FIFTY RULES FOR LIVING SUSTAINABLY
by Robert Waldrop
VIRTUE
1. Nurture blessings and hope in your own life and in the life of your community.
2. Promote solidarity and cooperation.
3. Celebrate life, goodness, beauty, virtue, responsibility, joy, and righteous and honest work. Practice peace, non-violence, servant leadership, harmony, community, voluntary cooperation, and the proper stewardship of Creation. Be authentic and honest. Pray without ceasing.
4. Hear the truth when it is spoken to you. Discern the signs of the times and speak truth -- to the power, to the people, and to the community.
JUSTICE
5. Protect the poor and powerless-- listen, learn, educate, organize, respect life, and empower participation.
6. Live simply and justly in solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Be a good neighbor. Make no war on them, rather, be one with them in spirit, truth, and love. Don't leave the poor behind for the wolves to devour.
7. Be aware of your environment and how your lifestyle impacts the community and world you live in and other people, for good or for bad.
PEACE
8. Work for reconciliation with truth and orthopraxis.
9. Make injustices visible -- witness, remember, teach, proclaim, and tell. Light candles – don’t curse the darkness.
TRUTH AND SELF-AWARENESS
10. Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
11. As you change your lifestyle to be more just and sustainable, don't attempt too much at first. Set incremental goals and meet them. Learn one new thing at a time and get good at it.. But beware of procrastination.
12. Be willing to start small, or it is likely you will never start at all.
13. Learn many things.
14. Practice many skills.
15. Teach others.
16. Govern yourself.
17. Accept responsibility for your own life, but understand your interdependence with others and the importance of community.
18. "What I do doesn't matter" is a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about doing wrong.
PRUDENCE
19. Be ready to adapt to major changes that may come your way.
20. Watch out for dangers and disasters that may be ahead, and act in advance to mitigate the impact of such events. The Bible says, "Remember the time of hunger in the day of plenty."
21. The time to build the cellar is before the tornado hits.
FOOD
22. Celebrate a new and more joyful way to do food. Prepare meals with primary ingredients grown in your local region. Share table fellowship with family and friends. Eat with the season, and discover the rich, varied, and authentic tastes your region brings forth throughout the year.
23. Learn how to grow your own food. Plant fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other perennial food crops. Preserve heirloom varieties of plants and animals.
24. Learn to process and preserve your own foods by canning, dehydrating, freezing, brining, fermenting, and pickling. Invest in appropriate food processing equipment. Encourage churches and community groups to establish community food processing kitchens. Make your own beer, wine, spirits, liqueurs, and soft drinks or buy from local breweries and wineries.
25. Gather up the leftovers and ensure that no food is wasted. Compost or feed to animals all organic waste materials.
26. Abandon the globalized corporation dominated agribusiness supermarket and fast food system. Buy as much food as is practical from local farmers and local processors. Do your part to help develop a cooperative local food system.
27. Encourage schools and churches to start gardens and to serve local foods to students and at church dinners.
28. Don't buy any meats, eggs, or poultry from the Confined Animal Feeding Operation system. If you can't find local animal products produced with sustainable and humane practices, go vegetarian.
ENERGY, HOUSING, TRANSPORTATION
29. Use energy frugally. Know how much energy you are personally using and which way your energy usage trend is going. When you go shopping, remember that "stuff" has energy embodied in its manufacture and distribution and thus conserving energy requires using less stuff. Invest in energy efficient appliances, but beware of accumulating energy hogs.
30. Use sustainable and renewable energy wherever practical. Buy wind generated electricity from your utility provider.
31. Walk, take public transportation, or ride a bicycle, where possible. Avoid air travel unless you can get there no other way. For cross-country land transportation, rail and bus are the preferred sustainable options. For freight, rail is the way to go.
32. Use Less Space. Heat or air condition rooms only when in use, do not foolishly squander fossil fuels on heating or air conditioning empty rooms.
33. Super-insulate your dwelling and reduce or eliminate fossil fueled heating and air conditioning by using passive solar heating and cooling in new construction and developing/installing retrofits for existing buildings.
MATERIAL GOODS
34. Practice personal and emotional detachment from material goods.
35. Understand that you are NOT your stuff. Resist corporate and government propaganda that suggests otherwise. Ignore all advertising.
36. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair, Restore, Make Do, Do Without.
37. Patronize the aftermarket in places like swap meets, thrift stores, and flea markets.
38. Avoid new stuff as much as possible.
39. Don't buy clothing made in sweatshops.
40. Limit your consumption of resources, including water.
DEBT
41. The borrower is the slave of the lender, if you value freedom, Flee The Bondage Of Debt.
42. If you must borrow money for education or housing, pay it off as quickly as you can, always make extra principle payments on loans. Do not forget that the borrower is the slave of the lender.
43. Never finance frivolous consumption with borrowed money on credit cards. I tell you three times: the borrower is the slave of the lender.
COMMUNITY ECONOMICS
44. Avoid big box corporate stores and franchise chains.
45. Buy from local businesses and as much as is practical earn a living and spend your money outside of the corporation dominated globalized economy. Invest your time, energy, assets, and intelligence in local economies.
46. Organize cooperatives, start small businesses, and create other structures and systems to replace unsustainable globalized economic and political structures.
47. Spend less money, save more money.
48. Keep your money in a credit union or in productive and useful assets (land, buildings, tools, knowledge, books, food, orchards, permaculture. etc.).
49. Support political and voluntary initiatives that promote sustainability and resilience, such as public transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy resources, small farms, decentralized economics, balanced government budgets, and local markets.
50. Ensure fair distribution, subsidiarity, economic opportunity, justice, and food security for everyone everywhere.
