Plenty Bulletin

Articles:
Introduction
Plenty Relief Team Still Working In The Gulf
Plenty Belize School Gardens Program
Imani House, Liberia
Kids To The Country Earth Day Activity

March 27, 2007
Dear Plenty Friends,

One of the questions for the ages has to be, “Are we, as a species, capable of learning and evolving, socially and spiritually, which obviously requires resisting self-destructive habits such as fear, greed, jealousy and revenge? As a generation, awakened and inspired in the “60s” to tackle the world in the decades to follow, we never doubted humanity’s capacity to learn and change, but almost four decades later I have to confess to traces of disappointment in the pace of this evolution.

At some point we all had to admit to ourselves, oh, I suppose these kinds of sea changes can take generations. If you had asked me in 1977 if I thought that 30 years in the future we would still be blowing each other up to prove a point that no one understood or could explain beyond fear and revenge, I would have said, “No way!” Yet here we are, more than six billion strong and more than two billion of us are so lacking in the basics of life—food, water, sanitation, health care, that two million of our children are dying every year because of the poverty of their existence. On top of that, the country I live in, the United States, spends more on weapons and defense, than would be necessary to deliver potable water and sanitation systems and primary health care to the two billion people in the world who lack these basic amenities. Sometimes numbers like a billion people tend to go in one ear and out the other, because what’s a billion anyway? Maybe this image will help. If the two billion people living in poverty were standing in a line, toe to heel, the line would stretch around the planet at the equator 15 times.

What were the great lessons of the 60s that so inspired us? We learned that we had the power to change the world, as long as we first changed ourselves. We learned that fear, hatred and anger were optional, with no redeeming qualities, while love was pure magic and the most useful tool in our toolbox. We learned that life on this earth was precious and miraculous (“…it’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill…”) and we learned, perhaps most significantly, that we are all part of each other—we are family, in every sense of that word. Knowing these things, our question to ourselves was, how then do we live?

In the early 1970s, the founders of the Farm Community in Tennessee and, ultimately, the founders of Plenty, held on to a vision of a standard of living that was healthy and graceful, yet modest in its use of non-renewable resources. We were well aware that the US, with six percent of the world's population (about 3.7 billion people at the time) was using 30 percent of the world's resources. I don’t think the term “sustainable” was yet in vogue, but we talked about finding a standard of living that everyone in the world could enjoy without being a threat to the biosphere we inhabit, or as E.F. Schumacher, the author of “Small Is Beautiful” put it, “…the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption…”

Maybe it took all this time, with the added shadow of the whip cast by global warming and the end of oil to hammer these ideas with a new urgency, but everywhere you turn these days you run into someone espousing the benefits of moderating consumption. It’s the school of “enough is enough.” People are concerned about oil running out, but a more immediate problem might be water running out, due to both global warming and overuse. Here’s an eye opener: a recent U.N. report says almost a fifth of global warming emissions come from livestock which adds up to more emissions than come from all of the world’s transportation combined! The biggest user of water in the US is, you guessed it, animal agriculture. They say the amount of water it takes to raise a thousand pound steer could float a destroyer. Hmmmm… food for thought.

The point of all this is just to underscore that generational lesson about having the power to change the world by first changing ourselves. There are very practical things we can do in our own lives that have ripple effects around the planet. It was exciting to realize this the first time, and it’s comforting and motivating to remember it now. We’ve always been a little wary of calling Plenty a “development” organization as we’ve learned that development can be very destructive when it’s all about “more.” We’d rather it meant “enough” so we started saying “alternative development” which has morphed into “sustainable development.” So it’s been a lifetime of learning and it’s gratifying to consider that those lessons and awakenings that caused us to put flowers in our hair and dance in the streets, back in the day, happen to be still operative and true. Finally, just let me say once more, how grateful we are that Plenty has been able to keep on keeping on, more than three decades, making a small but beautiful contribution, thanks to you and everyone who has given their time, energy and love. With your encouragement, we’re planning for the next three decades and beyond.

Yours truly,
Peter Schweitzer
Executive Director