Beautiful and Abundant

I’m feeling missionary tendencies these days. I have found love and I want to share it with the world. As I travel around I keep my eyes open for people who share my beliefs, scanning their cars for signs that they are part of my flock. When I see them, I say a silent “Good On Ya!” I pray for the hordes of unenlightened people, still laboring in darkness, driving conventional internal-combustion automobiles.

I think everyone should have a Chevy Volt.

I was gratified when, two weeks ago, Consumer Reports announced that the Chevy Volt was the best-loved car in the world among people who drive one – for the second year in a row. I felt gratified, but not surprised. I got my own Volt in August. I have never loved a car like I love this one.

And I have loved some cars.

There was my rusty, shag-carpeted 1969 Toyota Land Cruiser, vessel of my teen-age dreams. Then I had a 1967 Dodge Power Wagon crewcab pickup. Best truck ever.

A decade ago I developed an obsession with Audis. I blush. They weren’t the most reliable cars; they weren’t the most fuel-efficient; they weren’t the most affordable. They just felt so, so good. They’re pretty, too. If you love driving, don’t get in one. Stronger men than me have fallen.

 Then I met the Volt and it won my heart.

And my head.

I’ve had mine for four months. Symmetrically, over the course of 7,760 miles I’ve averaged 77.6 miles per gallon of gasoline.

Personally, I sacrificed nothing to achieve this efficiency. The car and I took long interstate trips. I habitually drive eight miles per hour over the speed limit. Mea Culpa. In town, I set the Volt for “Sport” mode and myself for “Mild Adrenaline.”

In my normal routine of errands and commuting, I use no gasoline at all. When I go a little too far, like my 110-mile round-trip to the airport, I need the gasoline motor’s assistance to recharge the batteries.

Yet in spite of my lack of personal effort, my fuel savings made my lease cheaper than a sub-compact. Look at the math:

The average passenger car sold in the U.S. in 2011 got about 34 miles per gallon on the highway. So if I had driven 7,800 miles in an average car, over the last four months, I would have burned 229 gallons of gasoline. At $3 per gallon, that’s a cost of about $688. Instead, I burned about 100 gallons of gasoline and $10 worth of electricity. So I’m saving $90 a month in fuel costs compared with an average car, or 25 percent of my lease payment. With the tax incentive and the fuel savings, the Volt’s lease now actually costs me about the same as a typical lease on a $20,000 new car, or maybe less.

And the Volt is no $20,000 car.

I think the car’s interior and driving qualities compare favorably with a BMW 3 Series or an Audi A4. It’s beautiful and comfortable. The cabin is snug but well designed. I’m happy in the front seats. I’m 6’2”; 210 pounds. And that’s not a lean, compact 210 pounds, either. I feel great in the Volt, even on an 800-mile drive to see my in-laws.

If you’re not familiar with the Chevy’s hybrid technology, it differs from other hybrid automobiles in that its propulsion system is strictly electric. There are two electric motors that drive the wheels. The gasoline engine under the hood is simply a generator. When the batteries are depleted to about 25 percent of their capacity the gasoline-powered generator replenishes them.

As a result, the Volt gives very little indication that the gas engine has started. It doesn’t change the car’s driving characteristics at all. And that conserves oil life. With about 8,000 miles on my car I’ve only used about 20 percent of the oil life, because most of the time the gas engine isn’t in use. I may go 40,000 miles or more before my first oil change.

Naturally, I was excited to see that other Volt owners feel the same way I do. We’re the happiest new-car owners in the world. And that, apparently, makes some people angry.

I read about the satisfaction survey on the Wall Street Journal’s website. In addition to being one of the world’s best sources for economic and business news, the Journal maintains an editorial preserve for the antediluvian opinions of several species of dinosaur – not extinct, just obsolete.

The skeptics appear to have two fundamental objections to any claims of success regarding the Volt:

1. Government subsidies played a role in its development.
2. Volt owners are smug.

Someone called Charleen Larson wrote,

“Satisfaction survey? More like a self-satisfaction survey. 

There aren’t enough Volt owners in the entire United States to fill the seats of a small stadium, yet their smug satisfaction at driving an electric car (it isn’t) and having gotten a huge government subsidy is obvious.” 

And a person self-identified as “Skeptic” wrote,

“Do you really think someone who bought one of these feel-good machines would admit they made a mistake?” 

“Ellen” took a more proactive approach:

“…the buyers of the Volt think they are ‘saving the planet,’ i.e., they are left-wing nutcases. So what do you expect, they sure as heck aren’t going to say they were wrong, liberals never do. 

