The Simpler Way

Review of:
The Conserver Society
By Ted Trainer
London: Zed Books, 1995.

Ted Trainer says that the emergence of ecovillages as models “could well represent one of the most important turning points in history, the beginning of the pioneering experiments that might soon show us how best to go about the (re-)establishment of settlements in which people can live contentedly and responsibly.”

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Where is the greenest place on earth? Sydney? Melbourne? The latter is the home of the Simplicity Institute, an education and research center “seeking to foster a transformation of consciousness that highlights the urgent need to move beyond growth-oriented, consumerist lifeways.” It was founded in 2010 by Dr. Samuel Alexander and Dr. Simon Ussher. Their vision is one of an eco-communitarian future which draws heavily on the writings of their mentor, Ted Trainer.

Trainer, a professor of Social Work at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is a familiar figure to many eco-activists as the originator of the “Simpler Way” (https://thesimplerway.info/). After following the development of his analysis of industrial-consumerist society for some time, I thought I was reasonably familiar with his work; yet I was startled recently when I happened to pick up an early volume of his, titled The Conserver Society. It was a revelation to see how — twenty years ago, in just over 200 pages — Trainer had so fully anticipated the most important trends of the current phase of the “greening” movement.

Recently de-growth, resilience, re-skilling, cohousing, “DIY” (do-it-yourself), “food not lawns,” re-wilding, energy descent, sharing economy have all become buzzwords of the movement; yet not only were those concepts laid out succinctly in The Conserver Society but, moreover, they were melded into a holistic vision of where we need to go — in an especially comprehensive and coherent way.

On social change

Ted Trainer is not a reformist. He acknowledges that every reform we can win is of value, but he stresses that our work must be guided by a radical (“going to the root”) vision of transformation. Efforts that achieve a series of reforms but fail to alter our fundamental civilizational trajectories will ultimately be inadequate, perhaps even futile.

For example: Reformers advocate the elimination of unemployment through sharing around of the economy’s labor requirements. Trainer doesn’t disagree with this, but, at the same time, he wants us to consider the problem of unemployment within a different context. Deprivation of work and remuneration in a rational economy would make no more sense than “unemployment” (no chores, no provision) within a household. There is constantly plenty to be done to sustain life within any human unit — household, village, region, nation. So there should be no issue about anyone willing and able being denied participation in productive activity. But the institutions of a capitalist (or state-socialist) Leviathan are too remote and bureaucratic to “optimally allocate the labor resource,” no less to pay attention to the “right-livelihood” fulfillment of individual citizens. There was no unemployment in the Soviet Union, but systemic labor imbalances were pervasive — despite repeated attempts to make fine-tuning adjustments. And Soviet citizens had a telling aphorism: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

Trainer says our perspective should be, over time: less and less labor employed by mega-institutions, more and more allocated to the straightforward sustenance of our home communities. In fact, local, interdependent efforts to “hold up the sky” — together — are the bedrock requisites for building community.

Trainer is a revolutionary, though a partisan of a soft variety of revolution. He says that, rather than expending ourselves in skirmishing with The System too much, we’d be better off gradually and mostly disengaging from it — focusing our attention on the positive endeavor of building the new society within the shell of the old.

That doesn’t mean he’s anti-electoral or anti-legislative. He acknowledges that democratic, social justice and eco-communitarian policy advances open doors to transformation and thus are worth fighting for. But, rather than having the perspective of “taking power,” we should mostly be thinking in terms of devolution of power.

Government and politics

Communitarian praxis fosters a sense of “we” — “we” administer our affairs, “we” are responsible for the social and ecological commonweal — whereas in our current society just about all levels of government are perceived as “they.”

Trainer writes: “At present we are governed. We do not govern ourselves. This is not good for us; people should be in control of their own affairs and should make the decisions about issues that affect them . . . This is not possible in our gigantic, complex, and bureaucratized societies with their manifold systems that can’t function without hoards of professionals, bureaucrats, and administrators. It is possible only when most functions have been devolved back to the regions and localities.”

There could and should be higher-level coordinative bodies for the sake of interregional cooperation. But the lowest practical level of sovereignty is the most preferable. Taxation should be mostly of, by, and for the localities.

