Frugal Earth View
This month I’ve been meditating every morning as a commitment to the virtue of frugality. I’m using it as a way to pay attention to how I spend emotional energy. It’s been extremely beneficial; when I follow through on meditating, it changes the trajectory of my day and I’m able to cope with things far more positively. On the days I roll out of bed like a stressball gaining too much momentum to sit still and breathe for 10 minutes, my emotional reserves are (for some strange reason) limited. It’s a work in progress. I’m a work in progress.
I’ve been considering how frugality can benefit the community and I keep coming back to an obvious answer. My mind keeps wandering back to a novel that I loved and that scared the crap out of me with its near-future vision of humanity ravaged by climate change. David Mitchell’s 2014 fantasy The Bone Clocks is a sweeping examination of good versus evil, following the life of its protagonist Holly Sykes. The third act of the book shows an elderly Holly in the year 2043, deeply entrenched in what Mitchell coins Endarkenment:
“I wonder what life in Cartagena, in Perth, in Shanghai is like now. Ten years ago I could have streetviewed the cities, but the Net’s so torn and ragged now that even when we have reception it runs at prebroadband speed…I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch.1 ”
A plotless never-ending disaster movie. That sounds a little too much like the real world lately. But Holly raises grandchildren in a future that looks unrecognizable to people of today, many of whom don’t think twice about jumping in cars to shop in supermarkets, travelling, or having online shopping shipped to their door. Climate change shows an earth turned into large-scale third-world. Yet that fictional planet is our real-world concern. Each one of us is accountable for taking responsibility.
“People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.”
The Bone Clocks may be fantasy, but the world Mitchell creates feels terrifyingly plausible. Many people are lulled into complacency while the world is quite literally on fire. Mitchell gives us characters that throw up their hands and say how was I supposed to stop it? I was just one person! But each one of us has to take responsibility for our own actions and their impact. Each of us is responsible for practicing frugality with the resources we use.
We have the power to make this distopian vision a warning instead of a sentence. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the climate change crisis, but there’s real cause for hope. If you’re interested in exploring how frugality can save the world, or if you’re not sure where to start, you can begin by estimating your carbon footprint with a calculator like this or this. Find one area in which you use a lot of carbon and commit to making one meaningful change. Individual actions may seem small and insignificant, but our combined actions add up.
I’m committing to refuse single-use plastics. I’ll keep you updated on my progress in the coming weeks.
How do you practice frugality? Please share your tips for how you practice frugality as an act of daring hope to create a better world today and for generations to come. Let us know in the comments below or join the conversation on Facebook.
Notes:
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
1. Mitchell, David. The Bone Clocks: A Novel. Random House, 2014.