Fall/Winter, 2000 Member Update
Contents
- Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All
- 100 things
- Decimation
- ICE smear campaign
- Customer Comments
- Diane Hockenberry
Progress Report
Thanks for the Feedback! Over 500 members, volunteers and customers responded to our Stakeholder Survey. The results will be reported soon.
On our website...
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We offer an "eStore" or Shopping Cart. This allows you to order resources
without typing the information into a form. While in the eStore, just click
on the item. You can view the items in your shopping cart and take some out
if you choose at any time before actually placing the order.
The eStore and the Master Catalog have the same contents. Eventually the Master Catalog will go away. - We offer specials - 50% discounts on selected titles.
- Our Website Archives have many articles for personal inspiration and for editors.
Need a speaker or workshop leader? Alternatives "SLOw Down" Network now has over 650 North American volunteers.
Scheduled for 2001 is "Quotes & Art" (working title), a collection of serious, humorous, religious and secular quotations and illustrations on voluntary simplicity, sustainability, social justice and related topics for personal inspiration and for publications. Your contributions are welcome!
Contact us for submission guidelines before February 1st.
How You Can Help
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Have a piece of art (line drawing, photo) that depicts the tension between
faith and culture? Have a personal experience related to simplifying Christmas
or finding happiness in relationships instead of stuff? Have an idea for
a worshipful ceremony or a family ritual?
We will be accepting submissions for "Whose Birthday Is It, Anyway?" for 2001 until January 15th. We print about 150,000 copies and reach many more through our website.
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It's time to nominate folks to be elected as "at-large" members of Alternatives'
Board of Directors. Self-nomination is welcome.
Here's the schedule:
- Now - nominations begin
- August 1, 2001 - nominations close
- Fall, 2001 - ballot appears in Member Update
- March 1, 2002 - balloting ends
- October, 2002 - two elected members attend board meeting
Here are the guidelines:
- A nominee must be a member of Alternatives.
- An at-large member is elected for a three-year term and is eligible for election to a second term.
- Elected members are not responsibility for their travel expenses to board meetings.
Please contact us with your nominee's name, address and phone number.
- Remember Alternatives in your will. Consider gifting us some appreciated securities. Contact us (or have your lawyer contact us) for more information. Our legal name is "Alternative Lifestyles, Inc., d/b/a Alternatives for Simple Living." We appreciate cash donations (they're tax deductible!) and project grants.
- When you see or hear about Alternatives in the news - local, regional, national (church or secular) - please send us a copy or report it to us with a brief description (content, time, place, date). We can't afford a "clip service."
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Take one or more media releases to your local editor(s) and identify yourself
as a supporter of Alternatives. All our current releases are available on
our Website under "Information: Media Releases."
Download your choice(s) from the Website. Or we will send the release to your local editor in your name if you send us the publication's name, editor's name and editor's mail and/or email address. Contact us for a copy of your choice(s). Tell us if you want them by mail or email.
- Urge your Christian & Community Access TV channels to air our videos -- "Break Forth into Joy! Beyond a Consumer Lifestyle" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." We'll provide free copies if they agree to preview them. We request that you (or they) return the copies to us. If you get a local TV channel to air it, we'll provide support materials for you to promote viewing and follow-up.
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To receive our email newsletter, send us your email address. Then forward
messages to the folks in your email directory. Don't underestimate the power
of word-of-mouth, even by email!
If you choose not to receive such messages, contact us, or mark the box "Personal email only" on the Resource Guide order form the next time you order.
- Link us to your Website. Put an excerpt from one of our resources on your Webpage and link it to us. For help, contact our WebMaster: David@SimpleLiving.org.
- Share our Resource Guide (catalog) with people in your church group, at a conference you may attend, as part of a display, at a meeting. A donation to cover shipping is welcome, not required.
WHOSE Birthday? Contest
Art's tricky. Each year we try to portray visually the tension between faith and culture to help people question the way we celebrate Christmas.
Sometimes the point is obvious. Sometimes a caption for subtle art helps to focus the reader's mind.
The cover of "Whose Birthday Is it, Anyway?" for 2000 - Santa kneeling at the manger - has provoked some interesting, thoughtful responses. It's makes a good discussion starter - at home, at church, at work.
