We do this out of a personal love for the natural world around us. Asceticism provides an example whereby we may live simply. Asceticism is not a flight from society and the world, but a communal attitude of mind and way of life that leads to the respectful use, and not the abuse, of material goods. Excessive consumption issues from a world-view of estrangement from self, from land, from life, and from God. Consuming the fruits of the earth unrestrained, we become consumed ourselves, by avarice and greed.
Asceticism is a corrective practice, a vision of repentance.
We lovingly suggest to all the people of the Earth, that they seek to help one another to understand the myriad ways in which we are related to the Earth and to one another. Many human beings have come to behave as materialistic tyrants. Those that tyrannize the Earth are themselves, sadly, tyrannized. If human beings treated one another's personal property the way they treat their environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social. We would impose the judicial measures necessary to restore wrongly appropriated personal possessions.