Personally I am going to buy a BMW 640 next year, because I can, and I don’t care about the gas mileage or ‘saving the planet’ for a bunch of liberals to live on.” 

Obviously, Ellen is angry about something other than the existence of a nice electric car.

There was one comment from an engineer whom I instinctively wanted to have over to share a bottle of bourbon and a couple of grass-fed burgers. He called himself “EAP,” and here’s what he had to say,

“I’m … a right-wing nut, smoke Marlboro’s, despise Priuses with unmitigated passion, but engineering is engineering. The biggest stain on the Volt (which began engineering in 2006) was Obama’s seal of approval in 2008, which has stigmatized it ever since. It’s a passenger vehicle, not a suppository with wheels, so it doesn’t have much panache with the greens. Conservatives are afraid they’ll be labeled greens, so there the Volt sits in limbo — unless you actually do research and learn before running one’s mouth. Or as some here have, pony up for one and discover their uniqueness and pleasure.” 

Well, Amen.  Unlike “Ellen,” I do want the save the planet for a bunch of liberals – and conservatives and reactionary brutes – to live on. But even if I didn’t, I would love that darn car.
 

If we commit ourselves to abundance, we can halt the irreversible tide of species destruction. We could celebrate the diversity of life and set a standard of preserving it, by the mutual consent of people around the world. All our food could be naturally wholesome and nutritious, except when we’d rather it be otherwise. We could live on farms or we could live in cities, as we wish. We could live at the edge of the mountain wilderness, or the edge of the ocean. Some of us would no doubt choose to work very little. Others would work hard to achieve something – new discoveries or greater personal wealth. 

In a stable human population, corporate success will be determined by some criterion other than the greatest number of products at the lowest price. The value of scale will be reduced; the value of quality will be enhanced. Products and companies that support our shared values of beauty, abundance and the preservation of nature will earn more. Quality will be defined, in part, by how well a product or a company supports those values. Innovative, conscientious companies will succeed. Less innovative companies will try harder. Our possessions will be more beautiful and more durable. 

As our population declines, territorial conflicts will become absurd. With more land, more energy and more food available each year, military conflict will seem more wasteful and more stupid than ever. We can decommission most of our armies. Rather than competing with faster jets and more powerful bombs, we will race to see who can preserve more natural beauty and attract more tourists. Who can print the most beautiful books? Who can build the most reliable and elegant machines? Who has the best skiing? Who has the best beach? 

Back at the beginning of this blog post series I challenged you to form a personal vision that idealizes our future. I challenged you to be unrealistic. Now I find I’ve failed to meet my own standard. Why is it unrealistic to believe we can agree that clean air and water are important and limited resources? What’s so crazy about wanting a couple of kids, and no more? How insane is it to think we could imagine a world of beauty and abundance? 

That’s what I’m going to aim for.

Bryan Welch is the Publisher and Editorial Director of Ogden Publications, the parent company of MOTHER EARTH NEWS. Connect with him on Google+.

For further optimistic discussion about our future, read Beautiful and Abundant by Bryan Welch and connect with Beautiful and Abundant on Facebook. 

I have been privileged to visit most of the planet’s ecosystems: from subtropical deserts to the floor of the ocean; from the grasslands to the tropical rain forest, the temperate rain forest, the temperate deciduous forest, the alpine tundra and the northern boreal forest called the taiga. Each and every one of them was beautiful. I haven’t yet seen the arctic tundra or a polar ice cap in person, but I’m certain they are beautiful and I hope I get the chance. 

Every natural environment is beautiful in ways we cannot imagine. We must preserve natural beauty for precisely that reason, because we could not conceive of natural beauty on our own without nature’s inspiration. 

People who design modern zoos use a criterion they call “flight distance.” Most animals have a prescribed distance they would run, if frightened, before they turned to look back. If a zoo enclosure is built at least a little larger than the animal’s flight distance, zoo creatures are calmer and healthier. If designers don’t allow for flight distance, the animals are neurotic, combative and less healthy. 

Besides beauty, wilderness also provides us with the psychological flight distance. As long as there are empty places on the planet, our minds can flee to those empty places when they have the need. 

