John deGraaf has made another great film that’s both funny and searing in its critique of the toxic by-products of the  consumer culture. It’s called What’s the Economy for Anyway? and you can watch a trailer on YouTube. It stars Dave Batker, an ecological economist, head of Earth Economics and also surprise guest of the Conscious Money Speakers’ Series teleclass tonight.

If you meant to sign up for the series and missed it, you can still do so by clicking here and joining in for the rest of it. It’s discounted 15% – and you still get to hear all the recordings.

About Ecological Economics – they include the cost to the earth in their calculations of “profit” – and take into account the “ecological services” of nature that don’t figure in the equation – like the value of air, water and all those microbes that eat our waste. Some say that the “North” – wealthy nations – are in ecological debt to the “South” or less developed nations since we have used a lot of their resources (including their capacity to absorb our garbage) to make our lives comfortable.

The big take away is that what we measure we can change. Like with Your Money or Your Life, to discover how much is enough you have to see what you have (step one) and what you’re earning and spending (steps 2-3) and how it’s working for you (step 4) over time (step 5).

The New York Times article “After Escaping Jobless Rolls, Trauma May Linger” profiles several people who’ve found work after 6 months to 2 years of unemployment, likening their anxieties and broken relationships to PTSD. They say, “It is not clear whether those who have gone back to work will embrace a new frugality. The Newbys are doing their best to rein in their spending, both out of necessity and to make sure they are better protected for the future. Like many other Americans, they had always simply spent what they earned.”

A new frugality? Is that spending less than you earn and saving for a rainy day – or year? Is it being so traumatized that you can’t spend? Is it like yo-yo dieting, binging and starving because you no longer can assess how much is enough? The savings rate is back up to 5% – is that from fear or prudence or waking up to what’s important in life? What do you think the new frugality is? How long will it last? Will we “go back to our old ways”?

And for those of you who are Your Money or Your Life readers, what role does the YMOYL approach have in helping people through a hard time?

What’s in a name? After all, it’s the ‘thing’ not the ‘name’ that matters. But I discovered about the Discover your Enough Point teleclass (new one starting in March - Free Intro Class on Tuesday, February 23rd) that the title wasn’t getting to the point. It’s not just about having “enough”. It’s about the sense of liberation you get when you realize that you finally do have enough. You are then free to direct your life energy elsewhere. Whether it’s work or play, solitude of sociability, whatever was once a hunger can become a satisfaction. Once satisfied – and knowing it – you move on. The trouble of course is that so many people don’t recognize enough and don’t move on. We keep pursuing more – even when it ceases to really satisfy.

This is especially poignant now that the opportunity for indulging in “more than enough” is far less for many more people.  17% unemployment/underemployment means people neither have the where with all to overspend… nor the stomach for it. The savings rate is up to 5% – from 0% or less for half a decade – because we the people don’t know which way the market is going or where our jobs are going next. We finally understand all that string saving and economizing our grandparents did and tried to teach us to do. They knew the bottom could fall out. Now we do as well.

The opportunity of this moment is to notice that when we cease the pursuit of more than we truly need for a rich life, we relax. What wasn’t enough last week simply because we believed more would be better might be just enough this week. The stove, the car, the coat, the bathroom fixtures suddenly look just dandy. They work. Don’t look bad. Hmmm.

This isn’t easy. The human psyche is wired to mourn the loss of $100 more than it celebrates the gain of $100. Losing ground triggers a deep seated fear for our very survival. Gaining ground is just increasing the distance from demise.  It takes awareness and maturity and a sense of life’s bigger meaning to even want to grab the opportunity of enough.

So Enough really is freedom. It liberates the mind from the clench of fear. It liberates your time from the pursuit of what doesn’t bring you happiness. It liberates your heart from miserly doling out a few pennies of love, and lets you relax into enjoying all your relationships.

That’s why I’m trying out the FREEDOM OF ENOUGH.

But I need you. What do you think of this new title? Does it ring your chimes? Does it leave you flat? What else would you call this work of rightsizing our lives?

Well, pretty far. I don’t know if this will attract you to my Discover Your Enough Point course or send you running in the other direction, but out of curiosity I went looking on the web for a song i wrote and recorded ten years ago on the theme of “enough.” Okay, so I can’t really carry a tune without someone on the other end keeping it from tipping off key, but it’s at least C for courage and I hope you agree it’s A for awesome lyrics… and still true now.

