May 1982 RAIN Page 9 The "how" of their lifestyle is surprisingly easy to explain. The rent for their room is low ($85 a month) and they have learned to live well on the wastes of an incredibly wasteful society. They glean discarded foods behind supermarkets, pick fruit which would otherwise go uneaten, and find clothing in thrift store free boxes. They have learned all the usual tricks of dedicated "simple livers" and added some of their own. The "why" is a more complex matter. Charles and Dorothy are living on what they call the "World Equity Budget." The idea for the budget had its roots in Charles' long involvement in the peace movement (he was a conscientious objector in World War II) and in his extensive travels in Third World countries where he witnessed a kind of involuntary poverty which left a profound impression on him. "I've had some fairly vivid experiences in terms of hunger," he says quietly. "Images just burned into my memory." Over the years, he reflected more and more on the relationship between violence and the hunger he was observing. He saw the explosive potential of a world economic system which allowed the richest five percent of humanity to control more than 200 times the wealth of the poorest five percent. He also reflected increasingly on how global resource consumption was exceeding sustainable levels. It became a very personal concern about how the rich (including himself) were denying not only today's poor, but future generations as well, their fair share of the world's wealth. In 1975, Charles and his wife, Leslie Brockelbank, also a longtime peace activist, gave the bulk of their extensive assets to establish the Mackenzie River Gathering, an alternative foundation dedicated to assisting peace and social justice concerns. Charles remained active in administering the foundation for a time, but soon grew dissatisfied with his involvement in the donor-donee relationship. He believed his developing concern with finding a "non-violent economics" required him to make more radical changes in his way of living. He and Leslie, who was sympathetic to his goals, were ultimately unable to reconcile their differing approaches to lifestyle change. They decided on separation (they have since divorced) and Charles embarked alone on his odyssey into poverty. "I figured that the average income in the world was somewhat under a hundred dollars a month," he recalls, "so my first goal was to just get under that figure." He reached his target in late 1977, then, as he proceeded to discover more and more ways to cut back his spending (like living without refrigeration and sleeping where he worked), his cost of living plummeted still further. "I took it on as a kind of game," he says. It was obviously a game for which he had a natural talent; in 1979 his average monthly expenditure dropped to an incredible $27! During his three years alone on the World Equity Budget (Dorothy did not join him until December, 1980) Charles managed to save $1200—the difference between what it actually cost him to live and what he calculated to be his fair share of the world's wealth. It amuses him that he has been able to sustain himself well on a budget which middle class Americans would deem impossible and has actually saved more then many of them. From the start, he has worked at refining the budget formula to better determine what a "fair share" really is. He laughs about his social scientist obsession with charts and graphs: "You want to simplify your life, and all you do is complicate it!" An early modification was the adoption of 1960 as a "steady state base year." That is, instead of dividing the current year's world product by world population to establish an equitable per capita income level, he decided to use a year which he figured was close to the time when global resource use began to exceed sustainable levels. After Dorothy joined him, they worked out the concept of the "Eco-dollar," which has allowed them to increase the budget substantially by indexing purchases in terms of such social and ecological criteria as durability, packaging, energy use, location of production and form of production unit. A load of firewood purchased from a local fuel co-op, for example, automatically justifies a larger dollar expenditure than an equivalent number of b.t.u.'s provided by fossil fuel imported from abroad and processed by a large corporation. But Charles and Dorothy do not spend the bulk of their lives plotting charts and perfecting their pursuit of austerity. Each labors one day a week, Dorothy as a nurse and Charles as a janitor and gardener, to provide for their economic needs. The rest of their time is devoted to their work for world peace (they are active in an organization called the Nonviolent Tactics Development Project) and to enjoying their life together. A good time for them may consist of a bicycle ride or a single shared ice cream cone. ("Really, all you want is a taste," Charles observes. "It's just as much of a celebration because what's important is the idea of celebration!"). Recently, they borrowed a rubber raft from Dorothy's son and floated down the Willamette River from Eugene to Corvallis, a distance of 49 river miles. The four-day outing was made at a total cost of 25 cents—the amount needed for a pay phone call in Corvallis. "It's both a cost and a pleasure to have fewer options," Charles concludes, "and the effects of living poor on your personal relationships can be very profound." He misses the opportunity to visit his two grown children, who have both settled in New Zealand, and he sometimes must contend with the reactions of more conventional people who feel compelled to defend their consumerism to him— whether or not he cares to bring the subject up. There are the very real insecurities (he and Dorothy each contribute $5.00 a month to a community emergency insurance fund called F.I.N.—Friend in Need) and the ever-present danger of lapsing into feelings of self- righteousness. But balancing all that is a beri'efit afforded to relatively few peooday, Charles and Dorothy are living contentedly on a monthly budget of $110 each. T pie: Charles and Dorothy are able to devote ample time and energy to the single thing which matters most in their lives. Their work with the Nonviolent Tactics Development Project currently centers around "political fasting," a tactic designed to draw public and governmental attention to the connection between world hunger and the arms race. They will soon be joining people from churches and peace groups around the country in a series of fasts focused on influencing the deliberations of the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament which will be convening in New York City this summer. "I guess I'm land of pessimistic about our chances of this world surviving," says Charles. "I view the political fasting as a thing that Dorothy and I might give our lives to some time in the next year or two as a kind of final expression of the need to stop the arms race. But my feeling is the chance that it would make a difference are one in ten thousand." As I listen to Charles speak, I try to reconcile the idea of pessimism with such a profound level of commitment, and to understand how this man can be at the same time so deeply troubled about the state of the world and so seemingly serene and in love with life. I venture the thought that for someone to live as he does must require, at base, a very real kind of optimism. He smiles and thinks about that for a time. Finally he replies. "I always have hope in our potential. If not now, perhaps in the future, we'll come closer to attaining that potential." I am reassured to hear him speak hopefully about the future. Meeting him has already made me more optimistic about our chances for realizing our potential.
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