Fire and Knowledge

I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured “waste”—solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever—should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

—Wendell Berry, “Waste” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 127.

It is useless to reduce your own consumption unless you also reduce your income. Everything you earn gets saved or spent, and anything that you save just gets spent later, by you or someone else. Changing your spending pattern will put a dent in the amount consumed only if it allows you to reduce your income.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 153

The Story of Stuff is a well-done 20 minute video about where all our stuff comes from and where it goes.

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 64

Unlike religion, which promised paradise after death, advertising promised paradise right around the next corner: through purchase of a new car, a suburban home or a labor-saving appliance. Consumer goods had become the new opiate of the people.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 27

Catalog Choice is “a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.” Sounds like a good idea to me.

The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy,” but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

–Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 22

Decades of countercultural rebellion have failed to change anything because the theory of society on which the countercultural idea rests is false. The world we live in … consists of billions of human beings, each pursuing some more or less plausible conception of the good, trying to cooperate with one another, and doing so with varying degrees of success. There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as “the culture” or “the system.” There is only a hodgepodge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that sometimes we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort away from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people’s lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 8