So, we're inviting you to tell us what the art means to you. Please reply by February 1st. Your response can be as short or as long as you choose. Or write a caption for the picture. We will publish selected submissions that represent the diversity of responses.
The art appeared in the Fall Resource Guide, on the cover of our Summer Resource Guide, and in full color on the cover of "Whose Birthday Is It, Anyway?" 2000. It's available on a flyer and a greeting card.
We plan to run another thought-provoking piece of art next year. Tell us what you think of that one too.
Worth Reading
For MORE Worth Reading (and past recommendations), visit our Website. Click on Information: Archives: Newsletters: Worth Reading. Or click on Insider Info.
A social statement on economic life...
Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All
Includes:
- The Church confesses
- Our obligation and ongoing tensions
- For all: especially those living in poverty
- Livelihood: vocation, work, and human dignity
- Sufficiency: enough, but not too much
- Sustainability: of the environment, agriculture, and low-income communities
- In conclusion, a vision renewed
Adopted at ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August, 1999. For a free copy in English or Spanish, call 800-638-3522 ext. 2718. Find this and all the ELCA statements and messages online at www.elca.org/dcs/studies/index.php.
100 things
I have as one of my life goals to own fewer than 100 things when I die. I have a long way to go with more than 100 dishes, more than 100 items of clothing, more than 50 pieces of jewelry and 18 pieces of furniture, but this goal is a useful spiritual tool. When I am tempted to purchase something because it's new or beautiful or convenient, I ask myself a few questions.
"Is this one of the hundred things?" "Is there a simpler way to use it, such as borrowing a book from the library rather than buying it?" And "Does this enrich my life or burden it.?"
- Fawn Fitzgibbon, Lincoln, IL, in Simple Living Quarterly, Summer 2000, p. 6. For a subscription contact Alternatives.
Decimation
Rita and I plan to retire in 10-15 years. We have set a goal of reducing our possessions by 10% per year for 10 years. Mathematically, we'll end up with 35% of our current possessions. We should be able to move ourselves in a small truck or trailer to our small retirement home. Other goals that I've reached and am working to maintain:
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Drive a car to work only one day per week, usually to transport items.
Bike, walk, take the bus or car pool the rest of the time. - Watch TV no more than an average of one hour per day.
- Eat only one helping of beef per week. In a week, eat for supper one modest helping of fish, beef, pork, poultry, vegetarian, left-overs and cook's choice. This plan includes sharing one entre between us when occasionally eating at a restaurant. Fast when appropriate. - Gerald Iversen
ICE smear campaign
Gordon Aeschliman, editor of "Target Earth: Serving the Earth, Saving the Poor," provides a strong caution in May/June, 2000, issue (p. 5).
The Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICE) discredit(s) the work of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a decade-long campaign by evangelicals, Jews, Catholics and mainline denominations to alert religious people to their responsibility to care for God's creation. (The "Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation" came out of this group.)
[ICE's] two major assertions that traditionally go with these folks' antagonism to the environment movement. The first assertion is that economic activity in the style of the West is the best way to take care of both the Earth and the poor. This group continues with the same silly idea that our market system is basically fair, free and kind. It supports the outmoded idea that we can ignore the impact our economic activity has on water, air, forests, species and large ecosystems (in current economic language, these "externalities" are real costs that need to be internalized in the system of accounting). We are eating up our natural assets faster than they can replenish or stay healthy. The U.S.A., just 4% of the global family, produces close to one-third of the world's waste - and that waste wreaks havoc on both Earth and the poor. The ICE document (named the Cornwall Declaration) would want us to believe that the poor are in misery basically because they degrade their own environments. No consequences sit with the West (arrogance would be too kind a word), the key culprit in this global exchange. The other key assertion of this group is that there are in fact no real environmental challenges. The air is OK, species are doing just fine, there are no population concerns.... The funniest citation claims there is no discernible human impact on global warming.
The Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship is not after all a council for the environment. Rather, it is an Interfaith Council for Traditional Political Economics.... Some of the biggies have signed on - Charles Colson, James Dobson, P. J. Hill. None of them have supported environmental causes in the past, so nothing new here.
