Let’s Get Simple

Throughout her career, Betsy Taylor has been drawn to organizations trying to improve society--the peace movement, the nuclear freeze campaign, environmental reform.

But for the past year she has focused on a project so idealistic it almost sounds like a joke. Taylor, 41, is launching a national Center for a New American Dream.

She hopes it will provide a nonpartisan forum where Americans can talk about an overriding theme of the 1990s that nobody seems to address directly: If we are the richest people on Earth, why aren’t we happier? And the forum aims to offer solutions--ideas and models for ways people might break the work-and-spend grip that materialism has on their lives.

“We want to spark a national conversation,” said Taylor, who has already enlisted a network of high-powered activists, spent a year laying the groundwork and expects to offer details next month. “Our hope is to change the society. This idea can be seen as hopelessly utopian or as something that people desperately want.”

She’s banking on the latter, contending that the old American dream of opportunity has deteriorated. For many, it’s become a weary race for consumer goods; for others, the abrupt loss of a job they’d counted on for life.

People do want change, she said, offering up documentation: a Gallup poll showing that a third of all Americans would trade a 20% cut in income for reduced work hours, or an Index of Social Health report that in spite of a 50% increase in personal income since 1957, the percentage of Americans who say they are “very happy” has not risen at all.

Much of the data is from Taylor’s own organization. She is director of the Merck Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation based in Takoma Park, Md. In the world of foundations, Merck is a modest player, with an asset base of about $35 million, and gives away about $1.5 million a year, mostly to projects to sustain a healthy planet.

Last year, in a new move, the fund commissioned a nationwide poll attempting to measure the impact of materialism on the collapse of community. The purpose was to get information that would guide the fund’s grant-making, but Taylor said the outcome was so impressive it charted a new direction.

The survey revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with materialism, with 82% of the respondents agreeing that “most of us buy and consume far more than we need.” And 67% agreed that “Americans cause many of the world’s environmental problems because we consume more resources and produce more waste than anyone else in the world.”

The survey, conducted for Merck by the Harwood Group of Bethesda, Md., included random-sample telephone interviews with 800 adults and four focus groups representing a demographic cross-section of the population. A 26-page report, “Yearning for Balance,” has been published and more than 6,000 copies distributed. “The poll response took us by surprise,” Taylor said in a recent telephone interview.

And it kicked her into action. With $100,000 Merck Fund seed money, she convened a conference last spring, pulling together dozens of thinkers who spent three days wrestling with the thesis that materialism has not bought happiness and the possibility of creating a “sustainable” society that does not borrow from the future.

The participants were challenged to look at the global picture: With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes nearly 30% of the planet’s resources. Americans now can choose from more than 25,000 supermarket items--including 200 kinds of cereal and 11,092 magazines (mostly filled with ads for more products).

In many ways, our society has grown beyond acceptable environmental limits, it was emphasized, and yet ominously, the American lifestyle is now the uncontested global model. This poses a paradox that technology alone will not resolve, said board member Robert Engelman, a program director at Washington’s Population Action International. “If the entire world used energy the way we do, the increased carbon dioxide in the air alone would bring on an immense greenhouse effect.”

The conference was concerned about the vacuum in American conversation, even in a presidential election year, and about the irony of consumers working overtime to buy things whose production is depleting the Earth’s resources.

“When we consider the rollback of the 4.3-cent gas tax we should also be discussing the way we use gasoline,” Engelman said. His vision is a society in which people are consuming fewer resources and still living a high-quality life. “We are not suggesting that Americans are awful people or that we all need to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle immediately.”

How to talk about the need for change was a major theme at the conference, which struggled with vocabulary, acknowledging that such words as “consumption” and “sustainability” often draw blank stares. Asked to define the problem in “sound bite” phrases, they came up with lines such as, “We’re working for the economy and it’s not working for us,” or “The Earth has enough for every person’s need but not every person’s greed.”

The conference participants acknowledged the meeting was only a small first step toward the daunting task of revamping consumption patterns, but they left with a positive feeling, Engelman said. “If there was any dominant message from that conference, it was ‘Keep going.’ ”

That has been Taylor’s byword. An eight-member board of directors has had several planning sessions for a permanent center. Both an executive director and a site (probably either Washington, D.C., or Seattle) will be announced in June.

“I’m trying to nurse this baby along,” Taylor said. “Our plan is to build a major membership organization, and not in a polarizing way. If you come at it with a political agenda, it won’t work.” She thinks the project’s timing is right on target and applicants for the directorship came from “every sector you can imagine,” she said, “from ex-priests to corporate vice presidents.”

It’s clear to her the project has tapped into something dynamic. “People are hungry to talk about this, and there is no place to do it,” she said. “They are up to their ears in credit card debt, they don’t have time for their kids, for their community. They’re beginning to say, ‘Is this it? Is this what it’s about?’ ”

She herself is a voluntary downshifter, having traded a $15,000 pay cut for a four-day week, to spend time with her children, Gus, 6, and Emily, 7, and have a little time for community activism. Her husband, Dennis May, is a community college teacher.

“I knew from my past, which was totally workaholic, that I needed time to be with my kids,” said Taylor, who studied business management at Harvard University and has previously run the Stern Family Fund and Ottinger Foundation.

And she sees positive indicators that the “shop till you drop” frenzy of the 1980s is being rejected on many levels. Although we’re not hearing it at the political level, she noted, many in the religious community, and even in the business sector, are starting to make the connection that environmentalists have long preached.

“And it’s a raging debate in Europe,” she added. “In countries like Norway, the Netherlands and Germany it has been raised at the highest level of government. And Czech President Vaclav Havel has been talking about a ‘third way’ of taking the best of a free market economy without the unbridled commercialism and billboards and unrestrained advertising.”

Politics aside, many Americans are taking matters into their own hands. In a surprising Merck poll finding, 28% of those surveyed said that in the past five years they had voluntarily made changes in their life that resulted in making less money in order to have a “more balanced life.”

Taylor points to a flood of how-to publications--books on ways to downsize, to live more simply--and newsletters with names like Tightwad Gazette and Penny Pincher Times. One of her board members is Vicki Robin of Seattle, co-author of “Your Money or Your Life,” a handbook on achieving financial independence that has sold more than 350,000 copies. Little bursts of activity such as “simple living circles” or “TV-free week” or “Ad-buster” campaigns continually flare up around the country.

“One of the most obvious things about our society is that our richness is not giving us satisfaction. It’s sort of the elephant in the living room no one will mention,” said board member Dana Meadows, professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and the author of “The Limits to Growth.”

Most of the conference participants represented big movements in their own field, Meadows said, but Taylor brought all the points together. “We were there ready to crystallize, and she was the seed crystal.”

The survey, Taylor said, revealed a lot of paradoxes:

* Americans are ambivalent about what to do. They express a deep appreciation for material things, plus a feeling that people should be allowed to make their own choices with money, and can’t be expected to change. Eighty-nine percent agreed that buying and consuming is “the American way of life.”

* They see the environment as connected to these concerns in a vague way but have not thought deeply about the ecological implications of their own lifestyles.

* They can imagine themselves changing individual behavior but are skeptical that anybody else would.

Taylor, who continues to work primarily for the Merck Family Fund, is also the acting board chairwoman of the incipient center, an ironic double load for someone leading a crusade to simplify life. “It’s a lot,” she said, “but if you want to turn things around, you can’t always be in balance.”