Overview

Embracing Sufficiency is the story of human resource consumption; the creativity that sustained us; what we learned, the lessons we ignored, how we lost our way. In the beginning we lived off the land, gathering enough food to feed ourselves. Today, most of us never experience the land, only its wealth, or the lack thereof. Humanity evolved, became more aware with expanded intelligence. For centuries we endeavored to improve the methods for producing food, tools and weapons of war. The Industrial Revolution launched a new era of machinery capable of running the treadmill of production full speed ahead. Thereafter the challenge became to increase consumption, to keep the economy growing, the prevailing mantra. Advanced technology, population growth, aggressive advertising, easy credit and globalization all served to get us where we are today. We consume excessively: corrupting air, land and sea. Plastic litters the landscape and the oceans; GM-plants promote the use of herbicides that's poisoning our food. The human species has fought with each other to the edge of extinction; we stand ready to once again. Today our world is becoming barren with foul air, murky water and lifeless soil, potentially unable to feed us. The severe weather will kill you, if the heat doesn't. But it's the silence, the lack of abundant life variations, the beautiful forests, streams, snow-peaks and desert valleys, the sprawling and rising oceans we've taken for granted that we'll miss most. Nature's balance has literally been turned on its head. Is it possible to survive in a finite world with limited resources and continue on the way we have? Do we really believe we can continue on this way?

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9781734073119

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Kirkus Reviews - A former electrical engineer and retired teacher offers a sweeping study of global human consumption. The second half of the meticulously researched book concentrates more directly on consumption, broadly defined by the author to encompass the use of all of the planet's resources, including fossil fuels, water, and food. Stadtmiller writes: Consumption levels of the world's wealthiest countries...are draining the remaining stockpiles of critical nonrenewable natural resources at untenable rates; the disparities of this consumption are glaring. Twenty percent of the population from the highest income countries consumes 86% of all private consumption. One of the more eye-opening chapters delves into Mount Waste-More, the author's clever name for the world's trash crisis: Globally, garbage waste is accumulating at 2.12 billion tons per year, 555 pounds of garbage each year per each global citizen. On the positive side, he wisely observes that some American communities are adopting a completely new concept of a world without garbage called Zero-Waste. Also pertinent are the five profiles (Brazil, India, China, Russia, the United States) provided as examples of energy and environmental usage by individual countries. Stadtmiller's lucid discussion of a Nature-Conscious Consumer reflects a sensible depiction of human accountability. With a rather remarkable eye for detail, he takes a broad view of human consumption, neatly dividing the topic into understandable segments while relating them to the whole. The author employs the occasional meaningful example for illustration and supports the text with a liberal use of carefully chosen statistics. An impressive, impassioned call for fundamental change in the way humans interact with their world.

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