In regard to political efficacy, Trainer says that Green Party electoral campaigns should prioritize their educational function. In doing so they can help lay the groundwork for the cultural/consciousness shifts that will be needed to have the citizenry comprehend and embrace “the Great U-Turn” (the devolutionary path). Like the Greens, Trainer talks about “overgrowing the government” rather than overthrowing it!

Lifeways

In my recent series of articles, “Thoughts For My Grandchildren,” I reflected upon two counterposed human lifeways. After Gary Snyder, I called them the “Old Ways” (stable, community-based, nature-embedded) and the “New Ways” (associated with the growth-oriented state/development/technology complex). A similar duality has occurred to many writers in recent decades. In his Ishmael trilogy, Daniel Quinn talks about “Leaver Culture” and “Taker Culture.” Trainer uses the terminology: “Conserver Society” versus “Consumer Society.”

All of these elucidations recognize how misguided it has been that the ideology of progress has conjured a goal of the generalization of Western-style (consumerist) Affluence. Not only is this goal unattainable (the horizon always recedes) but the pursuit is oppressive. We’d be happier if we relaxed our material standards and learned to live more lightly. All but the currently super-rich could improve their quality of life by acknowledging and cultivating the satisfactions deriving from simplification, localization, and rejuvenation of community; by recognizing that the hyper-individualism and competitiveness of capitalist-urban-industrial society is neither natural nor desirable.

We need to learn to be satisfied with sufficiency and a local, limited domain of experience. Many current norms and practices lead us in the wrong direction — and, moreover, are too expensive. Communitarian ways of solving problems and handling matters such as childcare, education, eldercare, and healthcare tend to be less expensive than institutional ways.

And simpler would be more serene. The pace and scale of life in the hypermodern era is numbing. It leaves us restless, craving the next stimulus, addicted to “innovation.” In this respect Trainer’s discourse is reminiscent of Paul Goodman’s when the latter described himself as a “Neolithic Conservative” and advised: “Innovate in order to simplify, otherwise as sparingly as possible.” Goodman noted that the profit-driven, limits-defying, balance-insensitive innovation associated with our touted “progress” can be disruptive and disorienting. Trainer agrees. His vision of social equanimity is attuned to conserving not only natural, but also cultural resources.

The de-stressing of people and the planet will to some extent require a return to “old way” paradigms such as: extended-family-within-village-within-home-territory. It will surely require a return to the human scale in most things. Trainer doesn’t shy away from advocating population reduction and de-growth. But, on the other hand, he doesn’t talk about “going back” to some kind of pastoral arcadia. He notes that small cities can be ecological if inclusive of urban agriculture and designed around groups of communitarian neighborhoods. There is no one right or best way to achieve sustainability. Cultural diversity is a key value for the Greens and for Ted Trainer.

Community

We evolved to live in community — the necessary (though not sufficient) basis for sane and sustainable human lifeways. Atomized individuals and families, making their best efforts, will not be able to meet the challenges we face at this critical juncture of our species history. Doing so will require the support and compensatory satisfactions that only community can provide. Living more lightly will be more easily accomplished and most effectively done together.

The populace of a nation-state; a network of “friends” on social media; the co-residents of a suburban township — these are examples of faux community. Real community is based on stable, familiar, face-to-face relationships of people who interdependently sustain their lives together. The cohousing and ecovillage movements seek to re-create such. Trainer says that the emergence of ecovillages as models “could well represent one of the most important turning points in history, the beginning of the pioneering experiments that might soon show us how best to go about the (re-)establishment of settlements in which people can live contentedly and responsibly.”

Real community is the locus of sharing, caring, and participatory culture. It fosters a sense of place and identity. There are many things we are supposed to take for granted in our current world of impersonal institutions that real communities would never countenance: homelessness, unemployment, gross inequality, destitution, educational failure. Another: impersonal authority. Security in a real community would be provided by something like a Neighborhood Watch rather than a police force.

The issue of educational failure is instructive. Rampant in our society, it’s a function of institutionalized schooling. The minority of children who thrive under the fabricated conditions of make-work assignments, memorization, and test-taking are rewarded. Those who can’t relate to those conditions (whether the problem is with their inappropriate enculturation for such or their particular schools or their particular dispositions) are penalized and denigrated — often with life-long consequences. In a real community what we call “education” would be inherent and incidental. The community itself and its daily functioning would be the main educational resource.

