Photo by Kirsty Pargeter

In a recent post traveler, journalist (and BNT co-editor) Tim Patterson provided a how-to guide for traveling free (or very cheap) – a practice that could be called “vagabonding.”

Soon after publication, he was promptly assailed by a number of readers for advocating a kind of “shiftlessness” and “irresponsibility.”

He was nailed with all manner of epithets – called irresponsible, a hippie, a bum, an idealist, impractical, a “rich, privileged, arrogant hipster,” the list went on.

In reality, Tim was just offering some practical low-budget travel advice. As such, the vitriolic feedback from the readers is way out-of-proportion.

But why is that? What brought on this storm of denouncements?

As humans, whenever we have a strong emotional reaction to something, it’s an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, the way our psyche works, the way our minds are wired.

When we react strongly, that’s usually an indication that some fundamental metaphysical axiom, in other words, some deeply held belief, is being challenged.

Mainstream Beliefs

Tim’s practical, low-budget travel advice struck a nerve with some folks. And my sense is that these are not oddball folks – rather they are probably fairly typical, fairly mainstream in their beliefs and attitudes.

I suggest this because one of the fundamental axioms held in our dominant Western “civilized” culture has to do with the importance of “getting somewhere in life.” From a very young age, we’re urged to achieve this or that, “become responsible,” and to make something of ourselves.

But aren’t I already something?

Of course, that isn’t what’s intended by the phrase – we’re meant to make something important of ourselves. And in this case, “important” means to embody success, as understood in the conventional way.

Stealing an illustration from Alan Watts, we ask: What’s the outcome of success in business as we know it? More business!

More business means more investment, more production, more stuff, more expansion, more proliferation of mostly material ticky-tacky, and to go along with all this, more bulldozing over ecosystems to make it all possible.

Now, granted, all this business – this busy-ness – has produced some technological marvels and various benefits to our lives and to society. But if one is to take a reasonably objective view, one has to ask the question, “At what cost?”

The Price Of Busy-ness

For all our technology and busy-ness, we’ve got nuclear weapons, climate change, deforestation, a precipitous decline in biodiversity rivaled only by the extinction event that did away with the dinosaurs, GMOs, And an environment full of toxic chemicals.

We’ve got Reality TV, high-density Confined Animal Feeding Operations and the largest disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor in human history.

To top it off, we’ve got an insane economic system that itself survives by accelerating the rate of all of these forms of destruction, desecration and depravity.

Even so, a belief held very deeply by most folks is that we are now better off than ever before in human history. But considering the above, I’m not sure about this.

Responsibility in our society means getting somewhere in life. It means making something of yourself. Yet as a vagabond traveler, there is only one requirement. To relinquish any notion of, or attachment to, getting somewhere in life or of making something of oneself…other than what one already is.

Being a successful vagabond traveler requires one to understand that the fundamental metaphysical axiom of our “civilized” culture is an illusion and is absurd.

A vagabond traveler realizes that naught but frustration, anxiety and suffering can come from blindly applying oneself to the futile task of endless consumption.

Examining Success

To illustrate this emptiness, here’s a short animation charting the conventional course of success.

To ask this question another way:

At what point when you have amassed X amount of personal fortune, accumulated Y amount of material possessions, and achieved Z status as ‘an upstanding member of society’ do you shout “Enough!” and commence living a life of contentment?

Looking around our society, it seems that hardly anyone has reached this point.

This is the defining characteristic of the conventional mind in our society – never satisfied in the present, never content with what is, always grasping for something more.

And we’re certainly inundated with enough marketing and advertising and PR to encourage this mindset.

The Awakened Vagabond

Photo by Julien Bastide

In a sense, the vagabond traveler is a kind of avatar for our society.

She is one who has seen the inherent emptiness behind the conventional understanding of success, who has realized the futility of living a life in unending pursuit of an illusory future happiness.

The vagabond traveler embodies the realization that there is no place other than here, and there is no time other than now. So if one is going to enjoy one’s life, it has to be done in the here-and-now.

If one is incapable of enjoying life in the present then one is incapable of enjoyment, period, because the present is the only time there is and “future enjoyment” does not exist.

In the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), the word “content” appears 11 times. Here are some examples showing what Lao-Tzu was trying to tell us:

Chapter 44:

“Fame or integrity: which is more important? / Money or happiness: which is more valuable? / Success or failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment / you will never truly be fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on money / you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have / rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking / the whole world belongs to you.”

A Higher Responsibility

The vagabond traveler represents a higher kind of responsibility – one who is more in touch with reality and the true nature of the Universe; although the typical mind will always label her as “out-of-touch,” “impractical,” and a “denier of reality.”

