Finding ourselves unable to install a windmill on the roof, Gene and I choose the NStar Green option today. So this means that we’ll be running our lights and laptops on wind power, right? Not quite. Our switch to green supports wind power, but apparently can’t guarantee wind sourcing. For that, we’ll be paying an extra $2-$4 a month for the 150-200 kilowatt hours that we typically use.

How do we know that premium will, indeed, support wind power and move us closer to the day when wind is a standard option – perhaps even a cheaper one – on our energy bill? Well, we’re relying on the good word of folks at the Conservation Law Foundation and Union of Concerned Scientists, both of whom collaborated with NStar to create this program.

And while we wait for our green-energy-wind-power utopia to develop here in Massachusetts, take a look at this scenario in the New Yorker. Could it happen here?

— Rachel

To stave off recession, Congress and the President urge us to buy more stuff. Encouraging Americans to keep shopping, they tell us, will plump our economy — despite fundamental shifts in the world economy, not to mention two large-scale wars. Whatever the economic merits of this plan, I believe that promoting consumerism is bad for our national soul. Indeed, I see the government offering us empty calories to satiate a bottomless hunger. And that’s why I am donating my stimulus check to charity.

The consumerist economy

Consumption represents the majority of our GDP. Cars and big-screen televisions keep a web of people employed domestically and internationally, from store clerks to factory workers to the cargo handlers in between. Consumption and consumerism are here to stay, and we would be foolish and delusional to wish otherwise.

But the recent boom was built on an illusion: Americans spent at a historically unprecedented scale by borrowing heavily against artificially inflated home prices. Well, it turns out that you can’t have your house and mortgage it, too. The buying binge is over, and it’s time for Americans to confront what all of this consumption has wrought.

We are still wealthy

The truth is that the United States is still the wealthiest nation this world has ever known. While almost half of the world lives on less than $2 a day, Americans are blessed with domestic tranquility, high literacy, and tremendous life opportunities. Understandably, many Americans find cold comfort in statistics when struggling with job loss, mushrooming health care costs, and rising gas prices. These problems are real, and right now they are growing. But the paradox is that more wealth can feed our gluttony rather than salve our want. In fact, the more money we make, the more we spend on ourselves and the less of it we give to charity.

Deprivation is relative: we don’t compare ourselves with the unseen poor halfway across the globe, but the Joneses next door. “I don’t think most people who are affluent feel affluent,” observes a participant in one of the Boston Faith & Justice Network’s economic discipleship groups. “We feel we are in debt and someone else is affluent…For my kids, poverty is not having Nintendo.”

From deprivation to gratitude

Without denying the reality of domestic poverty and inequality, I decline to view our economic circumstances through the lens of deprivation. For me, a more spiritually sound way of understanding wealth is as abundance. The glass isn’t merely half-full; it overflows.

It is out of gratitude for our wealth that some of us are choosing to do something different with our economic stimulus checks: donate them to charity. Certainly, those of us who are struggling financially are thankful for the opportunity to pay down debts, invest in schooling, or simply put food on the table. But many of us would otherwise binge on stuff we don’t really need.

One man gives freely, yet grows all the richer;
another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.
Proverbs 11:24 (RSV)

From the point of view of our national economy, donating our stimulus checks to charity will produce the same multiplier effects as buying a plasma-screen television. But it will mean something quite different to our own spiritual well-being. It’s not about denying ourselves by resisting temptation, but expanding ourselves by giving generously to others. Indeed, as the proverbs suggest, it’s not wealth that leads us to give, but giving that makes us realize we are wealthy.

I know we can’t extinguish consumerism, nor do I want to, but we can ask for a different kind of consumption. After all, the word “consumption” can mean “to use up.” But it can also mean, quite simply, “to eat.” Perhaps, whatever your spiritual beliefs, you too offer up words of thanks before you sit down to eat a meal. If so, consider offering some words of gratitude before you “consume” that stimulus check. You might find yourself feeling a lot wealthier for it.

Prices of food have hit the roof, but nothing has gotten more expensive faster than organic foods. By the laws of economics, organic food consumption will surely fall:

“Man, $6.99 for a gallon of milk is pushing it. We have to be very careful about not pricing organics out of the market.”

— Perry Abbenante, global grocery coordinator for Whole Foods Market

Near-term inflation (stagflation?) in the US can be attributed to the falling dollar and the rising costs of inputs (namely, oil and energy). But there’s also a long-term force at work here: by outsourcing agriculture and manufacturing to extract lower prices, advanced nations have essentially exported social and environmental costs to their poorer peers.

I’m not advancing an anti-globalization screed: in the very long term, the pie will grow, and we can view this exchange as “borrowing” against the future in the hopes that by the time the payments come due (in the form of fair wages, human rights, and environmental repair), we will have grown to the point where we can pay it off. And that seems a fair moral balance to strike if we (capitalists and environmentalists alike) acknowledged the terms of the bargain. But as President Bush just made clear, he sees the deal as entirely one-sided: the United States gets to borrow, but never pays a dime in either principal or interest.

Americans may be familiar with this scenario: we’re watching another version of it unfolding called the sub-prime mortgage crisis. For almost a decade, many Americans — rich and poor — lived in a fantasy bubble in which their homes basically cost nothing, pumping their “savings” into massive and unsustainable consumption.

We also see now what happens when the bubble bursts.

Those of us who have gotten used to buying sweatshop underwear and industrial lettuce are living in the same bubble. By pushing the cost of these products on to abused workers and energy-subsidized processes, we’ve been able to spend the difference on luxuries like big, wasteful cars and televisions. But in this version of the mortgage crisis, we the consumers are more like the banks than the homeowners: we’ve bundled up our debts and spread them through the system in such complex and hard-to-measure ways that we have no idea where the costs will land.

In other words, the basics of human survival — food, clothing, shelter — have been unnaturally cheap in the developed nations because we’ve had the power to offload their costs on to people (sweatshop laborers) and systems (global carbon exchange) we don’t see and can hardly understand. And just as a return to normalcy in the housing crisis means that homeowners will once again start paying realistic monthly mortgages — after a harsh period of payback — likewise if we want to return to a sustainable global economy, we Western freeriders will inevitably start paying higher prices. And many of us have been doing that by buying, yup, organic and fair trade products.

I believe in the big picture, the economists and capitalists are right: centuries of innovation have produced massive efficiencies and, with it, a real rise in global wealth. In the very long term, most people on this planet will enjoy a better life eating healthy food, getting decent health care, and enjoying reasonable luxuries — if we can survive the medium-term payback that awaits us in the form of climate change. But we consumers and citizens need to start separating artificial cost savings that come from borrowing against our planet or our fellow man from the real cost savings that come from technological innovation. With that clarity, a just economy comes into view.