Simple Living

Freedom from cluttered lives and minds.

Chris Jordan :: Running the Numbers

by Chris Jordan

posted Apr 14, 2008

Dazzling images make the statistics that describe the huge waste streams of our consumer culture visible. This photo essay shows recent works of Chris Jordan from his Running the Numbers and Intolerable Beauty series.

The Story of Stuff: The Bigger Picture

posted Feb 04, 2008

Take a look at our YES! articles to support teaching with The Story of Stuff. Use these stories to get your students thinking and talking about the golden arrow of consumption, our identity as consumers, the purpose of an economy, what makes us happy, globalization, and what a just and sustainable world could look like.

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

by Annie Leonard

posted Feb 04, 2008

The Story of Stuff will take you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture—from resourc extraction to iPod incineration—exposing the real costs of our use-it and lose-it approach to stuff.

The Good Life: Consumerism is so '90s

by Holly Dressel

posted Feb 19, 2006

In growing numbers, Americans are rediscovering that the real meaning of the good life doesn't come from things they can buy but from things they can feel.

Out of Time

by Jonathan Rowe

posted Nov 08, 2005

The desperate quest to cram more into time has caused it to diminish. Could the cure for time scarcity be a vision of the Eternal?

Book Review - Graceful Simplicity by Jerome Segal, Living Lightly by Walter and Dorothy Schwarz

by John de Graaf

posted Jun 30, 2000

Segal shows that now, perhaps for the first time in history, it is possible to create a society where all people can live simply but gracefully, with time for the things that really matter – deep friendships and relationships, a beautiful and clean environment, and freedom from fear and insecurity. All that is needed is the political will.

The Overspent American

by Sarah van Gelder

posted Jun 30, 1998

How might Americans get free of the mind-numbing cycle of overwork and overconsumption? Sarah van Gelder invited author Juliet Schor to discuss this question with leaders of the voluntary simplicity and downshifters' movements Cecile Andrews - John de Graaf - Duane Elgin -Vicki Robin - Betsy Taylor - Wanda Urbanska