The real curiosity to me is how far some American Christian leaders have slipped away from core biblical values - simplicity, generosity toward God's Earth and the poor, satisfaction with little, justice for the oppressed.
Instead the American way of greed, wealth accumulation and unhampered consuming is elevated to the level of spiritual stewardship. Now that is really amazing.
Fortunately, ICE is a small band of people who just don't get the facts. Their crusade will in time erode as fast as the topsoil in industrial agriculture zones is rushing down out American hillsides, clogging up our precious rivers.
Also worth reading in the same issue: "Beauty and the Beast: what to do when our hearts tell the truth," pp. 12-13.
Customer Comments
We get so many Customer Comments that we now put them on our Website and update them weekly. Visit www.SimpleLivingWorks.org, click Archives, then Feedback.
Diane Hockenberry
[graphic] Rosie the clown, center (Rose Ann Pridie, our Office Manager in real life, an honest-to-goodness graduate of the Christian Clown College) and her cohort, board member Marce Dirks, lead the celebration honoring Diane Hockenberry, right, upon her retirement from the board and from her position as Education Director for the Presbyterian Hunger Program. The party was part of the fall board meeting.
Editorials
Thanks for listening. Your responses are welcome. If you'd care to read past editorials, visit www.SimpleLivingWorks.org. Click on Archives: Newsletters: Editorials - Gerald Iversen, National Coordinator
Symbolism vs. Tokenism
In their important book "Environmental Basis for Effective Consumer Choices," our friends from the Concerned Scientists say, in effect, don't sweat the small stuff. Paper or plastic? Doesn't matter. Focus on the really important areas - transportation, food, household operations.
We market that book. It has a powerful and important message that is highly researched. We agree to a point.
Small stuff is important if you believe in symbolism but not if small stuff becomes tokenism.
This is the issue we wrestle with in "How to Influence Others," the Introduction to "Simple Living 101," which was also used as the calendar in "Whose Birthday Is It, Anyway?" for year 2000.
The small stuff becomes tokenism when it is used as an excuse not to deal with the big stuff. That's bad.
However, the small stuff does count. It does make a difference. Not a very big one. But it is an important symbol. It keeps us conscious of the need to "reduce-reuse-recycle-restore-respond." It helps keep us from overconsuming. it is part of a complete life of integrity.
Dear Simple Living
Dear Simple Living,
You have just won my prize for the earliest Christmas Advertisement! June 9! Whose birthday presents are being sold by you anyway? Just stop it. A. R., PA
Greetings, A. R.,
Thank you for your response. Without comments like yours we might grow complacent. Just because we have been at this work of de-commercializing Christmas for over 25 years doesn't mean that folks understand what we're about.
When dealing with the incredible forces of big business, one must get up early! We and our allies - concerned individuals and church denominations - start planning each year's Christmas campaign about a year and a half ahead of time. We are already working on the campaign for 2001.
Even though we use humor, this work is not a joke! We issue four Resource Guides a year offering tools to help oneself, others and systems toward sustainability. We have over 650 volunteers around the US ready to give presentations on simplifying Christmas. We urge you to be a part of this network as well.
I understand your suspicion. With big business trying to co-opt the Voluntary Simplicity movement to make even more money, even the "voices in the wilderness" may be seen as guilty by association.
Peace, Gerald
Dear Gerald,
I appreciate your response and your understanding of my reaction to your early Christmas promotion. A. R.
MODERATION
Most of us consider ourselves moderates. We've been taught that moderation is a virtue. The problem is that most North Americans are not moderates. We talk about moderation but we live extravagantly by world standards.
Moderation gives us the wiggle room to continue the status quo at a time when the status quo is killing our planet, our only planet.
COLLECTIONS
Collecting stuff - old stuff or new stuff - it's still just stuff. Call it antiques, collectibles, art, whatever. It's still just stuff. In capitalism, the question is not to collect or not, but WHOSE stuff to collect. Too bad it's the wrong question. The better question is, "Wouldn't we be better off and happier without all this stuff?"
Psychologically we think that stuff does not make demands of us like people do. So we may prefer stuff instead of relationships. But stuff demands a lot! The initial cost, our time to maintain it, to dispose of it meaningfully (like a museum or heir, rather than a landfill). Give me a caring human anytime!
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