This mis-labeling and the anger that comes with it – the anger that was showing up in several of the reactions to Tim’s post on low-budget vagabond travel – arise because the deepest Self, beneath all those layers of conventional Mind, resonates with the truth exposed and illustrated by the liberated vagabond, the free-spirited wandering ascetic.

For one strongly identified with the egoic mind and thus caught up in conventional notions of success, that resonance is frightening.

This deepest Self, this universal thing that the Hindus call Atman, has hidden itself inside each of us, playing this colossal game of hide-and-seek.

This hallucination that we are “isolated centers of sensation locked up in a bag of skin” (what is indicated in Western psychological parlance by the term “ego”) – hides our true nature from ourselves.

The Universal Self

Tim’s essay on traveling for free struck such a nerve with folks because he wasn’t addressing individual egos in terms that are comfortable, but rather speaking directly to the Universal Self hidden within all of us in terms intended to draw it out and expose the ongoing illusion of our conventional lives.

This Universal Self knows full well the illusory nature of success in the conventional, egoic sense, and moves naturally to embrace the Tao of Vagabond Travel that Tim illustrates in his piece.

A strong negative emotional reaction to this Tao of Travel is simply indicative of folks’ identification with the ego. And when the ego is threatened, it gets defensive (we all know what that’s like). Who among us has never reacted angrily and all-out-of-proportion before?

Don’t be too hard on yourselves. Or each other. (Which is to say the same thing.)

As Lao-Tzu said:

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
(chapter 67)

Share your own thoughts on the Tao of Vagabond Travel in the comments!

I want to urge caution in what has become a widespread and unqualified enthusiasm for the whole micro-finance thing. Since Yunus won the Nobel Prize, people have been afraid to criticize the idea of micro-finance.

But I hold a great degree of skepticism about the effectiveness of micro-loans to promote authentic well-being and prosperity for folks in the so-called “developing world” over the long term. I hasten to add that I am not dismissing the concept 100%, out-of-hand. But I have serious doubts.

I fear that the principal effect of micro-lending is to further hook people into dependence upon the money economy. In the so-called “developed” world, we can scarcely imagine a thing such as independence – we are totally reliant on money to buy everything we need and want for our lives.

But the rural “poor” of the world – the subsistence farmers, for example – can and do maintain a significant degree of independence from the money economy.

They do this by producing much of what they use themselves or within their immediate communities. This kind of locally self-reliant economy is preferable – it is far more stable, more ecologically sound, and more preservative of community than the global economy.

Development For Good?

My fear is that micro-lending provides yet another mechanism (under the failed rubric of “development”) for inducing folks off the land and out of their local communities, estranging them from their traditional cultures and thrusting them into the cities, which is to say the slums.

The best strategy to “help the poor” is to reduce their requirements for money, not find ways to make them more dependent upon it, even if those ways involve giving them a little money and even perhaps appear helpful in the short term.

Micro-lending involves giving the “poor” a little bit of money at the outset, which from our perspective (as rich Westerners) looks good because we can’t imagine a life without money.

We think the problem of the poor is that they don’t have enough money. On the contrary, their problem is lack of entitlement to the necessities of life. Money is only one way to obtain this entitlement, and it’s not a very good way in the long run, neither for the world’s “poor” nor ourselves.

The Trouble With Loans

A better way to secure entitlement to the necessities of life – in either the “developing” or “developed” worlds – is to increase local capacity for their direct creation; promoting local self-reliance.

A loan, micro- or otherwise, has to be repaid. That means an enterprise started on a micro-loan must not only be solvent, but must produce a surplus and earn sufficient profit above the interest rate of the loan.

The possibility of earning a profit is largely beyond the control of the micro-loan recipient. It is subject to the fluctuations and instabilities of the global economy and the decisions of far-flung bureaucrats in governments and international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank: all complex forces well beyond the ken, let alone the control, of a Kenyan peasant woman selling bread from an urban sidewalk stand.

If we want to “help the poor,” the surest strategy is to work with them to increase their independence from the money economy. This is unfamiliar territory to nearly everyone in the West. Since we (most of us, comparatively speaking) have money, it is our stand-by solution to everything. “Throw money at the problem” is our strategy in research, public welfare programs, environmental issues and politics.

What we must do in order to be able to “help the poor” is to first learn ourselves how to live without money, or at least with a lot less of it. We must learn, or rather re-learn, the techniques of self-reliant, agrarian living wherein local needs are met primarily by goods produced locally.

I am not suggesting – God forbid – that everyone ought to “go be a farmer.” We need “urban agrarians” just as desperately as rural ones.

We must familiarize ourselves with our local ecosystems and devise solutions for living that make sense within our particular ecological and social contexts. And we must re-establish the health of community that makes locally self-reliant living feasible, as it cannot be done by the individualist “loners” under the influence of “modern” society and market culture.

