Economist
(28 JUNE 2014) The future of universities- the digital degree
Business
Insider (28 JUNE 2014) New technology is turning education upside down
America
Academy of Pediatrics – Reach out and Read
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette (6 JULY 2014) Books for babies: Reading to children is essential,
from infancy on
Brookings
(3 JULY 2014) Good news about the future of news literacy
Brookings
(3 JULY 2014) News Literacy: Teaching the internet generation to make reliable
information choices
NY Times
(9 MARCH 2013) Graham Hill – Living with Less.
A lot less.
I
LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the
wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads
and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable
dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the
books I once did.
I
have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with
cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff —
electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets.
Somehow
this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed
ended up consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an
Internet windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things
isn’t.
We
live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping
opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge
themselves with products.
There
isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact
it seems the reverse may be true.
For
me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the
inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with
less.
It
started in 1998 in Seattle, when my partner and I sold our Internet consultancy
company, Sitewerks, for more money than I thought I’d earn in a lifetime.
To
celebrate, I bought a four-story, 3,600-square-foot, turn-of-the-century house
in Seattle’s happening Capitol Hill neighborhood and, in a frenzy of
consumption, bought a brand-new sectional couch (my first ever), a pair of $300
sunglasses, a ton of gadgets, like an Audible.com MobilePlayer (one of the
first portable digital music players) and an audiophile-worthy five-disc CD
player. And, of course, a black turbocharged Volvo. With a remote starter!
I
was working hard for Sitewerks’ new parent company, Bowne, and didn’t have the
time to finish getting everything I needed for my house. So I hired a guy named
Seven, who said he had been Courtney Love’s assistant, to be my personal
shopper. He went to furniture, appliance and electronics stores and took
Polaroids of things he thought I might like to fill the house; I’d shuffle
through the pictures and proceed on a virtual shopping spree.
My
success and the things it bought quickly changed from novel to normal. Soon I
was numb to it all. The new Nokia phone didn’t excite me or satisfy me. It
didn’t take long before I started to wonder why my theoretically upgraded life
didn’t feel any better and why I felt more anxious than before.
My
life was unnecessarily complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clear,
floors to vacuum, roommates to manage (it seemed nuts to have such a big, empty
house), a car to insure, wash, refuel, repair and register and tech to set up
and keep working. To top it all off, I had to keep Seven busy. And really, a
personal shopper? Who had I become? My house and my things were my new employers
for a job I had never applied for.
It
got worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east to work in Bowne’s
office in New York, where I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo loft that befit my
station as a tech entrepreneur. The new pad needed furniture, housewares,
electronics, etc. — which took more time and energy to manage.
AND
because the place was so big, I felt obliged to get roommates — who required
more time, more energy, to manage. I still had the Seattle house, so I found
myself worrying about two homes. When I decided to stay in New York, it cost a
fortune and took months of cross-country trips — and big headaches — to close
on the Seattle house and get rid of the all of the things inside.
I’m
lucky, obviously; not everyone gets a windfall from a tech start-up sale. But
I’m not the only one whose life is cluttered with excess belongings.
In
a study published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,”
researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found
that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent
dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in
the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too
jammed with things.
Our
fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for
example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American
home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480
square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an
average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had
shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the
amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.
Apparently
our supersize homes don’t provide space enough for all our possessions, as is
evidenced by our country’s $22 billion personal storage industry.
What
exactly are we storing away in the boxes we cart from place to place? Much of
what Americans consume doesn’t even find its way into boxes or storage spaces,
but winds up in the garbage.
The
Natural Resources Defense Council reports, for example, that 40 percent of the
food Americans buy finds its way into the trash.
Enormous
consumption has global, environmental and social consequences. For at least 335
consecutive months, the average temperature of the globe has exceeded the
average for the 20th century. As a recent report for Congress explained, this
temperature increase, as well as acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and Arctic
Sea ice are “primarily driven by human activity.” Many experts believe
consumerism and all that it entails — from the extraction of resources to
manufacturing to waste disposal — plays a big part in pushing our planet to the
brink. And as we saw with Foxconn and the recent Beijing smog scare, many of
the affordable products we buy depend on cheap, often exploitive overseas labor
and lax environmental regulations.
Does
all this endless consumption result in measurably increased happiness?
In
a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen
linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen
found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer
mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being,
including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer
activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have
flat-lined.
I
DON’T know that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an
aberrant or antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo.
But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up
when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff
quickly came apart.
I
followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat,
totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in
Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit
the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.
A
compulsive entrepreneur, I worked all the time and started new companies from
an office that fit in my solar backpack. I created some do-gooder companies
like We Are Happy to Serve You, which makes a reusable, ceramic version of the
iconic New York City Anthora coffee cup and TreeHugger.com, an environmental
design blog that I later sold to Discovery Communications. My life was full of
love and adventure and work I cared about. I felt free and I didn’t miss the
car and gadgets and house; instead I felt as if I had quit a dead-end job.
The
relationship with Olga eventually ended, but my life never looked the same. I
live smaller and travel lighter. I have more time and money. Aside from my
travel habit — which I try to keep in check by minimizing trips, combining
trips and purchasing carbon offsets — I feel better that my carbon footprint is
significantly smaller than in my previous supersized life.
Intuitively,
we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships,
experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.
I
like material things as much as anyone. I studied product design in school. I’m
into gadgets, clothing and all kinds of things. But my experiences show that
after a certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the
emotional needs they are meant to support.
I
wouldn’t trade a second spent wandering the streets of Bangkok with Olga for
anything I’ve owned. Often, material objects take up mental as well as physical
space.
I’m
still a serial entrepreneur, and my latest venture is to design thoughtfully
constructed small homes that support our lives, not the other way around. Like
the 420-square-foot space I live in, the houses I design contain less stuff and
make it easier for owners to live within their means and to limit their
environmental footprint. My apartment sleeps four people comfortably; I
frequently have dinner parties for 12. My space is well-built, affordable and
as functional as living spaces twice the size. As the guy who started
TreeHugger.com, I sleep better knowing I’m not using more resources than I
need. I have less — and enjoy more.
My
space is small. My life is big.
Collaborative
Consumption – City Guide: Barcelona
Collaborative
Consumption (25 JUNE 2014) Collaborative economy services: Changing the way we
travel
Clive
Hamilton (OCT 2010) Why we resist the truth about climate change
A paper
to the Climate Controversies: Science and politics conference
BC
Forest Professional (July-August 2012) Requiem for a species by Clive Hamilton
UN
Secretary General’s High Level Group On Sustainable Energy for All
Sustainable energy can revitalize
our economies, strengthen social equity, and catalyse a clean energy revolution
that benefits all humanity. Acting
together, we can open new horizons today and help power a brighter tomorrow.
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