SMALL IS STILL BEAUTIFUL

Back in the seventies, many of us were inspired by Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher, who pointed out the necessity of using less of the planet’s resources and living sustainably to protect the environment. When we were young, that seemed so simple and obvious. We lived in small apartments, stayed in youth hostels when we traveled, drove Volkswagen Beetles. We planned to have no more than two children. We could easily save the world.

Those of us who survived the seventies and settled down to a middle- or even upper-class life, though, found it hard to continue living small. Most of us found ourselves in large single-family homes having two or more bathrooms. The VWs were traded in on gas guzzlers. (I must confess to driving a Mercedes for many years, simply because my late husband wanted that car.) Instead of making our own yogurt and cooking simple meals, we started going to overpriced, trendy restaurants serving too much food. We drank too much alcohol. We wasted far too much, caused an appalling amount of pollution. Some of us felt justified in having more than two children if money was not a problem. Even one population biologist and his wife were stymied in their efforts when their carefully planned second child turned out to be twins!

Today, climate change and other environmental issues are making us look again at how we can live in more modest ways to preserve the planet. In some cases that calls for some sacrifices, but in many others, it makes life easier, more beautiful, or happier.

If the United States truly wants to be a world leader, we need to change our ways, to be more like Denmark. (Being part Danish, I am prejudiced, but many people share my opinion.) For many years, research on using solar energy has been carried at Roskilde. The Danes live less ostentatiously than Americans, yet their homes and public spaces are comfortable and attractive. They not only make smallness and simplicity seem desirable, but use those characteristics as tourist attractions.

Some of our universities have become bloated, investing too much in costly buildings and too little in more important areas. Small colleges seem to be doing better, partly because they have less money. My alma mater, Kalamazoo College, is a very small school that began in 1833 as a Baptist college dependent on Baptist alumni and friends. Even now, alumni are a major source of the school’s funds. Allen Hoben, the president of Kalamazoo College in the 1920s and 1930s, once said that he wanted “K” to be the best school of its kind. “K” today has about 1500 students, only a little larger than when I attended it in the 1950s, but it has grown steadily in the proportion of students who join the Peace Corps or take part in the school’s very desirable foreign-study program. It has always provided a good liberal arts education, has produced a great many scientists, is regularly cited as an excellent college, and I am very proud to be an alumna.

Even our pets can show the advantages of small size. I have seen people travel in RVs with very large dogs, for instance. How silly! For many years I helped raise a series of Scotties, terriers that are small enough to fit into small spaces and to eat reasonable amounts of dog food but just large enough to provide some protection when necessary. I always felt safe when walking with one of our Macs. Cats, too, can provide companionship without taking up a large space in the environment. If we adopt cats from shelters, keep them indoors, and have them neutered, that also helps lower the population of feral cats that kill enormous numbers of birds.

Collectors tend to amass very large, expensive collections of whatever they fancy. Far better is what one jade collector did: His collection always consisted solely of the finest piece of jade he could find. Each time he found a better one, the older one was sold. The small quantity of his collection was in inverse proportion to its enviable quality.

The small-house movement is an encouraging sign today. Though it has been enforced in part by the high cost of larger homes, some architects and designers have also embraced it as a challenging way to provide desirable cottages. In these homes, which often have a rustic Arts and Crafts style, the furniture is simple and functional.  Nothing can be wasteful or merely decorative. As a result, life in them is simplified. If you don’t have room for an enormous TV, you are unable to waste time watching it! My only reservation about small houses is that some of the super-rich are building them as cute little vacation houses rather than living in them.

Many small cars are just as appealing as larger ones. My Honda Fit is an amazing little car that fits into tiny parking spaces, but holds anything I want to carry in it when the back seat is folded down. It’s “small on the outside, big on the inside.” My partner’s tiny old Suzuki Samurai is vital for us in the winter, when we need 4-wheel drive on snowy hills. Like the Fit, it uses little gas.

When I was a grad student at Stanford in the early eighties, I did some quantitative research in education. To run the statistical tests, I used main-frame computers that took up most of a very large building. A student today could do the same research on her laptop computer. What an improvement that miniaturization has been! The same trend has been true in most electronics, mostly to good effect. My tiny digital camera, for example, is not really as good as a professional photographer’s film camera, but for my purposes it is fine, uses no film, and certainly is more portable.

My favorite case of compact size, though, is our Winnebago View. We shopped for a long time to find a small motorhome that was large enough for us, with a nice galley, real bathroom, comfortable bed, and other features we wanted. (Yes, a tent might be a bit easier on the environment. We tried tent camping, but a bear came moseying through our site, and chipmunks stole our food. If we were going to travel long distances, we needed a motorhome.) At the same time, the motorhome had to be small enough to fit into a couple of standard spaces in supermarket parking lots, narrow enough to stay well within traffic lanes. At times we despaired of ever finding the Goldilocks combination we wanted, but the View (7 feet wide, 24 feet long) has been just right. When we see gargantuan RVs squeezing into small campground sites or slopping across several spaces at a Walmart, we feel quite smug about the View. Constructing it required much less material than would be needed for a large rig, and it uses much less fuel. (How can anyone defend driving something that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and goes only six or seven miles on a gallon on gas?)

So, I see some hope for the future in the “small is beautiful” trends of today. The gloomy Dane part of me feels very pessimistic about population growth, which is the elephant in the room no one wants to mention. Immigration, especially, will continue to drive consumption and pollution higher in this country, and the ever-growing populations of India and China will do so in those countries. However, until war or epidemics reduce the world population to a sustainable size, we can use common sense and technology to lessen our demands on the environment.