Breaking Control

When we consider that we must first help ourselves in these formidable tasks before helping the world’s poor, we reach the ineluctable conclusion that we are, at present, woefully unqualified for the task. Our standard answer to life’s problems – to spend more money – cannot produce the needed long-term solutions.

What seems ironic, though only from our own perspective, is that some of the “poorest” communities in the world are in a better position to help us than we them. Some subsistence farming communities of Asia, Africa and Latin America still practice a lifestyle that involves a high degree of local self-reliance, strong community bonds, ecological literacy, and a well-developed sense of place.

The last thing these communities need are more enticements into the money economy and the overly-consumptive and ultimately unsatisfying modern urbanized lifestyles. To the extent that micro-lending programs draw folks further into the money economy and market culture, they create financial dependence and advance the attendant breakdown of community and destruction of ecosystems.

So as far as micro-lending tourism is concerned, I would suggest instead that travelers seek first-hand experience and insight into self-sufficient community lifestyles.

Such agrarian projects are developing worldwide, and our participation as travelers helps both to advance the communities’ independence from the global economy and provides us with invaluable experiential learning possibilities that prepare us to help our own society break its addiction to globalization, growth and monetary dependence.

Are micro-loans good for people in the developing world? Join the discussion below!

Josh Kearns is a bona fide hill-billy who currently runs AqueousSolutions, an NGO devoted to developing and promoting self-reliant forms of water purification. He’s been a researcher in environmental chemistry and ecological economics and is into techniques for high quality self-reliant living like organic farming, natural building, permaculture and bluegrass music.

The quality of our food, our shelter and our medicines all go to promote our health. To be healthy means to be free of disease and sickness, to be strong and energetic, and to live a long life. Beyond this, we pretty much just want to have a good time.

We’re a social species; we need community – to form bonds of friendship, respect and love. Being part of a community helps with having a good time. It’s more fun to grow food or build a house with the help of others; the quality of the product is usually better, too.

We have large brains, and although the evolutionary jury is still out on whether these are adaptive or mal-adaptive organs, we have a need to use them for various types of stimulation and self-expression. Intellectual and creative development are essential ingredients of human happiness.

So – food, shelter, medicine, a few essential goods, community, and intellectual development and creative self-expression – what else is there? How about security. Having a degree of security in the attainment of well-being is also important.

That’s pretty much it, isn’t it? Good news! Life is simple!

Obtaining these needs in sufficient quantities seems like it ought to be pretty easy. So why does life seem so complicated and difficult most of the time?

Roots of the Problem

If I had to answer this question with only one word, I would say, “institutions.” To quote Edward Abbey:

“In our institutions the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.”

Many of our institutions are deeply flawed, and it is evident that these flaws are at the root of our discontent, thwarting our efforts to achieve a happy life.

For example, one flaw at the root of our modern economic system is the “grow-or-die” mentality – the mentality of a cancer cell.

It is impossible for the human economy to grow indefinitely on a finite planet Earth, although economists, politicians and the heads of the Great Corporations are hell bent pursuing policies and strategies for as much growth as possible, as quickly as possible.

The symptoms revealing the physical and biological absurdity of this economic foolishness are increasingly apparent in the form of pollution building up in our air, water and soils, the degradation of ecosystems and catastrophic losses in biodiversity, and the disturbance of the climate.

Our media institutions are deeply flawed as well, first and foremost because they have done such a shameful job of informing us about things that are truly important.

In fact, the media is often implicated in our outright deception, as in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Their advertisements are designed to make us feel inferior so we’ll go out and buy crap we don’t need to try and feel better. The media is heavily into the game of deceit and manipulation – what good do we get from this?

The No Spin Zone

But it would be foolish to expect our media to inform us on these matters, since the corporate institutions that own the media are the same that heedlessly and recklessly pursue profits and growth at the expense of our communities and the environment.

Perhaps we might expect to learn about these problems in our educational institutions so that they can be fixed. But there again, the same “special interests” are at work, not informing us about the ecological and social realities of our world, but rather training us to be effective servants of their world – which is organized around profit and growth.

The educational institutions train, for example, the specialized servants of industrial agriculture.

Industrial agriculture uses massive amounts of toxic chemicals, degrades the soil, impoverishes biological and genetic diversity, destroys rural communities and livelihoods, treats animals cruelly, is obscenely wasteful, and is entirely dependent upon huge public subsidies and heavy inputs of non-renewable fossil energy.

How can we be healthy if our food is poisoned and its nutritional value reduced by bad farming methods? How can we be happy knowing animals are suffering for our food, and knowing that our trip to the supermarket makes us complicit in the destruction of the environment?