So in my vision, every unique ecosystem across the globe would be preserved in its natural state. Perhaps we could reserve at least 20 percent of each nation’s landmass for wilderness, allocated to each biome, each ecosystem. In the United States 20 percent of our grasslands, 20 percent of our forests, 20 percent of our swamps and at least 20 percent of our deserts would be permanently preserved as God created them, open to visitors but not vehicles. Whatever natural resources they contain would remain unexploited, by popular consent, forever, as a testament of our commitment to beauty, and to abundance. 

Because I want my great-grandchildren to live in a world that is beautiful and… 

Abundant.  

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly in this blog post series, there are two variables affecting abundance in our world. The first is supply. We depend on the planet’s natural resources. Those resources are, by definition, limited. The second variable is demand. Demand we can control. 

Demand for resources is also influenced by two primary variables. The efficiency of our usage determines how much of the world’s natural bounty each of us requires. We can improve efficiency, to some extent. The second variable affecting demand is population. No matter how much we improve efficiency, there will still be an ultimate limit to how many people we can support. 

Once I acknowledge that limitation, I find myself thinking, well, why are we talking about a maximum human population? Why not aim for an ideal population, instead. 

Since I’ve already set aside 20 percent of every earthly biome for wilderness, in my mind, I might set my own ideal human population at 20 percent less than our current population of about 6.9 billion people. That would put us at about 5.5 billion people. That was the world population in the early 1990s. 

What the heck. While I’m idealizing why don’t I allocate a little more room for solving the world hunger problem and take us back 30 percent, to a total human population of 4.8 billion. Just about like 1984, when I celebrated by 25th birthday. That’s a shocker, isn’t it? Our population was 30 percent smaller when Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term as President of the United States. 

When I suggest something like this in public some idiot always asks me whom I’m going to kill. I get letters from people who ask me which of their children should they give up. Let’s kill no one. Let’s keep all our children. But if each of us reproduced ourselves once, if each human couple had two children, from now on, then the total human population would soon begin to decrease. Of course we will not prescribe death or childlessness for anyone. We don’t need to. We can simply agree, as a species, that two parents and two children make a great family. 

We could have wild elephants and mountain gorillas in a world of 5 billion people. We could have oceans teeming with fish and vast grasslands where bison and wildebeest roam wild, forever. We could provide clean water for every human baby, food for every new mother and a warm, comfortable bed for every old man, always. 

Well, why not?

For further optimistic discussion about our future, read Beautiful and Abundant by Bryan Welch and connect with Beautiful and Abundant on Facebook. 

 I want my great-grandchildren to live in a place that is… 

Beautiful.  

Anyone who has traveled in the developing world during the past 30 years has seen the vast slums that engulf the cities. Slums occupy decaying sections of old cities and newly built shantytowns that often surround more affluent urban areas. About a billion people, worldwide, live in slums today and the United Nations expects that number to double by 2030. 

Slums are densely populated aggregations of minimal human shelter. Generally speaking slum dwellers are barely protected from the weather. Their sewage is not treated. Their children are not educated. Increasingly, the world’s slums host a variety of toxic occupations such as recycling used computer parts and scavenging landfills. 

Slums are not beautiful. I’m sure their residents find some beauty in them, but ugliness remains one of their defining factors. The slum’s residents want to make it smell better, look better and provide better shelter. 

An absence of beauty often indicates an absence of health, and the slums metastasizing around the world are indicators of a profound economic disease. As we’ve enhanced the lives of the world’s riches human beings, economic disparity has advanced like a cancer. It’s not that the poor live a lot worse than ever. As far back as recorded history can take us, there were unfortunate people who lived without shelter, clean water or adequate food. Their condition hasn’t changed appreciably in the entire span of human history. The richest residents of the 21st century, on the other hand, live lives of luxury that kings and emperors couldn’t have imagined until very recently. The rich need not ever smell an unpleasant smell or see an unpleasant sight. From birth to death they have access to temperate air, clean water and beautiful things. They can reach any terrestrial destination that pleases them in a few hours. They have drugs that soothe almost any pain. Almost any form of entertainment is available to them at the touch of a button. 

And they live, quite often, within walking distance of a slum. 

The ugliness of the slums is striking for its proximity to wealth and beauty. 

To spread beauty in my vision of our human future, the poor must be elevated. 

I don’t imagine a world in which economic disparity has been eliminated. I think that would be a bad idea. Economic disparity and the opportunity of improving our individual standard of living is a tremendous source of energy fueling enterprise and innovation. It’s a motivator. 

But I envision a human world that no longer tolerates “inhuman” conditions. I see a world in which people don’t go hungry, because we no longer put up with starvation. Today we have enough food to eradicate hunger, but we lack the collective will to do so. We could feed every hungry person tomorrow but we haven’t collectively decided to do so. 

