Human Scale Living

Take control over your life by going small(er)

Lost in the Oceans of the World

Long ago (but still true today for millions of us) we lived small and local lives. Most of what we ate was grown locally, most of what we wore was grown regionally and processed locally. The objects that traveled farthest were the metals and ores and gemstones that appear rarely on the Earth, and for good reason: not every backyard can be mined for gold, but every backyard can grow some food.

This began to change for “advanced” cultures built by conquest such as the Roman empire. Rome fed itself on bread whose grain was grown in Egypt, the “breadbasket of Rome.” But it began its current exponential growth when industrialization was born in England some 300 years ago. Since then, industrialization has swept across Europe, the Americas, Asia and is now digging deeper into Africa. The triumph of industrialization seems inevitable.

But is that good for us?

A large textile mill must weave a great deal of fabric in order to drive its costs down from the high initial outlay to build the mill in the first place. This means that the mill must sell its fabrics outside its native town, across the county and region and perhaps even nation in which it is set. As mills are built that are bigger than in previous generations (the “more and more” philosophy) they must sell their fabric across borders, eventually globally — the stage we are currently growing into.

As a result each of us is lost. Lost in the sense that we may never know the weaver who made the cloth we wear, and he will never know us. We are anonymous consumers and he is a famous but alienated producer. In all likelihood “he” (the weaver) is a faceless mass of interchangeable employees at the corporation which is the true weaver, the unhuman producer of the cloth we wear.

This alienation means that we consumers can never know enough about the producers of the goods we consume, to be able to trust them. And the producers of the goods measure everything in terms of monetary gains and losses rather than the quality of the finished goods or the pleasure of satisfying a customer.

Control Through Downsizing

“Downsizing” is a corporate euphemism for firing massive numbers of low-ranking employees in order to lower costs so that high-ranking employees can be paid more. But here we use the term to mean:

shedding the distant producers in favor of more local producers for all the goods we consume

It makes good sense to consider that we as consumers can have greater influence over and knowledge of producers who are smaller in size and closer to us in location. An extreme example should make this clear:

Mrs Dalsworthy

Mrs Dalsworthy is a nice woman who lives up the street. She knits sweaters as a sideline. If you would like to buy a sweater from Mrs Dalsworthy, you ring her up or drop by for a chat. She serves you a cup of tea and you tell her you’d like a sweater. She asks what kind, and you tell her. She measures you, you give her a small down payment and leave. A few weeks later she rings you up and you go to pick up the sweater. You put it on and together you and Mrs Dalsworthy judge how good the sweater is.

But your neighbor goes to the mall to get his sweater. He buys it at a large retailer and must select the sweater out of their stock on hand, which is ample for sizes types and colors. Your neighbor gets his sweater on the same day, pays a lot less than you do, and his sweater is manufactured to a higher degree of uniform quality than Mrs Dalsworthy can achieve. On the other hand your neighbor’s sweater is also made to sell cheaply and its dyes and materials are cheaper and less sturdy than those Mrs Dalsworthy uses, and his sweater will not last so long as yours.

You dealt with the sole proprietress, knitter, materials orderer and saleslady. Your neighbor dealt with a low-wage clerk who could only act within the parameters of what his supervisor, another low-level employee, authorized.

Your order made a difference to Mrs Dalsworthy; your neighbor’s purchase amounted to a trivial, vanishingly-small item on the monster lists of sales of the retailer, whose further payments (rent to the mall owner, goods orders from the distributor, etc.) amounted to only small items on those companies’ revenues. Seen from the other point of view, Mrs Dalsworthy will experience a good deal of pleasure if you like the sweater she knits for you, and some pain if you don’t like it. But when your neighbor told the clerk at the large retail store, “I’ll take this,” it hardly made a difference to the clerk, or the clerk’s supervisor, or the store manager, or the CEO of the corporation that owns the chain of retail stores in question.

Go Small Be Happy

Moving to a smaller, more human scale gives us more power over our lives. It gives us more pleasure also. It increases our contact with our fellows, and the contact is more meaningful for both parties.

Go human, go local.