How can we feel secure knowing our dinner is dependent upon fossil fuels, for which war after war is being fought to secure?

Our flawed educational institutions also induce a helplessness that goes along with the overspecialized training we receive in the service of a bad economic system. To the extent that we are employed as specialists, we have neither the time, nor the skills, nor many of us the inclination, to be generalists, to be able to do a variety of tasks for ourselves.

Back to the Land?

How many of us could, if we had the time, grow our own food, process it, prepare it, preserve it for winter? How many of us could, if we had the time, build our own home and design its landscape, making use of ecological principles for efficiency and aesthetics?

How many of us could plough a field or sustainably log a forest using a team of horses? How many of us could make our own clothing or tools or furniture, if we had the time and inclination to do so?

Very few, because we have not learned to do them. Instead, our educational institutions render us dependent on corporations and other institutions to employ us according to our “profession.”

We sell our labor to one institution for a wage, which we use to buy all the things we need for our lives from other corporate institutions. And thanks to our media, who foster the sensation of unlimited wants through advertising, we can never seem to “get ahead,” or keep up with what is “fashionable.”

How can we be happy if we are always wanting something more? How can we be content when we are constantly made to feel inadequate with what we’ve got right now?

How can we avoid feeling anxious if the level of affluence we hope to achieve is always receding away in front of us, even as we grasp for it more fervently? And how can we avoid feeling depressed at the meaninglessness of this blind consumerism?

It turns out that our medical institutions have their answer to these questions, too – prescribed pharmaceuticals.

Well, bullshit.

I ask you now, as I have asked myself many times, “What are you living for?”

Think Local, Act Local

I am living to be healthy and happy and secure. For this, I simply need adequate food, shelter and medicine, to be part of a community, to be stimulated intellectually and express myself creatively, and to attain a measure of security in the procurement of these elements comprising genuine well-being.

And as we have already seen, meeting these needs and achieving security should be simple; if it is not so, it is because of the interference of flawed institutions.

Therefore, meeting human needs and achieving health, happiness and security should follow naturally from the opting-out of participation in flawed institutions, and pursuing well-being in a more efficient and direct fashion. That many people achieve affluence through obedience to institutions, but lack health, happiness and general well-being also recommends this strategy.

This opt-out requires what I would say, “local self-reliance.”

Local self-reliance involves the creation of a local economy for food and other essential goods. It means relying upon traditional knowledge of medicinal plants, herbs, barks, roots, and ferments in health care.

Local self-reliance calls for the ingenuity and the labor of humans and animals in place of artificially cheap (due to subsidies), polluting, non-renewable forms of energy. Homes are built with locally abundant materials such as mud, stone and straw, and make use of passive solar heating and cooling, rainwater collection, solar water heating, etc.

It involves the local community, of neighborliness, of more face-to-face interactions, and of cooperation instead of competition. It involves the development of place-centered knowledge, its ecosystems, climate, geology, hydrology, and wildlife. It requires us to take responsibility for educating ourselves, which is the only way we truly learn anyway.

Abbey again: “Freedom begins between the ears.”

Local self-reliance involves the promotion of creative self-expression that produces things both useful and beautiful – a rocking chair, a painting or sculpture, a piece of music, a tasty dessert, an efficient wood stove, or a composting toilet. (Yes, even a toilet should be beautiful and well-made). Craftsmanship and care are central to these creative works.

Local self-reliance means that we will have to work. It means we will get sweaty and dirty with some regularity.

But it also means we will have to think. We will have to undertake problem-solving exercises that require the use of our intellect as well as the use of our conscience, our compassion and our intuition – we will have to think ecologically.

Our scientific efforts will not be divorced from our morality and emotions, as the modern paradigm has attempted to enforce, often with disastrous results.

In short, local self-reliance means getting what we need to live long, healthy, happy lives in ways that are direct, efficient, ecologically sustainable, and secure.

Opting Out of the System

As long as we rely upon far-removed institutions that operate according to logic flawed at the deepest fundamental levels, and in fact whose “success” completely depends upon the continued failure of our communities and the destruction of ecosystems, then we only exacerbate our frustration in attaining true well-being.

We must turn our backs on a broken system and begin to do things the right way, for ourselves. We cannot expect institutional support for this work, and nor should we. It’s not needed anyway.

Get over the idea that you need money to do everything. Money is just a symbol – don’t make too much of it. You don’t need money, you need food (so grow it), or a place to stay (so build it or crash with some friends), or a hat (so knit it), or whatever.

In many, many cases, knowledge, creativity and resourcefulness can substitute for money. Not having much money forces you to develop these skills, which anyway are necessary for obtaining true wealth and well-being, instead of the symbolic, insecure, false kind of wealth that money represents.

