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Simple Living is Becoming Mainstream

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After I wrote in my editorial in Natural Life’s September/October issue about James Lovelock’s book The Vanishing Face of Gaia and its heavy-handed approach to saving the Planet, a reader told me about Pentti Linkola, a Finnish fisherman and anti-democratic deep ecologist who shares Lovelock’s pessimism and authoritarian solutions. Linkola has built a following by calling for a totalitarian ecological regime that ruthlessly suppresses consumerism. He writes that “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” are the only solution to what he sees as an ecological catastrophe.

Although I fear that the global warming problem is bigger than most people want to admit and that extreme changes are needed in the way much of the world lives and manages its economic and social affairs, I think it’s possible that many of the changes can be made without coercion. I see evidence everywhere around me that people might be ready to do the job voluntarily. You’ll see lots of that in the upcoming November/December issue of Natural Life: questioning the purpose of shopping malls – and avoiding them this holiday season, planning a scaled-down wedding that’s in line with one’s social and ecological principles, living in community with our neighbors to share work as well as the large possessions that make work easier, helping children understand the tactics of advertising, downsizing and discovering the benefits of minimalism.

The less-is-more philosophy has been one of the foundational pillars on which Natural Life has been based since our first issue was published 36 years ago next month. We’ve published hundreds of DIY articles; essays about tiny homes, sustainable energy, and alternatives to the car culture; instructions for growing your own organic food; and inspirational stories about people who’ve built their own houses, simplified their lives, birthed their babies at home, unhooked their children from institutional schools designed to turn them into efficient consumers, and much more. All of this information has been aimed at improving people’s quality of life, not at making oppressive sacrifices.

But what’s different now is that these ideas are becoming more mainstream. The Boston Consulting Group said in a June report that recession anxiety had prompted a “back-to-basics movement,” with things like home and family increasing in importance over the last two years, while things like luxury and status have declined. And there is more good news: Many retailing professionals are saying this idea of careful consumerism is not a fad, but rather “the new normal.”

Living in a small house, selling our car, buying only things that meet our basic needs or enhance our lives – these choices all have a positive impact on the health of the Planet. Imagine the impact if we can find a way to scale up this downsizing! We also need to export this new normal to those parts of the world to which we sold our old hyper-consumption lifestyle. Those of us who have already voluntarily rejected unbridled acquisition are leading the change. If can get some help from progressive government policies, we might just be able to step back from the brink.

Support the Wild Salmon of British Columbia

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In 1997, I received an article query for Natural Life Magazine from a killer whale researcher named Alexandra Morton who had, 14 years earlier, moved to a cluster of islands on Canada’s west coast called the Broughton Archipelago, which is the perfect place to study whales year round. Her research broke new ground as she spent her life watching orca as they slept, foraged and played. But she had recently discovered a problem: The exploding number of fish farms – and the problems they have caused with sea lice and other issues – was causing her beloved whales to disappear. As she put it, “Wild salmon populations crashed and the pristine waters of the Broughton Archipelago turned red. Another ecosystem was dying.” The articles was entitled “Whales Don’t Eat Farmed Salmon…Why Should We?” It was among the first articles published on the problems with farmed salmon.

Ever since, Alexandra Morton has been working against the floating pen fish farms and trying to move the industry into closed tanks. BC scientists have produced over 20 scientific papers on the impact of salmon farms, to no avail. In fact, they’re still trying to enlarge the industry and 90 percent of the 2009 sockeye that were exposed to salmon farms vanished. So now, she is spearheading the Get Out Migration as the logical next step in an effort to remove the impact of salmon farms on wild fish and ecosystems by removing salmon farms from BC waters. Morton and others are walking down the B.C. coast this week from the fishing village of Sointula to the province’s capital in Victoria, organizing a blessing for the wild fry on Mother’s Day, then meeting with politicians who support their position that the era of net pen fish farming is over for BC.

Like the salmon migration, success depends on numbers. Details are at the Wild Salmon Are Sacred website. If you can’t particpate in the walk, the least you can do is to sign the petition on the website, avoid farmed salmon and support the wild salmon economy.

Building With Straw Bales… Better Late Than Never

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We were interested to see the venerable Economist magazine write about straw bale houses earlier this month. When such a conservative, mainstream publication notices a trend – albeit a decade or two late – that can only mean the trend has become firmly entrenched in our culture. So we welcome this article, even though it’s belated and somewhat uninformed.

Straw bale construction has, indeed, experienced a renaissance and has become popular with people looking to build strong, relatively inexpensive, ecologically sound houses and other structures using local, renewable materials. The material is very low in embodied energy, cheaply produced, non-toxic, and biodegradable at the end of its lifetime. Straw is an abundant, annually renewable resource often treated as waste by farmers. Well-constructed straw bale homes are durable, with some having survived for hundreds of years. They can also be very attractive because the materials lend themselves to rounded corners and other shapes.

Natural Life Magazine has been covering straw bale construction for almost 20 years now. Here’s the earliest straw bale article that we have archived on the website. In 1996, we held a two-day straw bale construction workshop as part of the Natural Life Festival. Ottawa-based architect and straw bale specialist Linda Chapman and her group of enthusiastic students built a small structure in the backyard of our rural home/office. One of Linda’s designs was featured on the cover of our May/June 2000. Linda and her partner, through their company Fibrehouse Limited, have been researching and building with straw bales since the early 1990s. With the help of CMHC, they have tested 18-inch wide stuccoed straw bale walls and found them to be sturdy under extreme stress.

A list of some of the articles we’ve published in Natural Life Magazine on straw bale, straw clay and other types of sustainable construction is here.

Linda Chapman’s website has a great deal of useful information, as well as a gallery of straw bale homes.

And last, but not least, the International Straw Bale Registry Project has almost 1,500 straw bale buildings on its site.