Click here to listen (you need realplayer) and below are the words.

And the Discover Your Enough Point class has room for 5 more participants. It’s great information, revealing practices and comes right from my heart and soul and 64 years of living.  Click here to register.

I Have Enough, Do You?

By Vicki Robin

Excuse me sir, I know it’s impolite
But since kids are starving I thought I might
Just ask some folks to figure out rough
If they could possibly have enough
Sure more might be better but maybe it’s worse
Stuff taxes your serenity as well as your purse, so
Could you say as though it were true:

I have enough
I do,
I have enough,
do you?

Hello Mr. Buffet and Mr. Gates
I’m wondering if you could congregate
Billionaires like you who might have a few
More things than you’re needing and be needing nothing new
Since our forests are denuded and our waters are polluted
Could your fortunes be diluted and maybe contributed?
So would you say and have it be true:

I have Enough
I do
I have enough
Do you?

Excuse me Mrs. Bangaladeshi
I just have one very simple question
If you haven’t enough can we work together
If what I have will help you weather
Poverty and storms I’ll surely give
For you and your neighbors to love and live
So we all can say and know it is true:

You have enough
You do
You have enough
Yes you do

Hey everyone can you just guess
How we might live without the mess
Of some having lots, some having less
Let’s all have plenty but none excess
Forget lamb and lions lying down together
Can rich and poor learn to love each other
So we all can say and know it is true:

We have enough
We do
We have enough
We all do.

By chance or by luck or by some mysterious design, I was invited at the last minute to do a teleclass on Saturday as part of the Women on the Edge of Evolution series. The topic was Having Enough for Life and it was truly wonderful and here’s a link to listen to it.

To my great pleasure and amazement, registrations poured in after the class for both my free class tonight and for the Conscious Money Speakers Series.  Because of that, I’ve put in an addition free introduction to the series. Click here to join the free teleclass on January 12 at 5:15-6:15 PM PST.

Last night 40 people and I “gathered” in a virtual workshop room to consider the rich questions of “How much is enough of anything? How do we know? What happens next – after you recognize that you have enough?”

Would you like to hear what happened? Click here for a recording.

There is still room in the class. Since attending the Gross National Happiness conference I’ve thought much about what makes us happy, what makes life worth living and how we can align our relationship with time and money and busyness and food and more so that how we actually spend our days adds up to a life we love. It really is my joy to explore that with a “room full” of equally curious and creative people, so I hope you’ll “come” to my class starting in January. Click here to sign up.

Another big picture post from Brazil, now a hotel room in Rio headed home in a day.

Reading about the Climate Summit in Copenhagen and thinking about the roles of personal change (Your Money or Your Life) and community change (Transition Movement). COP15, as it is called, is debating what structural agreements and financial mechanisms all nations will agree to honor. The feasible is all too little too late. The necessary perhaps too far from the feasible to turn the tide. Whatever the agreements, though, in the end it is real people in real places that will have to make them stick – or adapt. That’s wherepersonal change comes in. Here Bill Becker reports that Citizen Consumers are beginning to wake up the strategic if not moral consciousness of corporations. Some are making system wide changes which actually affect sustainability outcomes. So voting with your dollars – and declaring from the roof tops and blogs that you are doing so – can make a difference.

Frugality itself, a big lesson of the 9-step program in YMOYL, helps at every level to use resources well and wisely. If everything bought costs personal life energy, and you want to maximize that for the best life possible, then you look for reused items, elegant and low-tech construction options, keeping some things in service longer than old habits would suggest (cars to carpets). Big agreements in Copenhagen might make these choices a bit more economic, but you still have to make them! And so does everyone else.

But what about personal actions themselves. How important are they?

First, many of the worst aspects of climate change happen to people.

Health is a big one. Bad air and water and contaminated food breed illness. New pathogens and endocrine disruptor and more cause health problems.

Justice is another – those at the bottom are more affected and less able to protect themselves. These will be climate refugees and richer nations and people will not be able to keep them from pressing across boarders for food, water and life. Sickness care is often metered to the rich before the poor. It is not only morality that says change is needed, but common sense.

Both health and justice can be addressed locally as well as globally. Staying informed, finding home remedies that work whether you can get to a clinic, growing your own healthy food, sharing knowledge with others – this is also public health. Supporting local food banks (we have one of the best on Whidbey, brag brag) is crucial. We can make it better for us and need to activate our will even in the face of failed global agreements.