Travel the world and learn by direct experience as much as possible. Read what you want, when you want – you’ll retain more.

To quote Ed Abbey once again: “What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.”

Context is what imbues information with the qualities that allow for the development of sympathy, deep understanding, love and compassion that turn the storage of mere disembodied facts into wisdom. Context is what you get from experiential learning, as opposed to the mere disembodied facts inculcated by institutional learning.

So if you want the happy, healthy, easy life, and a good measure of security in hanging on to it, then eschew the institutions – educational, corporate, political, economic, and media – and get right down to the work of building a viable local economy and promoting local self-reliance.

Recruit others in this work – you can’t do it alone and you’ll need all the help you can get. And besides, overthrowing the system is way more fun when done with friends.

This essay is turning out to be a regular Abbey-fest, but I’ve got to end with this quote:

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

Josh Kearns speaks the truth, y’all. Comments are welcome.

Josh Kearns is a bona fide hill-billy who currently runs AqueousSolutions, an NGO devoted to developing and promoting self-reliant forms of water purification. He’s been a researcher in environmental chemistry and ecological economics and is into techniques for high quality self-reliant living like organic farming, natural building, permaculture and bluegrass music.

I pose this question because mainstream economic theory and the policies promoted by international “development” institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, government agencies such as USAID, various UN programs, and the majority of NGOs assume that monetary wealth and human well-being are tightly coupled, even synonymous.

Of course, this assumption flies in the face of common sense. One need only know of a miserable rich person in order to cast doubt upon its validity. So what gives?

The first thing to understand is that the doctrine of economic growth is sacrosanct in the mainstream paradigm that dictates how these “development” bureaucracies function.

The idea is that if the economy grows everyone will get richer and thereby become better off.

However, one obvious reality that has played itself out in the decades since this ideology has taken hold is that the rich have gotten richer much faster than the poor.

Simultaneously, the growth economy has eroded environmental quality on a massive scale worldwide.

How can we have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet?

I have no idea – but try explaining this to a university economist or a World Bank bureaucrat and see how far you get.

The Birth of the GDP

The economic sacred cow of Western society since WWII has been Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

It was created in the ‘30s under the macroeconomic theory of John Maynard Keynes to gauge industrial output, which, at the time, was pretty much all going to fight the war.

It was never intended as a proxy for well-being. But this is what it has become, in no small measure because taking GDP as a proxy for well-being supports the growth ideology.

GDP only measures the flow of economic value within an economy – it says nothing about the quality of that value.

For example, if I get in a car wreck and have to go to the hospital for injuries, and have to get my car repaired or buy a new one, this causes an increase in GDP, though clearly I am worse off for making these expenditures.

If our urban neighborhoods are continually degraded, resulting in even more poverty and desperation, and if more people purchase handguns for “protection,” GDP goes up.

If they build a new elevated interstate off-ramp next to my bedroom window and I have to buy soundproofing to defend against the noise and an air filter to protect myself from the additional pollution, GDP goes up.

If a young married couple has kids but can’t afford for one parent to stay home and raise them and they have to hire a nanny, GDP goes up.

National tragedies like 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, because they require massive expenditure of human and physical resources to deal with their aftermath, cause GDP to go up.

If we clear-cut the entire state of Oregon and sell the timber for building more Starbucks coffee shops, Ikea furniture, and suburban tract homes (complete with gazebos), GDP goes up.

Lousy Accounting

I could go on and on with all sorts of examples of what could be termed un-economic growth, but you get the point.

To take GDP as a proxy for well-being is lousy accounting because it counts everything in the plus column – it has no minus column for ‘bads,’ such as expenditures necessitated by the breakdown of households and communities, or expenditures made to defend ourselves against the side-effects of economic growth.

GDP even counts depletion of natural resources as a “good,” even if it means they get wiped out completely. Thus British social critic John Ruskin’s characterization of GDP as “the gilded index of far-reaching ruin.”

In the (over-) developed countries of the West, a sound argument can be made that the rate of growth in ‘bads’ has well exceeded the rate of growth in ‘goods.’ Thus further economic growth makes us worse off, not better off.

Ecological Footprint calculations support this argument, as does the Genuine Progress Indicator, an alternative to GPD that relies on honest accounting of ‘bads’ as well as goods. In Western countries, we’d all probably benefit greatly from economic shrinkage.

Certainly our children and grandchildren, not to mention the environment and pretty much every other species, would be better off if we started shrinking the economy ASAP.

But, again, try explaining this to a mainstream economist and see how far you get. My hillbilly mother back home in West-By-God-Virginia would say, “You can explain in one hand, and shit in the other, and see which one gets filled up first.”

