Becoming Hopeful
by Bill McKibben
Ones of the places I've been in recent years that excites me the most is the south Indian state of Kerala. It's a crowded place, the population of Canada squeezed into an area the size of Vancouver Island. And it's poor, poor even by Indian standards. It's annual income per capita is about $300, or one-seventieth the American level. Which means if you're worried about the largest and most dangerous environmental problems-things like the greenhouse effect-then the average Keralite does about one-seventieth the damage of any of us.
And yet, despite the very real poverty, it's a remarkable place. People in Kerala live about as long as Americans; the infant mortality rate approaches ours; their literacy rate, including the female literacy rate, is higher than ours, and their birth rate is lower-they'll be at zero population growth before we will. We could spend a long time discussing the reasons why-a commitment to redistribution, for instance, and a long tradition of equal rights for women. Development experts flock here to study how to remake Tanzania, or Bangladesh, or El Salvador.
But I think its most powerful lessons may be for us in the rich world. For me, it broke forever the nearly instinctive link in my mind between more and better. We grow up believing, almost intuitively, that more means better health, better education, better security. To see a real life proof that it isn't so-that there are other ways to organize our existence so that we can lead dignified lives without the vast consumer apparatus we've built up, at great peril to the earth-startled me, freed my mind.
The link between accumulation and happiness that seems so obvious to us (it is always good news on the TV stance, suggest that people have vastly increased the number of their possessions in the last four decades, but that the percentage of us who describe ourselves as very satisfied with our lives has shrunk-shrunk below a third.
The one Achilles heel, in fact, of the incredibly powerful technosphere in which we live-the whole great agglomeration of TV and shopping mall-is that it doesn't make us quite as happy as its claims to. There is in most of us a vague and weak voice in our heads and hearts-we hear it halfway through a night of television, sometime around the middle of NYPD Blue: "You really could be doing something more fun than this," it says. "Something more real."
That is the subversive voice we have to nurture in ourselves and in others, the voice that might lead us out of the box canyon in which our culture is trapped. The voice that might lead us to rediscover the joy of actual contact with nature and with each other instead of the ersatz pleasure of ever-more mediated contact with the world around us.
But we need to believe, too, that this is a realistic direction in which to dream. That's why Kerala, and places like it, seem so crucial to me. It's not that we need to live like people there live. They don't need to live like we live now-they're much too poor. But we don't have to live like we live now, either. The difference in our incomes is not two times or five times or ten times-it's seventy times. Surely in that ratio there is the possibility for some creative and flourishing medium. Surely the alternative to Walmart and the cable box is not freezing in some darkened cave.
I'm reminded of how many different possibilities the world holds, ideas and pleasures we need to share with each other and the world. Our way, the way we've grown up, is not the only way. m
Bill McKibben, an active environmentalist, is the author of Hope, Human and Wild and The End of Nature.This is a "partial reconstruction" of Bill McKibben's presentation at the 1995 Second Luddite Congress.