In my beautiful vision, we would tolerate nothing less. 

The poor will, by some definition, always exist. But we have the power to change the definition. The poor should have food in their pantries, doctors in their neighborhoods and beauty in their lives. In my vision, no nation in the world will tolerate anything less, even for its poorest residents. 

But perhaps I’m not setting a high enough standard. Perhaps I’m being too realistic. Raising the lifestyles of the poor is a relatively simple matter of reallocating resources we already possess. I’m not meeting my own standard for an idealized, unrealistic vision. 

So I think the poor, and everyone else, should also have access to beautiful, unaltered nature. 

In nearly every literary tradition across the world, untrammeled nature remains a standard for beauty. A Libyan novelist writes movingly about the virgin sand dunes of the deep Sahara. A Canadian poet describes a frozen lake in the north woods and a pygmy storyteller sings of the subtle, changeable beauty of the African jungle. 

  As I wrote these case studies the same thought kept occurring to me: These are some of the best puzzles ever! Applying human objectivity to the biggest, most intriguing and most definitively human problem, ever, is quite an endeavor. And we’re in that endeavor. We’re part of that enterprise. 

I notice a lot of people my age – in their 40s and 50s – saying they don’t know if they would want to be young today. They feel overwhelmed by our challenges. For some the challenge of global cultural conflict seems insurmountable. For others it’s the prospect of economic stagnation that overwhelms them. Then, of course, there are planetary environmental problems. 

If I just sit around and think about problems like these, I sometimes feel a little intimidated myself. But if I get off the couch and do something – write something, grow something, fix something that needs fixing – I feel a whole lot better. In fact, when I’m busy I often feel energized by the importance of the projects our species is tackling today. Old-fashioned biological expansion was automatic. Our previous technological triumphs were exciting, but they were, ultimately, the products of our primitive desires for more power, more speed, more food and richer entertainment. 

Now we’re inventing something new – a path toward prosperity of a particularly human kind. To expand and grow stronger is the animal impulse. To calculate our natures and build a world to suit those natures – a world designed for the long term – is an achievement to which only a human being can aspire. 

We’re working on the best human project of all time. 

What a great privilege.

Bryan Welch is the Publisher and Editorial Director of Ogden Publications, the parent company of MOTHER EARTH NEWS. Connect with him on Google+.

For further optimistic discussion about our future, read Beautiful and Abundant by Bryan Welch and connect with Beautiful and Abundant on Facebook.

Google can be the most enlightened power-user on the planet. Because it is so successful, and because it uses a lot of electricity, Google has the opportunity to set a new global standardfor clean power. The company already makes a noticeable contribution to clean energy through its efficient computers, the headquarters’ solar array, its dedication to electric and electric-hybrid transportation and its research projects. Google is studying utility-scale renewable electricity, plug-in vehicles and smart metering for businesses and households. 

True to Google’s engineering culture, the company’s contributions so far are relentlessly practical, made with an eye to efficiency. 

What if Google set a new standard of consuming electricity for its operations worldwide only from renewable sources? 

Imagine a thousand server farms bristling with photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. It would cost something, but Google can afford it. It might not be practical or repeatable for the majority of companies today, but imagine the ripples of influence the new standard might send out across businesses around the world. Imagine utilities vying for Google’s patronage with their own renewable-energy solutions in every country where a Google computer is plugged in. 

Imagine competitors scrambling to do the same thing when conscientious computer users focus their activities on the Google sites. 

Google’s commitment would set a new standard that could catalyze a drive for more contagious and abundant power everywhere. 

Goals: Beauty, abundance and contagiousness. 

Amp up the charitable giving. Google is many orders of magnitude more successful than the average company, but its charitable giving is below average. Google commits to giving away 1 percent of its profits. The average company gives away 1.2 percent. Why not commit to at least meeting the average? Or, better yet, why not match the 1.8-percent average for individual U.S. taxpayers? While they’re at it, why not make it an even 2 percent for simplicity’s sake? 

Because Google is so visible, a commitment like that could increase corporate giving everywhere. 

Goals: Abundance and fairness. 