Gardens Of Eden?

So we come to your research project as an ‘enlightened’ traveler: when you visit exotic places, try and observe what makes for real quality of life, for authentic well-being.

I’ve spent time among some of the “poorest” communities in the world: in the high elevation desert of Ladakh, in the upland forests of the Indian Himalaya, among the rice farmers of rural West Bengal and in the hill country of northern Thailand.

According to the “logic” of development economics, these communities, which are largely still self-supported by ancient traditions of subsistence farming, ought to be languishing in misery.

But my impression of these communities is that they are a kind of paradise.

Not perfect, to be sure. (What would that mean anyway, short of a return to the Garden of Eden?) But the people seem very happy, mellow, fit, and healthy, and they seem to get along with one another.

I haven’t witnessed a single case of road-rage among the adults or ADD among the children. To my knowledge, no one in any of the communities I have visited is suing anyone else.

And the food is very good – no, excellent in most cases – and plentiful. The farm animals know nothing of “confined animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), the sanitized term for factory farms.

People’s homes are comely and well made. Common resources, such as forests, are used respectfully and sustainably. And so on.

Why such a contrast?

Most of the economists, bureaucrats and policy wonks who would characterize these communities as “poor” and in need of “development” and “aid” have never actually been to any of these places – they probably spend all their time in air-conditioned offices in Western metropolises.

And all their professional training, which is highly ideological in character, has inhibited their faculties of common sense.

Money Can’t Buy Happiness

That’s why it’s your job to make a proper study of this ‘well-being’ thing, and work out which really are the most important ingredients of happiness.

We can see that the single ingredient GDP recognizes – money – has little to do with well-being. Integrity in familial and community relationships is very important, as are opportunities for meaningful work, having sufficient free time for creative endeavors, and enjoying a healthy surrounding ecosystem.

I’ll let you elaborate on this list and work out the details for yourself.

Once you have a sense of what makes for real, genuine well-being, we can all team up and try to de-school some economists and bureaucrats and help them back onto a course of civic responsibility, ecological sanity and economic sense.

Photos by Ryan Libre, John Biesnecker and Josh Kearns

Josh Kearns is a bona fide hill-billy who currently lives in Oakland, CA. He’s been a researcher in environmental chemistry and ecological economics. Currently he’s into techniques for high quality self-reliant living like organic farming, natural building, permaculture and bluegrass music.

Josh Kearns speaks the truth, y’all. Comments are welcome.

“Vacation” is for people who find their vocation unpleasant, and desire to “escape” as often as possible.

For these folks, sitting on a beach is probably the most appropriate option, because the idea of working while on “vacation” would seem repugnant.

I would ask these good people why they despise their jobs and need to escape. I would also ask who and what are enslaving them and why they keep showing up to a job they dislike every Monday AM.

But that, perhaps, is the topic for a different essay.

Instead, I will explain why working on a farm beats sitting on a beach; or why slow travel is more rewarding than tourism of the conventional sort.

1. You can stay longer

If you’re working on a farm, you typically stick around one place longer than the conventional tourist.

You’re able to attain a deeper understanding of the environment and culture. You will come to appreciate a genuine and meaningful sense of place.

You will also have time to truly relax, and because you aren’t flying frantically around a country or region, you will not be responsible for unleashing tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Experiencing the natural rhythms of place is a great joy of slow travel and farm work.

It’s something most conventional tourists never notice, because they turn up and leave during the “tourist season,” which is when the weather is most conducive to the particular activities for which the area is marketed (e.g. skiing, golf).

2. You can travel cheap

Conventional tourists pay a huge premium for food, accommodations and entertainment, which are located in the tourist zones.

Sometimes, in places like Laos and Bhutan, the tourist zones are only 3 or 4 streets in the whole country – and it’s commonplace for tourists to spend more money in one week than most local farmers will see in one year.

If you avoid the tourist zones by living and working with a farming community, you will get room and board for next to no money, regardless of whether you’re in an industrialized or “developing” country.

Often you can arrange some kind of work-trade in exchange for a place to stay. This makes it feasible to travel for months at a time.

3. You can experience reality

Even though slow travelers are still tourists in a foreign land (and don’t be tempted to forget this), we get a deeper glimpse into what “real life” is like for the locals.

Mostly, conventional tourists experience the “show” that locals and foreign corporations put on to attract tourists. In tourist zones, food, lodging and entertainment are very much akin to what we’re accustomed to in the West.

In tourist zones like Bangkok’s Khao San, there are Irish Pubs and Internet cafés, sushi restaurants and hamburger joints, air-conditioned rooms and bookstores that only sell guidebooks. Khao San is in Thailand, but it could be anywhere.

