The 3 E’s part two: the micro/personal level view

In my last post I explored the 3 E’s (the Economy, Energy, and the Environment) from a wide scale macro viewpoint. This time I want to look at them a bit from the micro view, or that of my own personal household. It might not be a bad idea to reread the previous post, but as a brief recap we have economic systems that require continuous exponential growth to function well. Continuous exponential growth requires a continuous exponential extraction and consumption of energy resources, in particular fossil fuels, as well as a continuous exponential consumption of environmental resources. In other words, endless growth on a finite planet. There are strong indications we are at peak extraction rates for our planetary fossil energy and environmental resources.

This is all well and good, or well and bad as the case may be, but what does it really mean for our personal lives? I could view this predicament through the lens of gloom and doom, which might be a fair way to go as we will likely face serious challenges in our lifetimes. However, I’m trying to take a different approach, looking at how I can use my understanding of the interrelationships to create a fulfilling, secure life of abundance that will be better positioned to handle future challenges.

A question I ended on previously is one I’ve been considering for quite some time now. Why if we in the western world are living at the peak of resources, when there is more energy, money, and material available to us than ever before in all of human history do we so often find ourselves struggling to get by? We are consuming more raw energy and resources than all the royalty and elite of past generations. Why aren’t we living in similar comfort, security, and ease?

I don’t really have a solid answer for this conundrum. Maybe all those in the past really lived truly crappy lives? I don’t actually believe that though. Certain some things may have been different or more challenging, but I believe people’s daily lives had just as much, if not more, satisfaction and fulfillment.

I suspect we are expending much of our resource wealth in direct competition with each other, in effect canceling out the potential overall benefits we could get otherwise. I’m trying to think of what examples of this in normal life might be. One such thing might be all the time, money, and energy we put into higher education to get degrees with the goal of allowing us to stand out in the job market. Another might be all the ways we compete with each other for social status, the whole “keeping up with the Jones” thing.

For myself I try to pull back and take a wider view, asking what do I really need to live a quality life? What is essential? High on that list is food and shelter. If I am living at a time completely awash in resources should I really need to work that hard to attain minimum levels of food and quality shelter?

If I’m honest, food has never really been a problem for me to attain, at least in terms of cheap calories. I’ll likely get back to this subject more but for now let me shift to how I tackled the shelter problem. Even before I really understood the 3 E’s I saw housing as being something to get control of right away. I think my approach to housing should probably be an entire blog post in itself sometime. For now I’ll just say that small is beautiful. When I have a small home it costs less to begin with. It costs less to heat and/or cool. It generally costs less to maintain and repair because there is simply less there to take care of. Because it is valued less the property taxes are correspondingly lower. There is also less space to accumulate stuff which tends to mean you spend less buying stuff. If it costs less to buy in the first place your mortgage is probably less and much easier to pay off sooner saving even more on interest payments.

This approach put me in a position of owning my small, low cost homestead free and clear relatively early in my adult life with no rents, mortgages, or interest payments to pay since that time. Without needing to make such a large monthly payment for housing I was able to quickly save more money providing me with a greater sense of security and allowing me to invest in improving my small home in ways that would reduce my future monthly expenses. The major things were new windows and doors, much more insulation, installing wood burning systems to make the propane furnace a back up system, and photovoltaic solar array to provide all my electricity.

To phrase this in terms of the 3 E’s I first stabilized my economic outlay by getting and paying off a small home. Then I focused on reducing my energy needs even more which had the natural result of reducing my economic needs even further. All the while, keeping things minimal results in less strain on our environmental resources.

I should note here, that I was always wanting to be something of an environmentalist but initially thought there wasn’t much I could do about that because early in my adult life I was so poor. I had bought into the notion that doing environmentally sound things always cost more money. I’ve since discovered, and understanding the relationship of the 3 E’s to each other has further reinforced, that in most cases doing the most environmentally sound thing is also going to be the least costly thing. For example, driving a nifty electric car sounds like a good thing for the environment, but it’s expensive to purchase and has tons of embodied energy in the materials that make it up. It might be better for the environment than driving a standard internal combustion vehicle (and there is some debate on this). However, not driving and walking or riding a bike instead is way better for the environment and costs way less.

