Church of the Unwasteful

Or focus instead on other ways to be a better person or enjoying more of what you have. What religions (and prayer/meditation especially) show us is that we can be ritualistic about doing nothing, or at least in forms of nothing that don’t entail consumption. But don't fly to visit temples/shrines!

How about this as a ritual… before you go to sleep each night, try tallying the material impact you’ve had on the world that day, consider where you could have done better, and imagine offsets and tradeoff possibilities. If it gets low enough, there won’t be much calculation to be done and you zzzzz

Making sacrifices (no, not wasting food/animal products on alters) in our lives is hard. If we can find ways to renounce an excessively resource-intensive practice and replace it with something much less so that gives similar satisfaction - YES, for us that's religious observance in its highest form

Q: Doesn’t a religion need rituals?
A: Well, we sure don't prescribe prayer, meditation, alters/shrines, pilgrimages, etc. Besides taking concrete actions to improve the function of ecosystems and to spread messages that cause people to do less damage to them, I guess abstention is our core ritual.🧵

They basically thought to themselves - hey, these people believe in (covid) science like we believe in the Bible - and were increasingly flummoxed by that notion. I would hope that the dangers posed by a longer-term, yet more existential threat would spark exactly that kind of reaction in both camps

We'll never really know how much of it was done for reasons of self-protection or for the collective good, but it doesn’t really matter. The other intriguing thing was when Covid-deniers noticed weird aspects of quasi-religiosity in Covid-believers' approaches to help shielding themselves/loved ones

Their reactions weren't primarily driven by government mandates, which were less stringent here in the US than in many parts of the world and largely ineffective anyhow. Still, people changed their lifestyles to a much greater extent than I thought probable. People are very open to protective change

Most people agreed that it posed a serious (though not existential) threat to the population. It became somewhat clear early on that it entailed a fairly low risk of mortality for healthy children and adults. Yet, a great many people reacted in very fundamental ways for at least a couple of years.

Q: Do you really think people could/would radically alter their lives in order to confront a crisis they can barely conceive of, at least in terms of consequences?
A: Well, after seeing Covid-19 responses unfolding, I became less skeptical. Remember how poorly understood that disease was initially.🧵

Wastefulness is not a predetermined outcome. It's just easy to take more than one needs, whether we are talking about houses, cars, comforts and conveniences. To what degree this is systematic path dependency is arguable, but like most other social problems we confront, we have plenty of agency too.

It is a real challenge for people to walk this path and not feel constrained and FOMO. My mother in law, for instance, lives alone but HVACs hard and travels extensively. Her energy usage is greater than that of my family of six even without us making large efficiency investments (solar, HVAC, EVs).

Do some thought experiments on your own and calculate. We'd also argue that it isn’t just selfishness and ideology that are the prime predictors, but wealth itself. How many people of significant means do you know of who have really chosen to “live small” and stay local with their leisure pursuits?

Sure, single family homes with two plus cars are not a good sign. They've got a point, but there is a heckuva lot of wiggle room for choice in there too. Just how many magnitudes separate your average American trying hard to “live their best life” and someone who attempts to adhere to this religion?

Q: Is it really all that feasible for people in the developed world to live much less wasteful lives? Like, isn’t it already baked in?
A: Well, that's essentially the argument put forth by those who would rather see us focus on long shot policy proposals like radically redesigning our settlements. 🧵

but at what our damaged world is doing to us. Even if it isn't actively killing us, there still remains the psychological impact of the knowledge that there is plastic forever in our flesh. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has the feel of a backhanded divine vengeance.

Well, that is done to the planet on our behalf, as consumers - is being visited, in this surreal and lurid manner, on our own bodies. So then, when we look at the decomposing bodies of trash-filled once-beautiful birds, we know that we are looking not just at what we are doing to the world...

"Trash in the ocean seems like a thousand now unconsumable traces of our deranged productivity and heedless hunger. The whole subject of microplastics is possessed of a nightmarish lucidity, because we understand it to be a symptom of a deeper disease. The unthinkable harm we have done to the planet

When banks offer better loan terms, people buy more. That fuels our ongoing relationship with debt and our worship of money and acquisition. There's the insidious nature of expanding affluenza symptoms in wealthier populations - in that having more isn’t leading to better health, mental or otherwise

Q: Why do you underestimate just how much people love stuff and their freedom to acquire it?
A: Because it's just a base desire that we've come to coddle. We don't like to think about the consequences of being free to take as much as we can, both in environmental damages and doing moral harm to us.🧵

The anti-communist messaging didn't help - those living in the “free world” were encouraged to only react to market forces in their drive to use and acquire as much as they desire. This reexamination of how we determine what we “want” and “need” is a way to address the real sins driving this crisis.

People began to consider the immense consumer powers they were gaining as a sort of birthright for their children. Consider where we might be now if depression-era norms of thrift had combined with stronger public policy recognizing not just local pollution limits, but overall levels of enviro havoc

Daniel Quinn reinterpreted the story of Cain and Abel to point to a break in how hunter gatherers vs. farmers/pastoralists conceived of their dominion over other life forms and ecosystems. That really seems to point us too far back in the past, given that the big paradigm shifts only came post WWII.

Q: Does this faith deal with the concept of original sin?
A: No, certainly not with the premise that human beings are inherently selfish and destructive, if that's what you are getting at. We may however believe in some tipping point when too many lost sight of our relationship to the natural world🧵

How about this… our kind of asceticism is more like eating vegetarian in a small apartment with no personal automobile waiting outside. Oh, and no planes or pets. Those are plenty big asks for most folks. We don't need the really bad press associated with encouraging people to more radically detach.

Anyway, let’s not put the cart in front of the horse - many people remain homeless and hungry while we're continuing to pillage and defile the planet. Perhaps a quarter of the world population lives in cramped rooms where they are allotted personal space not much bigger than one of our prison cells

Q: Does this religion encourage homelessness and penury?
A: No. However, there is a long history of asceticism and mendicancy to be found in most religions. Advocating for needing and taking less as a means to higher spiritual ends is a venerable tradition. The prosperity gospel is decidedly not. 🧵

Notions of sacrifice, doing good works, kindness/hospitality, promoting peace, engaging in contemplation, pursuing justice etc all apply. Yet dwelling on textual interpretations, in/out groups, salvation, an afterlife, demonstrating love and obeisance for a God -just not for us. We walk another path

There’s your mystical mystery - how can it be possible? Maybe there being no deities or sacred texts is a helpful feature, because these concepts are quite fallible and do not lend themselves to actually pursuing our goal. And yet we do indeed have broad commonalities with other religious traditions

Q: Got a holy book?
A: No. There's no revelation story or grand narrative in this religion. It may not even bear traces of the deeper spiritual meaning you're looking for. But take its practice seriously and it'll definitely change your life, then perhaps you'll find something holy in it after all🧵

The cost of a pair of new shoes vs a pair of lightly used ones explains why so many are prematurely put in the trash. Material wealth keeps piling up around us and yet we feel no richer than before. So, when thinking about GDP, I just can't really identify with the premise of this economic argument.