Consumer slowdown – spending less for equal or greater quality of life – will at least reduce the pressure of overconsumption – and might shift production towards what consumers will buy: energy efficiency, low- and high- tech solar installations, recycled clothing, purification systems, water cachement systems, farm and garden implements, bicycles, electric mopeds and cars, online trading systems that work, films full of hope and information. Lots of good things can be produced in response to wise consumer’s demands.

Community relocalization. This is where I’m investing my life energy (time and money) since all sustainability adaptation is actually local. It happens somewhere.

Relocalization isn’t isolationist. It’s “subsidiarity” at its best. This means making decisions and adaptations at the most local level possible. Not sending important decisions that can be made locally up the political hierarchy, regarding the local as powerless. Influencing the halls of power, but not waiting for them. This is “FI-thinking” (Financial independence, intelligence and integrity) at a collective level

Here are some aspects:

1. Find out all laws and policies that can bring money and power to local projects. Robert Gilman, my city councilman in little Langley WA found state money to finance an “energy czar” for our city. County activists are smart about the laws and use them to protect land from developers and Puget Sound from pollution. Just because a law is on the books doesn’t mean it’s on local official’s radar. Find out. Make change happen. Here in Brazil there are ever better laws, but in a country as huge and basically wild as this one, much illegal destruction still goes on.

2. Map local agricultural, water and economic assets. Local production of food and goods doesn’t mean local food and economic systems. On Whidbey we’re doing this. First a “farmer to chef” network was developed, revealing several gaps in the delivery system that prevented a good idea from becoming a real one. Money was raised. A local ag coordinator was hired. Money ran out and she was fired, but the network and the knowledge remains. Now Transition Whidbey is sponsoring an ag mapping process so we know who is growing what and which lands have what ag potential. This will help the farmers coordinate crops in response to local demand, and help CSA’s and sharecroppers (people who grow for Farmer’s Markets on others’ land in exchange for a cut of the crop) know where else they might grow. With budget cuts there may not be much county or state support for this effort, but it has to happen and we are doing it.

3. Research. God bless we have the web. You can find solutions from around the world for water harvesting and good farming practices and energy generation and more. www.worldchanging.com is a treasure trove of solutions – but so are many other sites. YouTube has videos for every green home handyman project you can imagine. Form clubs like they do for investing, but for researching good local energy and food systems and how to manifest them.

In other words, it may seem hopeless in Copenhagen that we’ll get what we need, but hope is alive and well in hearts and hands and communities and we can do it.

• Too much to do and too little time
• Too many expenses and not enough savings for the future
• Too many demands from others and not enough attention to yourself
• Too many mails pouring in and no matter how many you answer it’s never enough
• Too much food - or the wrong kind – to feel good in your body

• The insidious way “too muchness” robs you of satisfaction.
• How to find your “internal yardstick for fulfillment”.
• Tools to develop a personal values and mission statement.
• A simple yet profound way to observe your patterns with a “no shame, no blame” attitude.
• About the science of happiness and the 5 universal pathways. Mapping what you need to be happy.
• 9 powerful practices to steer your life away from “too much” and towards enough.

• Clear about where all your time, money and resources are going.
• Ways to steer yourself out of “too muchness” again and again.
• More balance, mastery and intentionality in your life.

Since John deGraaf did such a fine summary of the GNH conference, and those deeply interested can dig deeper here, I want to explore how GNH might translate to a US setting. It’s my “does it hoe corn” eye – what might it take for GNH to make a difference.

First, here are the gifts of GNH, what makes it a step beyond other efforts at making “well being”, not “economic activity” the express purpose of an economy.* First

GNH is the project of a national government, fully funded and empowered to develop a system of measurement of “well being” and then policy tools based on these indicators that will actually guide choices and laws. This is a first in modern times. Most well-being research and writing has been produced by academics and activists – people who push on those in power but who do not have their hands on the levers of power. This makes “well being” an interesting side-line to policy. In October 1986 John Vasconcellos of CA proposed the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem that was ridiculed around the country (and the world). We’ve come a long way baby and thank you Bhutan for elevating well being to a national priority.

