natural world, from moral and visual beauty, so much hopelessness, so many who don’t have enough in a world full of people who have too much.”
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Our overconsumption requires much of the rest of the world: sweatshop labor, the continued extraction of resources, and the accumulation of waste. And yet, with all this stuff, we generally feel like we still do not have enough. Because all these things do not actually bring us joy or connection.
Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is foundational to our work, offers a different understanding of abundance. She instead challenges us to adopt a stance of gratitude for all that the natural world gives us. She notes, “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.” Moreover, gratitude makes visible our obligations to each other and to our world. Kimmerer emphasizes interconnection and reciprocity and the abundance that will flow from that. She concludes, “That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”
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