Play Favorites. Google is justifiably proud of its search engine’s impartial results, refined to deliver the most useful and efficient information. But the company that handles more information than any other entity in the world is in a unique position to support the causes judged most worthy, either by Google employees or Google users. Google could create a partition within its search engine for the sites that it determines do the most good in the world. In the way Google Health helps users organize their medical records or Google Finance provides special money-management tools, Google Good could promote tools for people who want to give their money away based on the best available information about charities. It could also provide useful information for job seekers in search of especially meaningful work in mission-driven organizations. 

Goals: Beauty, abundance, fairness and contagiousness. 

Maintain the pressure. In March 2010 Google began redirecting all Google China’s traffic to its servers in Hong Kong, allowing uncensored search results to appear on the screens of its hundreds of millions of Chinese users. China censors pornography and content it judges likely to foment social unrest and Google initially submitted to that censorship. Google searches explicitly stated on the screen that the search results had been censored. However, when Chinese human-rights activists had their Google Gmail accounts hacked – and it appeared that the Chinese government was the most likely perpetrator – Google retaliated. 

In 2010 the world’s largest search engine bypassed the censors by re-routing searches to Hong Kong, a special jurisdiction where Chinese laws are more liberal. 

Google walks a fine line in China and in other countries where information is aggressively censored or where governments want information about Google users. In April 2010 the company published a new “transparency” tool on its website designed to identify countries that either ask Google to remove certain content or request access to user data. China considers its censorship practices a state secret – it’s the only country listed that does that – so the site doesn’t report much of anything about how China limits its citizens’ access to Internet content. Brazil submitted more “removal requests” than any other country. Germany, India and the United States were in second, third and fourth place at the time of this writing. Brazil also requested more data on Google users than any other country, followed by the United States, the United Kingdom, India and France. 

So far Google’s “transparency” doesn’t report where countries are simply blocking content. Those countries obviously don’t need to request the removal of content. The website reports that Google is working on a tool to show where content is blocked. 

With access to unprecedented amounts of information, Google can have an unprecedented impact on public knowledge. If you believe that the access to knowledge is important to creating and maintaining democratic societies, then Google is in a unique position to push for open access to information. Or to provide tools that give access in spite of censorship. 

Bryan Welch is the Publisher and Editorial Director of Ogden Publications, the parent company of MOTHER EARTH NEWS. Connect with him on Google+.

In each decade new institutions of power arise in the world that appear to have a stranglehold on free enterprise. The mighty metropolitan newspapers once controlled the flow of information to the mass audience. Their era is over. When I was a kid, the oil companies and television networks seemed to run the world. They are still powerful, but a lot less powerful than they were in 1965. In college I heard people fret about IBM’s monopolistic control of high technology. “Big Blue’s” wing-tipped minions ruled the computer industry. That didn’t last. 

In fact, the dominant global businesses in each decade of my life have followed the same pattern of growing power followed by decline. 

Google’s dominance won’t last forever. Some upstart with a bright new idea will take its place. But the company’s founders seem to be as proud of the company’s culture as they are of its financial success. Can the Google culture persist when the company’s economic power declines? 

More seasoned executives might say that it’s simple to supply free food and video games to your employees while you’re one of the world’s fastest growing companies. It’s easier to have fun at work when the company is making lots and lots of money. As the company and its industry mature Google’s culture will probably become more conventional unless its managers and shareholders make continuing investments in that culture. And as company resources become more constrained with the maturing of its industry and its business model, those investments will be harder to make. 

Still, managers in every industry should take note of Google’s ability to attract excellent employees with a combination of personality, conscience and equity. The opportunity of joining an attractive culture, building a business and sharing in that business’ economic success makes for an attractive offer. When Google’s growth slows, retention of great employees will be more important than attracting bright new stars. That may require some redefinition. What components of the Google employment contract are valuable after the stock options stop appreciating so rapidly? 

Google’s cultural innovations are probably repeatable in companies around the world. Most of us could invest more in the corporate lifestyle to attract good people. Most companies could be a little better at citizenship, and could publicize their citizenship a little more effectively. And most companies would benefit from investing more in culture and citizenship. 

Google has made its citizenship an integral facet of its product. Consumers today implicitly consider a company’s conscience a part of its value proposition. The consumer’s new mindset is probably here to stay. And workers worldwide are aware of the quality of life the staff enjoys inside the Googleplex. To compete for high-quality workers all employers must, on some level, compete with Google. Plus, the children of today’s workers won’t willingly accept a lower quality of working life. So we’ll keep on meeting these new standards in the future. 

Bryan Welch is the Publisher and Editorial Director of Ogden Publications, the parent company of MOTHER EARTH NEWS. Connect with him on Google+.