This brings me to another point I wanted to make about the micro view of the 3 E’s. If you want to save a ton of money in your personal economy, one huge way to do this is to drastically reduce the energy and resource consumption so many of us have by living so far from where we work and shop that we must always be driving a car to get where we need to go. If you can set yourself up to live very close to where you work, if not work at home, then it’s like getting a huge raise in pay while drastically reducing your environmental footprint! In the FIRE (financial independence retire early) community getting the housing decision right is one of the major ways to propel yourself to financial independence.

As I mentioned previously food is one of the essentials I need to provide for. Let me toss out a few thoughts regarding food as related to a micro view of the 3 E’s. First, and maybe this is drifting into the macro scope, I’ve read that in our modern food systems on average every calorie we eat has had 10 calories of energy go into the growing, processing, and delivery of it. Without fossil fuels to support this extravagance we would quickly starve to death if these food systems were the only way to get sustenance. Living beings just don’t survive expending more energy to get less energy, at least not on a regular basis. Since we as humans have been here on the planet for quite a long time before fossil fuels were widely used it’s safe to say there are obviously more efficient ways to get food! The formula should probably be reversed to where one calorie of energy yields ten or more calories of food.

How could this be done? I think one obvious factor would be to source food as close to where you live as possible. Other thoughts are to set up systems that require little in the way of energy inputs such as no till polyculture gardens with lots of perennial edibles that provide abundant food while building and improving soil health. Eating a whole food plant based diet can not only be beneficial to ones health (reducing long term medical issues and expense) but involves less energy intensive processing and packaging of food. Learning to forage wild edibles growing in the immediate region is great too, though this is sort of the same as a no till polyculture.

I’m by no means perfect on all this. I certainly do enjoy and indulge in plenty of foods exotic or out of season for my region on a regular basis. In fact, I suspect the next blog post will be on another healthy cure for a sweet tooth involving bananas and cashews, neither of which grow around me. However, I am trying to develop greater food security, less energy use, save more money, and greatly increase my positive impact on the environment by shifting my food culture. So many problems can be solved with food!

I apologize to you all for this being such a scatterbrained post. I’m having trouble finding a clear structure to express all I’d like to. What I really want to get across is that by living below my means I am able to vastly increase my wealth and security while significantly reducing my environmental footprint as an added bonus. The farther below my means I live the greater these benefits are. Despite what consumer advertising may say I don’t find my quality of life is poor as a result of this. It’s more like the opposite. Without all the stress and worry about money I can breath easier, work less if I so desire, with the freedom to pursue different projects or jobs as I wish. In fact, a major reason I’ve been able to make my dream career of being a full-time studio artist work is because I’ve paid so much attention to my cost of living!

The macro view of the 3 E’s suggests to me that difficult times are ahead as the large structural problems must work themselves out somehow. We just can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. The best way I know to prepare myself for this is to develop a quality life that needs less to begin with, and as much as possible be able to get my necessary requirements of food and shelter outside the economic system. If things keep staggering along as they have been I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything by not having a higher consumptive standard of living. In fact maintaining the status quo has me on the path to early retirement if I so chose. So I keep looking for ways to reduce my energy and environmental resource consumption which will result in increased economic security and yet still leave me with a high quality life.

Studio Snippet

I’m not as far along on this commissioned piece that I shared in the last studio snippet as I’d like to be, but here is where one of the vessels is now. I’ve just started the chasing work on the one I’m tentatively calling “Sleeping Dogs”.

Designing and chasing low relief imagery does require quite a mental shift for me. Things are no longer so much about lines being the intersection of two visual layers, which is how I normally think when doing vessel chasing. With these dog pieces I’m going to be focusing much more on the small undulations in the form which won’t necessarily have clearly defined edges and lines. My brain is going to be a bit sore until I get back into the swing of thinking and working like this!

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.