Tourist guidebooks like Lonely Planet, while useful, aren’t helpful in avoiding these areas, since many tourists have the same book.

To find a more “authentic” experience, you have to make the effort to do what the conventional tourists aren’t doing, and go to places where entrepreneurs have not yet recognized the potential for snaring tourist dollars.

At least to-date, rural agrarian communities are one such haven from shallow commercial development.

When you get off the tourist trail, you MUST take great care to respect the cultural values of the local community. Flaunting material wealth or otherwise disturbing the peace is not cool.

4. You can enjoy a deeper, meaningful experience

When you work on a farm, you and the locals are working together.

You share a common purpose, whether it’s building or repairing a home, planting or harvesting a crop, foraging for edible plants and fungi in the forest or tending the animals.

You are participating in the ecological cycles of that particular place, and helping sustain livelihoods – your own as well as those of the community.

Slow travel promotes a sense of place and interdependence within the community and local ecosystem. When you share this experience with the locals, you come to know what is valuable to them, and what is valuable to that place.

You may directly witness changes that have taken place in the community and in the local environment due to the actions of far-away governments or corporations.

You will understand what “globalization” actually means, and what the DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE actually measures.

Through your work and participation with the community, this knowledge will mean something to you, since you will bear witness and feel sympathy for the victims.

5. You can get an education

Slow travel promotes a deep, insightful kind of learning that you can’t get in school, a true education that is also denied to the conventional tourist.

Insights such as those gained from slow travel are what make for the “life changing experiences” that many people seek when they go abroad.

You will return home transformed, a new person with fresh insights into the world and a broader, deeper context and meaning for your life.

Resources

I have found the following resources helpful for engaging in productive and educational slow travel:

• The International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC)

  ISEC conducts homestays with villagers in the remote Himalayan mountains of Ladakh in northernmost India. The villagers still practice ancient traditions of subsistence agriculture and enjoy a very high quality of life, although “development” and “modernization” over the past few decades have brought on some unfortunate changes. “Learning From Ladakh Farm Project” participants also benefit from thorough and interesting discussions on economic globalization and the effects of globalization on traditional cultures.

• The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, West Bengal, India

  The Center, run by ecologist and critic Debal Deb, maintains an agricultural biodiversity research station in rural West Bengal. The farm and attached seed bank strive to reestablish genetic diversity in rice and promote organic farming throughout the area. Working with the Center offers opportunities in farming, plant breeding and genetics research, as well as political activism to resist the malignant influence of corporate biotech operations in India.

• Pun Pun Organic Farm and Panya Sustainable Living Project, Chiang Mai province, Thailand

  Pun Pun offers 10 – 12 week internships during winter months in organic farming, seed saving, natural building and appropriate technologies. Panya hosts courses in permaculture throughout the year in addition to gardening and building internships.

  (Editors Note: Read about my experience at Pun Pun and Panya here.)

• Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF)

  An online database of organic farms around the world that offer internships and work exchange accommodation.

• Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), International Permaculture Directory

  Two more useful directories.

• MatadorTravel.com

  Connect with like-minded travelers and grassroots organizations.

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome.

Josh Kearns is a bona fide hill-billy who currently lives in Oakland, CA. He’s been a researcher in environmental chemistry and ecological economics. Currently he’s into techniques for high quality self-reliant living like organic farming, natural building, permaculture and bluegrass music.

BP PLC, the green-minded oil producer, in February chose the University of California at Berkeley to help lead low carbon research, starting with biofuels. BP plans to spend $500-million over a decade.

This is perhaps the biggest collaboration between the corporate sector and academia in history, all in the name of developing alternative fuels to handle the growing energy shortage. Or is it?

The real energy crisis is that we have too much energy. The way politicians, the media, corporations, economists, make it sound you’d think we don’t have enough now, and that we’re heading for greater demand because of population growth and economic expansion.

This is a good test for my rule of thumb about reality: whatever they’re saying on the TV news – on Fox, on CNN, – is probably just about the opposite. If you watch the news and play a game of “opposite day,” like we did in third grade, then you’ll have a better idea of the truth.

Uncovering The Issues

So we’re supposed to get excited that BP and UC are going to spend a lot of money (mostly public subsidies) on high-tech research and development to discover or invent technologies to solve the environmental and economic problems.

They will be able to (finally) apply technology to solve the problems created by technology. Talk about fighting fire with fire!

What this is really meant to do is allow us to continue conducting business-as-usual. The fundamental tenets of the faith of modern economics aren’t being questioned.

This UC-BP collaboration is just the latest and most ostentatious denial and refusal to address the only two rational questions regarding the so-called energy crisis:

1. “What are we doing with all the energy we have now?”
2. and, “Do we really need to do those things?”

