Linkages Home | Sustainable Consumption Home | Search | Send Feedback

PREAMBLE: An Invitation to Reclaim the American Dream

In April 1995, a small but enthusiastic group of Americans, young and old, male and female, with ancestry from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, met to reconsider the American Dream. Underlying our gathering was the conviction that the prevailing American Dream is not improving our sense of well being. Time spent driving, shopping, working, and watching television has increased, while time spent in conversation, at family meals, and in informal visits with neighbors has decreased. More stuff just isn't doing it. Somewhere along the line, our country took a wrong turn. We ended up equating national progress with rising property values and ever increasing material consumption.

After three days of intense, sometimes heated dialogue, we decided to work for a new kind of future. We left with a strengthened hope that we could, in time, speak to millions of our compatriots, redefine and reclaim the American Dream, and thereby point the way to a better future.

Beyond that, we agreed simply to band together. We invite you to join in. We are forming a network organized by its recognition that high per capita consumption of natural resources in our country threatens global sustainability. We Americans now consume our body weight in raw materials each day -materials extracted from farms, forests, grasslands, and mines. Just as developing nations must seek just and uplifting ways to arrest the rapid growth of their populations, such as educating women, improving health care, and reducing child mortality, we in the United States must seek just and uplifting ways to reduce our consumption.

The network is organized by its recognition that our current materialistic definition of the American Dream is both an integral cause and consequence of much else that ails our nation. Our commercial media are saturated with consumerist messages and gratuitous violence. Our civic institutions have been eroded by a "me-first!" kind of individualism. Our sprawling, high-consumption neighborhoods are effectively community-proof - they put us in our cars ten times a day and engender isolation. Our financial house is out of order, with a giant national debt and equally massive personal debts. Our tax codes and government expenditures reward resource consumption, pollution, and habitat destruction, penalize work and savings, and amplify inequality. America is now the least equitable of the industrial democracies. And the rising inequality contributes to worsened violence, putting many poor people in high-security prisons, many rich people in caged compounds, and everybody in insecurity.

Our industry sheds labor, especially family-wage jobs with good benefits for high school graduates. Our democracy revolves around money, and our political discourse has devolved into fear mongering and scape goating. The dictates of our high consumption economy and way of life are causally bound up with each of these other challenges.

With our conference, we began a conversation. With our newly formed network, we will continue it. We will seek routes for individuals, households, workplaces, communities, cities, and our nation to follow toward a better quality of life. Toward more fu lfillment, less junk.

It may not be an easy trip, but it will never be dull. As an octogenarian activist from Seattle says, "If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been in bed with a mosquito."

Alan Thein Durning,
For the Planning Group
August, 1995