In a world where human-made stuff outweighs nature and absorbs our attention, how can we lighten up? And what could it mean for the season of giving when we already have enough?
For thousands of years, we humans have been a busy bunch. We’ve built, designed, invented, cultivated, and created. For these efforts we now have shoes and saucers, houses and highways, skyscrapers and satellites. I type this on a portable computer filled with technology unimaginable one hundred years ago. That’s the blink of an eye in world time.
And we’re still going at it—building, designing, innovating, recreating, and consuming. In fact, according to a 2020 article from BBC News, “For every person in the world, more than their body weight in stuff is now being produced each week.” Helen Briggs, BBC Environment correspondent, tells us that in that same year, “the combined weight of all the plastic, bricks, concrete and other things we've made in the world will outweigh all animals and plants on the planet for the first time.”
If the sheer volume and weight of our stuff is staggering, add to it the psychological weight of stuff, from the gadgets that demand our attention to the time, focus, and work required to maintain our cycles of consumption.
That’s really heavy.
"It is a reason for all of us to ponder our role, how much consumption we do and how can we try to get a better balance between the living world and humanity." — Dr Ron Milo, Weizmann Institute of Sciences
Weighing the costs
If you’re a visual learner, take a scroll through the growth of both natural materials—from trees and viruses to humans—and the later growth of man-made materials in this interactive infographic designed by a Johns Hopkins University physicist and a graphic artist.
In it, you’ll see the relatively small amount of the natural world is human. Sea life, fungi, and bacteria outweigh us by large margins. And yet since the 1900s, we’ve managed to create enough stuff to outweigh everything else on the planet. It’s striking.
But why does it matter if human-made objects outweigh natural ones? What does it cost us?
According to the BBC article, one reason that human-made is outweighing nature, is that there’s simply less nature these days. Much of what we produce requires natural products we get from trees, plants, and animals. And with fewer trees, ecosystems have fewer places to grow and thrive.
And because we are a small and deeply dependent element of the natural world, we risk the ecological balance when we tear down natural habitats to build unnatural and unnecessary things.
In fact, the effects of man-made climate change are well documented and deeply felt in a growing number of communities around the world. And yet our stuff keeps growing.
There’s also a deeply human heaviness at play. We all likely have precious and well-loved material possessions. And yet we find ourselves drowning in stuff that just doesn’t mean that much. We have been so collectively overwhelmed with stuff that a small 2004 book about tidying up became an international best seller and 2019 Netflix special.
Not only does stuff diminish the natural world and tax our attention, it also pulls our focus away from each other. We’ve all experienced moments in the midst of other humans who might be talking but are consumed instead by worlds packed into a gadget—the great irony of the promise of a connected world. We’ve all probably also noted the extra time we must spend working in order to maintain all of this.
Can we really lighten up?
What would it look like to stop? To need less and use less and spend the time and attention on our communities instead?
Author and activist Robin Wall Kimmerer knows exactly what it would look like.
In her latest book The Serviceberry, she considers the complex relationships between giving, consuming, and sustaining ourselves and our communities. She sees the serviceberry—a berry thatXXXXX—as a model for these relationships, because these berries exist in a network of exchange in which they give abundantly, feeding and pollinating their communities and receive abundance back from that same community.
In the serviceberry economy, exchange and reciprocity are the guiding principles, not personal accumulation.
Accumulation. If you’re like me, you can look around your home, open closets and drawers, notice overladen shelves and stuffed nooks and crannies everywhere. From the looks of it, accumulation is one of the things we do best.
We live in an abundant natural world. But how does that translate to our stuff? On balance, we may have more shoes and coffee mugs and candles than we could possibly need. But is that abundance? Would we rather have more abundant time? More abundant attention? More abundant and meaningful connections? More abundant green spaces in our neighborhoods?
Kimmerer encourages us to rethink our relationships with abundance and wealth. What if we begin to understand wealth not as the individual accumulation of goods and money—a sort of hoarding—but as a whole community that has what it needs to survive and thrive?
Celebrating “enoughness”
In a scarcity mindset, we always need more, even when we have too much.
And here’s the thing - it’s not your fault. Scarcity is hardwired into our species as an ancient survival play. In the modern world, advertisers tap into that wiring to sell us things we don’t need. It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into. Only a full shift in our understanding of abundance as “enoughness” can disrupt the scarcity/consumption cycle.
In a scarcity mindset, the solution to unwanted stuff is to dispose or recycle. But that mindset doesn’t decrease the production of consumer goods. In fact, it opens up the market for more in the form of recyclable goods.
In an enoughness mindset characterized by community wealth, the solution is to use what we have, share it with our communities, repair it, hand it on, pass it down, and take care of it. And as we move from buying short-lived, recyclable goods, to longer-lived reusable stuff, perhaps we can also rethink buying altogether.
In a world where human-made stuff outweighs nature, neighborhood Buy Nothing lists have sprung up to encourage sharing resources we already have. And much of what we need and want may be waiting like unearthed treasure at a local thrift store or vintage mall.
Or maybe we can simply settle in our enoughness. Maybe what we really need is nothing more than what we already have. That won’t always be true, but in those moments when we realize it is, when we’ve saved ourselves the time and money and effort sunk into stuff, maybe we can then reinvest that attention into ourselves and our communities.
A very merry enoughmas
As I type this, it’s early December and the holiday advertising is in full force. I’m not going to tell you that I’m buying nothing this year. I’ve bought a few gifts and will likely buy a few more.
What I am doing is focusing those gifts on sustainability, repairability, longevity, simplicity, and community building. I want these gifts to enrich bonds now and in the future. I want us to share moments, share meals, and build our community abundance without hooking our wealth to accumulation.
I’m celebrating a personal enoughmas so that when I give, it’s from my own feelings of abundance. That’s when giving is a joy.
