What has changed in our time, \u00c2\u00a0writes McKibben, is that Better has flown a few trees away to make her nest, and that changed everything because if you have the stone of your own life in your hand, you have to make a choice.\u00c2\u00a0 Which will it be: More or Better?\u00c2\u00a0 Evidence\u00c2\u00a0piles up that growth isn’t any longer making us\u00c2\u00a0wealthier, but is generating inequality and insecurity, and\u00c2\u00a0colliding with serious physical limits to what our planet can realistically sustain.\u00c2\u00a0 But there is also another wild card calling out for our attention:\u00c2\u00a0evidence from various directions suggests that “even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier.”<\/p>\n
The direction\u00c2\u00a0McKibben points\u00c2\u00a0for solutions is not toward abandoning either Adam Smith or markets (they clearly work) but toward rebuilding local economies.\u00c2\u00a0 That, he contends, will mean setting conscious limits on markets by downplaying efficiency and paying attention to other goals.\u00c2\u00a0 The\u00c2\u00a0biggest changes to our daily habits in generations,\u00c2\u00a0as well as\u00c2\u00a0“our worldview, our sense of what constitutes progress,” will be required, a shift that is\u00c2\u00a0neither liberal nor conservative, mostly just different.\u00c2\u00a0 The key question will no longer be whether the economy produces “an ever larger pile of stuff,” says McKibben,\u00c2\u00a0but whether it buiilds or undermines community, because commuity “is the key to physical survival in our environmental predicament and also to human satisfaction.”<\/p>\n
Who knew?!?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Contrary to that infamous counsel to lessen our post-9\/11 grief by going shopping, having more doesn’t make us feel better.\u00c2\u00a0 McKibben\u00c2\u00a0is a United Methodist and taught Sunday School for years in his small upstate New York congregation; he\u00c2\u00a0wrote The End of Nature <\/em>as a staff writer for The New Yorker<\/em> and is currently scholar in residence at Middlebury College.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s possible to hear echoes of the biblical prophets when he suggests\u00c2\u00a0that it’s time for people of faith to throw some grit into the works by making the economy less effiicient.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“At the risk of betraying my background as a Sunday School teacher,” he writes, “the most inefficient idea our society ever embraced was originally a Jewish inspiration: the Sabbath, a day set aside for relationships with family and with God and with the world around us.”\u00c2\u00a0 For most of our national history, everything stopped on the Sabbath: it was impossible to go shopping<\/em>!\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n We’re not likely to turn the clock back, nor is that exactly what McKibben suggests, but it’s interesting to contemplate.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s hard to imagine a world very different from the one we know, but that seems to me to be precisely what Jesus invited us to do.\u00c2\u00a0 The question for our time may\u00c2\u00a0be\u00c2\u00a0whether we can modify human behavior enough to limit the damage to our planet and\u00c2\u00a0find ways to copy with what we can’t prevent – – maybe even, in McKibben’s words, “mobilize the wealth of our communities to make the transition tolerable, even sweet, instead of tragic.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I think I heard more voices than ever this year suggesting that we\u00c2\u00a0consider toning down the cultural excesses of Christmas gift-giving.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve certainly not eliminated gift-giving in my world of family and friends, but … Continue reading ![\"judybanner1.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/judybanner1.jpg\")
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