The purpose behind UrbanThoreau.com could be summed up as, live simply, live the good life, hair shirt not required. That has been my working premise since long before I even started this website (the site was started in 2001, btw).

This latest economic disaster has really hammered home the idea of the necessity to live more simply. If not for saving $$, then for saving the planet. If not for saving the planet, then for saving one’s sanity.

I’m noticing in the lefty press that this idea is starting to take root. It used to be that the lefties just wanted the working class to live more richly, in a material sense. Now I’m detecting glimmers of emphasis on living a richer life, in a quality of life, personal fulfillment, community-oriented, heck, even spiritual sense. This article in the current issue of the Nation begins to capture some notion of moving away from the materialism as an end in itself. About a year ago, Orion Magazine published a great article entitled The Gospel of Consumption. It was a marvelous narrative about the transition away from community & family based enjoyment of life toward a thing-obsessed economic system.

More recently, the eminent pragmatic thinker over at the Entropic Journal has captured the issue in his essay railing against this “society that has made virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins.”

It will be interesting to see if we are wise enough to connect the dots between the quadruple catastrophes simultaneously emanating from our gluttonous ways: economic implosions, ethical voids at the highest levels of our most respected institutions, biosphere-wide environmental destruction and death struggles between civilizations. It will be even more interesting to see if we will actually do something about it, and maybe throttle back our gluttonous ways to bring us back from the brink–all four of them.