William Powers, Author of Dispatches from the Sweet Life
Author, Speaker, Professor, Activist
I receive so many letters from readers about Twelve by Twelve. Thank you for your feedback! Connecting soul-to-soul with you makes the three years I spent writing it seem entirely worth it. Here’s part of one very thoughtful note I received yesterday. It’s from John Reed, author of the book Elegant Simplicity. He said it was fine to share it. Thanks John.
Wisdom="one mistake after another"
Is there a better way?
Russia, crippled by intense drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat, moved today to ban exports of its grain. This is a fifth of the world’s market, and comes at a time when grain prices are already up 90%.
This dangerous mix of global warming (this is Russia’s worst heat wave since record-keeping started there 130 years back), the precariousness of chemical-industrial agriculture, and the fickleness of world trade flows got me thinking, once again: Is there a better way?
I’m on the road in Arizona this week, meeting with people to talk about Twelve by Twelve. But like everywhere else, we’re also talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The over half-million gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf each day is terrible, but not terribly surprising. After all, we’re also losing several thousand acres of rainforest every day, heating the climate by a fraction of a degree each day, and losing an indigenous culture every two weeks as jungle homelands become cattle clear-cuts.
Three years ago, I returned to America after a decade of aid and conservation work in Africa and Latin America. Abroad, I’d seen, starkly, the grave impact the global economic system was having on our environment—Amazon rainforests clear-cut for fast-food cattle, African rivers poisoned by multinational mining—and began asking myself a daunting question: How could humanity transition to gentler, more responsible ways of living by replacing attachment to things with deeper relationships with people, nature, and self?
Fortunately, I stumbled upon someone with some clues: Dr. Jackie Benton (a psudonym, per her request). I met this slight, sixty-year-old physician, she was stroking a honey bee’s wings in front of her twelve-foot by twelve-foot, off-the-grid home in North Carolina.