Second, their 9 domains and 72 indicators are wider than previous well being measures. The domains are:

• Psychological Well Being
• Health
• Use of Time
• Community Vitality
• Education
• Culture
• Environment
• Governance
• Standard of Living

You’ll notice that only one of the nine has to do with economic activity. Thus GDP, while a part of the picture, isn’t the whole picture. It’s positive qualities – that people feel financially secure and have what they need – are included and it’s negative qualities – the environment and culture and personal happiness be damned – contained. GNH decontaminates GDP rather than rejecting it. How Buddhist.

You’ll also notice that subjective well-being is a ninth of the picture. They are grappling with the fact that you can set up conditions for happiness but you can’t make people happy. At the same time, the felt sense of well being is actually the bottom line. Is it all adding up to a good society? In GNH this is taken seriously. If the people aren’t happy the government listens.

You’ll also notice that Time Use is part of it. Time famine is a hidden distress of the modern world. Ask anyone in the US how they are and “busy” is mostly the answer. The speed up of life has allowed us to do more, have more, commit more with no end in sight – and “enough already” is the cry of the soul (which of course is why I am teaching my Discover Your Enough Point class). In Bhutan, if people don’t have enough time to love, to pray, to play with children, to sleep, the government WILL make changes.

Third, GNH is a whole systems approach. It’s a complex equation. All nine domains are interlinked and must be regarded together, not disaggregated and dealt with one by one. This means you can’t adjust for Standard of Living without attending to how that affects time use or culture. Setting up a complex equation and requiring whole systems answers requires the mind to go where it has not gone before. It requires us to expand our understanding of life. To discover options that are invisible in linear systems.

You see why GNH has captured my imagination.

BUT

Does it hoe corn?

How does it get applied?

Susan Andrews, hostess of the Brazil Conference, beloved spiritual teacher and iron willed do-er when she hears the call, enacted three projects along the GNH lines. One was in a city, one was in a university and one was in a corporation. Next they are doing one in a favela in Sao Paulo. The city project is the template. She trains young people to be data collectors. The fan out to a statistically signifiant number of households to get the surveys filled out completely – even if the people are not literate. Next a community meeting happens where results are presented and people engage passionately in discussing what the community needs for greater well being. Based on that, and funded by the government, they get project of their own choosing.

This is not so different from what we did as Sustainable Seattle in the early 1990’s. We involved a large swath of the community in developing indicators of sustainability, exploring the linkages among the 40 (how they affect one another) and measuring once a year. We were not, however, a project of the city. Our County Exec, Ron Simms,  once took a copy of our Indicators Report out of his desk drawer and brandished it, saying this was how he gauged how good a job he was doing. And our indicators were more weighted towards economic and environmental factors than social and personal.

So the question remains, would GNH hoe corn on Whidbey Island – better than Transition Whidbey which is actually increasing the ag land being hoed.

I think GNH as a methodology has to be in the hands of people who have the budget and clout to do valid research and may policy that sticks. Unless you have an army of passionate volunteers who can work 12 hours a day for nothings and some of whom have PhDs, I don’t this a citizen group can do this work. Well, with a Susan Andrews you might be able to – but she has a lot of resources behind her through her Visao Futuro teaching center and truly vast networks who listen to her, love her and love working with her.

What a citizen group CAN do is educate, organize, influennce, host conferences, talk to officials, makes brats of themselves. What GNH has that TW doesn’t is a focus on increasing well being rather than a focus on adaptation to dire circumstances with as much pizazz as possible. Measuring GNH in a less rigorous way and committing to increasing it – together with our action groups and storefront and education work – could accelerate the shift on Whidbey and that indeed is compelling.

John deGraaf and I are exploring hosting an educational and networking and base building GNH event in Seattle, perhaps coordinating with two other GNH conferences in 2010 – one in Vermont, one in Wyoming.

Let’s get happy. Together. in a measurable and whole systems sort of way. I’m game.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*By the way, John deG has been a passionate champion of this issue if you want to explore this further

While I’ve been on a wild goose chase here in Brazil to replace my stolen computer cable and now to replace my kaput memory chip, John deGraaf wrote an extraordinarily clear summary of the GNH conference on Worldchanging.com . He gives a summary of the Conference where we were both speakers as well as a summary of GNH and happiness studies and cultural adaptations around the world. Read it! It saves me a lot of background summarizing. Plus John is going to be a speaker in the Conscious Money Speakers Series hosted by moi and beginning in January 2010.