Sustainable Living

Simple Living and Self-Sufficiency

Simple living is the conscious decision to withdraw, to varying degrees, from modern materialism and to replace income and consumption with personal development. It has been described as a lifestyle that is outwardly simple but inwardly rich. Poverty or an inability to command sufficient resources necessary for a materially more complex lifestyle is not the reason behind simple living. Indeed, the element of intention is important to understanding a related concept, called voluntary simplicity, which shares features with simple living. Intention is also a key feature of an allied movement, downshifting, which dated from the late 1980s and saw people, mainly well-paid professionals, choosing to work less and accept the consequent reduction in income and overall consumption.

Adopting simple living or downshifting need not reflect anti-consumerism or anti-materialism; a key theme is having more time to enjoy “quality” consumption rather than mass consumer goods (e.g., the Slow Food movement). Downshifters in particular are characterized as changing their lifestyles for predominantly personal reasons: a desire to spend more time with family, to improve physical and mental health, and to pursue personal growth and/or spirituality. As a result, increased sustainability may be a by-product rather than a central intention of simple living and downshifting, resulting from reduced overall levels of consumption and choosing simple consumer goods over more complex ones.

Self-sufficiency is an important variation on simple living as it links frugality with sustainability. The desire to be as independent as possible from production not directly under one's own control also fits the countercultural desire to withdraw from mainstream western urban lifestyles in order to foster and live by alternative values, and underpinned the back-to-the-land movement popular in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this period, the ability to control food production, ensuring greater purity, as well as achieving harmony with nature, was a central reason why families chose to homestead or small groups forming communes practiced organic farming and permaculture (permanent agriculture, or sustainable food production systems). Intentional communities, from early communes to modern ecovillages, create rules and construct infrastructure that promote sustainable living. These rules may include sharing consumer durables such as washing machines between households, banning the use of cars, and buying locally as much as possible to support a local economy. The ethos of living on a human scale is reflected in the adoption of appropriate technology, such as small-scale wind and solar energy generation and housing designs that minimize resource input and waste output.

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