The ninth point of the Scout Law reads: “A scout is thrifty.” In recent years the idea of thrift has seemed to mean buy stuff cheap. But can it be thrifty not to buy stuff at all? Is it un-American, in the face of a recession, not to “do our part to fuel the recovery” (by buying cheap plastic crap manufactured overseas)? Oh dear, perhaps I reveal a bias. I’m into thrift, but not in the sense of accumulating more stuff at lower prices.
It’s the old theory: he who dies with the most toys wins. Except I always preferred the revision: he who dies with the most toys still dies. So— let’s journey to the heady days of the 14th century, when thrifty meant thriving and prosperity. Back then, if memory serves, “prosperity” might have been defined as not being among the one in three Europeans who died of plague.
The current recession is no Black Death, but it’s not so very cheery for many people who are suddenly discovering thrift in the stingy sense. If, instead of worrying about the quantity of stuff we may or may not be able to afford, what if we gathered up what we do have and made the most of that? One of my favorite tree huggers, Dana Meadows, often confronted this very dilemma and typically looked to the planet itself for guidance:
If you stop your struggle and lift your eyes long enough to see Earth’s wonders, to play and dance with the glories around you, you will discover what you really need. It isn’t that much. There is enough.
Take the desperation out of the picture, slow down and listen to the trees a while, and this concept of sufficiency doesn’t seem as crazy as its ugly cousin, the fear of scarcity. The panic of depletion is one that ironically escalates the entropy: people compete to hoard and consume scarce resources before they’re gone.
If, however, it’s possible that there really is enough here for all of us, then all of a sudden the perspective shifts from “git mine while I can” to “whoa, let’s make sure there’s enough for all.” This concept of sufficiency is not extreme: it’s not saying there’s more than enough; it’s saying there could well be just enough. In the same essay quoted above, Meadows continues in this vein. Here, she speaks to us as if in the voice of Mother Earth:
Take your time building soils, forests, coral reefs, mountains. Take centuries or millennia. When any part wears out, turn it into food for something else. If it takes hundreds of years to grow a forest, millions of years to compress oil, maybe that’s the rate at which they ought to be used.
And while she has an earful for those who listen to the so-called laws of economics over the laws of the Earth, she is ultimately after thrift. She takes the word’s 14th-century sense, which may have hinted at simple survival, and adds a modern, joyous sense of thriving thriftily:
The planet does not get bigger, it gets better. Its creatures learn, mature, diversify, evolve, create amazing beauty and novelty and complexity, but live within absolute limits.
— “The Laws of the Earth and the Laws of Economics” by Donella “Dana” Meadows
Any chance this was the intent of a law memorized by millions of scouts over the past century? Here’s what the Handbook says:
A Scout is Thrifty. A Scout works to pay his own way and to help others. He saves for the future. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
Hmm. Maybe the Boy Scouts in 1910 were on to something those plague survivors figured out in the 1300s?
Thanks for reading. Cheers,
P.S. The previous blog in this series was the cheeriest anti-scrapbooking rant you ever read.
Photo by SteamboatDigs