To address the first question, I’ll offer a few examples.

For one, a ton of energy goes into the military. The military is fighting in Iraq and elsewhere to get more energy (such as oil). If we just stopped fighting so much we wouldn’t need so much energy. Fewer people would be hurt and killed and there would be less incentive for terrorism.

That solves many problems at once. But the military contractors, engineering outfits and weapons corporations don’t like this solution.

Also, a huge amount of our energy goes towards pumping water to service industrial agriculture, along with scads of energy for fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery and food processing and transport. In general, an all-around nightmare.

If we reformed our agriculture system and embraced small-scale, self-reliant permaculture and organic agriculture systems, we could use way less energy. But the big agribusiness corporations don’t like this solution either.

A Dead End

Where else do we use a lot of energy? We drive a lot. People in cities like Atlanta commute, on average, over an hour to work, one way. That’s a lot of driving time, a lot of gas burned.

Some very silly people, like me, use a lot of energy flying all around the world in airplanes to learn about and work for ecological sustainability. (I plead no contest. So it goes).

And we use a lot of electricity. In the average American home, the TV is on almost eight hours per day. And it’s a double wammy since what’s on TV is advertisements that cajole people to go out (in their car) and shop, shop, shop.

People going out to buy tons of crap they don’t need, because commercials have made them feel inferior.

You get the point. The energy we have now is used for destructive, wasteful, and/or unnecessary purposes. None of the stuff I listed makes our lives any better.

In fact, it makes our lives worse. Three hours round-trip commuting in Atlanta traffic sucks. I don’t care if you do it in an air-conditioned Lexus SUV.

The medium of television could make our lives better but it doesn’t. Most of what’s on there is garbage. The rest is advertisement – advertisement for garbage.

A Single Solution?

Sometimes people ask me, “Josh, what’s the one thing I can do to really make a difference in my life and the world?” First I give them a hard time for wanting the easy way out, for looking for the one thing, the conscience-cleansing “silver bullet” they can do for a better world.

Once I’ve dressed them down I tell them the best thing they can do is to stop watching TV. “It’s mind poison. Literally. Stop poisoning yourself.”

If I could do one massive experiment on the whole US I would take away TV for a month. Once a chunk of the population survived the mind-poison withdrawal I bet great things would start to happen.

People would shop less, exercise more, talk to their neighbors, maybe even, dare I say, read a book or plant a garden. You can bet the social and political landscape of the US would look mighty different.

The status quo assumes we need a lot of energy for a good quality of life. On the contrary, we have too much energy now and our use of it has damaged our quality of life and the environment as well, which is inextricably linked with our quality of life.

Accessing new energy sources will certainly exacerbate this problem, not ameliorate it.

As an example in support of my argument I offer myself – I spent the winter living fantastically abundantly with a very small Ecological Footprint in a locally self-reliant organic farming community in northern Thailand.

I can attest that the quality of life is very high, despite the relatively low (material and energetic) standard of living.

A New Paradigm

You can also see why the proponents of the big-money, high-tech R&D deals like the UC-BP collaboration will never get this. Because it’s hard-wired into their paradigm that quality of life and standard of living are positively correlated, even that they’re synonymous.

That’s how they can be so tremendously irrational in assuming that continually pursuing more and better technology will solve the problems created by technological expansion. You try to tell them that quality of life and standard of living for many people in the developing world (and almost everyone in the West), are inversely related and see how far you get.

It’s like trying to tell conventional economists that economic growth is making us worse off instead of better off. They just won’t get it, just can’t get it.

It means calling into serious question fundamental axioms of the whole modern paradigm. If they did they’d be out of a job and replaced with people who would more assiduously keep the dogma.

Over the past century, modern civilization has behaved like a ten-year-old with a fire hose when it comes to our energy use. We need to ask ourselves what really makes for quality of life.

Our rampant pursuit and use of energy for transport and to power all sorts of new techno-gizmos, not to mention the out-and-out destruction caused by militarism, economic globalization and industrial agriculture, is killing us and the ecosystems we depend on.

The win-win solution of embracing high-quality, low energy and small footprint lifestyles is there, it just requires a bit of swimming upstream in the current cultural milieu. You can start by turning off the TV.

This article was originally published on Josh’s blog. Reprinted with permission.

Update: No Impact Man wrote a powerful post on this topic as well. Be sure to check out “Can capitalism survive environmentalism?”

Josh Kearns is a bona fide hill-billy who currently lives in Oakland, CA. He’s been a researcher in environmental chemistry and ecological economics. Currently he’s into techniques for high quality self-reliant living like organic farming, natural building, permaculture and bluegrass music.

What do you think about the crisis of too much energy?