Economics

Trainer, like the Greens, has a post-capitalist conception of “community-based economics” encompassing a mixture of public, private, and cooperative enterprises. He says: “The model for an acceptable free-enterprise sector is given by the small firm owned and run by those who work in it. Here the main concerns are to derive a reasonable income by providing a worthwhile service, rather than to grow, get rich, and someday become a corporate empire.”

Currently “the economy” is perceived to be an idiosyncratic, almost exogenous realm — complex and abstract — the vagaries of which affect society like the weather does(!). Under rational conditions it would simply be the straightforward production of life’s necessities and comforts. All such activity would be accountable to and, at a macro level, under the guidance of the community as a whole (economy of, by, and for the community). Cottage industries, regional currencies, and local financial institutions would be key features. Goals would include deconcentration of wealth; less dependence upon imported goods and niche export production; allocation of economic resources away from the national centers.

In regard to the process of transitioning to a post-capitalist society, Trainer rejects the Marxist-progressivist paradigm of social change (national-scale collectivization of enterprises), advocating instead a strategy of disdaining the large corporations while favoring (even subsidizing, for the time being) local entities. This applies as much to the currently “under-developed” countries as it does to our own. Trainer: “In no area is the contradiction between the conventional and alternative paths so stark as with respect to Third World development. There are thousands of economists, advisers, bankers, engineers and others working to develop the Third World without the slightest understanding that their methodology is totally mistaken. The dominant conception of development is one in which it is not possible for reasonable living conditions to be achieved unless there is a long process of capital investment, urban growth, export development, borrowing, selling of natural assets, invasion by foreign firms, and seeing most of the country’s resources and production geared to the whims of a small number of mostly foreign consumers.”

The natural environment and the built environment

Trainer’s thinking in these areas is reminiscent of that of E. F. Schumacher. Technological development, efficiency, and mechanized productivity are of secondary importance relative to community solidarity, individual wellbeing, and right-livelihood. We should shift toward employing technologies and methods that a local village populace or a bioregional polity could produce and maintain.

In regard to food production, permaculture should become our watchword. Topsoil erosion losses have plagued our civilization for millennia; the advent of industrial agriculture has led to an accelerating depletion of this basic natural capital. This issue may be less publicized than that of climate change, but it conceivably could have more dramatic consequences in the near future.

Living more lightly will require population reduction and “energy descent.” Trainer goes beyond just advocating for renewable energy sources. Clearly we have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible (and avoid the temptation to turn to nuclear energy — it’s toxic and expensive); but we should have no illusions about renewables being able to supplant fossil fuels as sustainers of the kind of affluent lifestyles we’ve aspired to under the regime of consumer society.

Downscaling will be necessary, and it should become a virtue. Our houses should be smaller and groups of houses should be clustered. There must be a radical reduction of the number of cars and trucks. The paving over of the land should be reversed; many roads should be converted to horticultural usage. The public transit infrastructure should be expanded, especially light rail. Beyond public transit: less personal travel, less transportation of goods.

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Many advanced environmental thinkers were starting to insightfully address one or another of the above-mentioned issues during the latter half of the twentieth century. But Ted Trainer was one of the first to put it all together in a thoroughgoing holistic vision of “where to go and how to get there.” I can’t think of a significant area where the perspective of The Conserver Society strikes me as faulty or deficient, except to say that in his zeal for promoting the transition Trainer has a tendency to minimize the resistance that will inevitably be encountered. His inclination is to convey a hopeful tone (avoiding the catastrophism that can make people averse to reading environmental tracts) and not dwell on the challenges involved. I sympathize when he asserts that the transition could be achieved relatively quickly and painlessly — given a prior deep transformation of consciousness. I agree with him that the transformation has already begun (I think it started in the Sixties). But my sense is that the consciousness changes to date have been superficial relative to what Trainer feels will be required.

It can’t be foretold when movements for deep change will start to achieve critical mass (movements such as: bioregionalism, permaculture, Transition Towns, ecovillages, Green politics). Efforts by those like Ted Trainer and his disciples at the Simplicity Institute — who are striving to lay the groundwork — are of vital importance. We should all be following their lead.