From: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Subject: Re: Sustainable lifestyles
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 19:47:32 GMT

In article <1992Oct10.075735.8668@netcom.com> beast@netcom.com (Master) writes:
>In article <JMC.92Oct7225619@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
>>Here's the energy god again.  There is plenty of energy to be had.
>>Human labor is what needs to be conserved, unless we want to live in
>>poverty.
>
>I agree.  The thing that really gets me about these people who want us to
>make as many of the things we use as possible (including growing our own
>food) is that they don't seem to realize just how much time we would actually
>spend doing these things.  

Do you ? Do you know that I can grow 80% of my summer diet and about
30% of a winter one on 300 square feet with less than 10 hours of work
a week ? 

Proponents, such as myself, of a more agrarian society, are not
advocating a general return to the conditions endured by farm laborers
before the industrial revolution hit US farms. Instead, we observe
that the knowledge that we (and other countries & cultures) have
acquired about farming and nutrition can be put to much better use
than it is by current typical US farm and eating habits. 

I certainly don't want to spend all my time working a hoe or a lettuce
knife in sun, rain & wind (although I've done both for months at a
time).  However, I think that I can make a productive contribution to
my own sustenance by spending a mere fraction of my time doing such
things in the much more efficient ways that we are now aware of.
			    
			    I have better things to do than spend time
>sewing clothes, growing food, etc., when there are other people willing to
>do it for me (for a price, of course).  

Why are they so willing ? There is a history to how the US moved away
from Jefferson's ideal of an agrarian society and became the
industrial system it is today. Some parts of that history are
admirable, creative, ingenious, brilliant. Others are deceptive, short
sighted and ultimately foolish. Ignoring the history, ignoring the
question of why so many people believe that life should be spent doing
one thing for 8 hours a day in order earn the currency needed to
enable them to stay alive is self-deception, IMHO.

					 The more labor intensive day-to-day
>survival is, the lower the standard of living is.

Ridiculous, unless your only measure of standard-of-living is based
around material goods. Machinery has made our lives immeasurably more
comfortable, and we would be fools to do without it completely. But it
has also made many of our lives suffer the absence of satisfaction for
a good part of each day. Perhaps this absence predates machinery,
perhaps it does not - I certainly do not want to glorify the past as
some kind of "golden age" - it clearly was not. 

However, I believe that the knowledge we find around us today can be
used, not to go backwards, but to combine elements of less machinized
societies with the relative comfort we enjoy. Such a life might not be
rich in electronic widgets, but I suspect that it would be healthier,
more full of laughter, wine, food, friendships, travels, reading,
writing, art, and perhaps even speculative engineering. In short, it
would be focus on more of things most human beings want in their lives
without disconnecting them from the things they can never escape.

-- paul


-- 
There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a
little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider
price only are this man's lawful prey.
						John Ruskin