Embracing humility: The case for living lightly in a wasteful 21st century

In Jan Rabie’s short story Ek het jou gemaak (“I made you”), a grieving inventor creates a wax statue of his late wife and a robot called “Andries” to fill his house. When asked to define “love”, the robot famously observes that love means “Aanhou beweeg en geraas maak” (“to keep moving and to make noise”).

This is perhaps the cost of membership of the ambiguous human species: having knowledge of our mortality, and being able to project a future of which we will not be a part, we feel compelled to make noise, to make an “impact”, to leave a legacy, to ensure that someone or something – a building, a poem, a trust, a charity, a statue, a lineage – testifies to our brief here-ness. Before, that is, we no longer move ourselves or others, but only find ourselves moved by Earth’s diurnal course.

Some of the “noise” we humans make is quite tolerable. Moved by the blue ceiling in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, I tip my hat to King David I. I secretly wish that it was me, and not Mary Oliver, who gifted posterity the combination of words we know as the poem When I am Among the Trees.

And I am grateful to every person who commissions a memorial bench in a park or an urban green belt, like the ones in Outspan Bird Sanctuary in Johannesburg, or next to the Lade Braes Walk in St Andrews. Not only do I count these benches among the most precious joys that this little life offers, but I also deem a bench under a tree the worthiest of legacies.

If the words on this page are a lament, note that it is not for some lost capacity for legacy. Instead, I lament the quality of the legacy we humans of the 21st century busily construct.

Like most contemporary human beings, I am leaving behind a much weightier endowment than my ancestors. But instead of poems and cathedrals, the latest available statistics indicate that South Africans leave behind in the region of 122 tonnes of waste each year. And only 10% of our rubbish gets recycled. The other 90% we comically try to cover up in landfills, like an old cat only half-burying his excrement.

As for art and literature? Today we can make a dynamic exhibition of our entire lives through the publishing house and gallery of social media that gleefully accepts our blogs, vlogs and holiday pictures. It is estimated that, through “sharenting”, children have roughly 1,300 pictures of themselves circulating on social media before the age of 13.

It makes sense, then, that an old idea is being upcycled in both popular culture and practical ethics. This is the idea that we should “live lightly”. Against the impulse to make more noise, and to leave evidence of our existence, we are called upon today to leave ever smaller traces of ourselves – to unspoil the world we live in.

But what could “living lightly” mean?

Living lightly could be described as the attempt to live a life that, instead of seeking to dominate the environment that sustains us, pursues balance or partnership with our surroundings. It includes reducing our impact on the planet – using less to sustain ourselves and creating less waste.

But it moves beyond frugality and aims to sculpt more meaningful ways of being. The wager is that lifestyles that are less wasteful could ultimately increase our quality of life.

In parallel with a sensitivity to waste, living lightly therefore also entails the cultivation of a different kind of character, at odds with the species character that has developed in the post-industrial era. In the field of environmental ethics, for instance, scholars have proposed that we develop interconnected character traits (or “virtues”) that include humility, temperance and mindfulness.

Humility in an environmental context is the recognition that humanity does not enjoy some special status above other species. From the perspective of the universe, nothing has absolute or objective value. Value is always relative to the valuer.

Hence the complete works of Shakespeare have little value to a cow – while her own life matters a great deal. If all species value their own lives, why have humans come to believe that all life can be treated as if it exists for us. If we were to realise our relative value, and if we were to understand our interdependence on this planet, we might ask the same question as the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer:

“If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives we take?”  

From humility flows temperance, moderation or self-restraint – one of the ancient and cardinal virtues. As Dale Jamieson, professor in environmental studies, notes (quoting Gandhi): “A temperate person does not overconsume; he ‘lives simply, so that others may simply live’.”

Finally, temperance may require mindfulness, or a sensitivity to where our clothes, food and appliances come from, and where they end up. Mindfulness means to refuse wilful blindness to the “shadow places” that are the underbelly of our convenient lives – the landfills where our unrecycled waste goes; the torturous abattoirs where suffering and self-aware animals are processed into steaks; the garment graveyards where our fast fashions end up; the workers in developing countries who helped make ChatGPT less toxic by viewing and labelling psychologically damaging material for less than $2 per hour.

It is notable that these old virtues – already encouraged in ancient Buddhist and Stoic traditions – would not only help us address the current climate emergency, but are also being encouraged in our knowledge and social media practices.

The humble citizen combats division and polarisation with an attempt at mutual understanding and inventive connection. The temperate person avoids digital addition. The mindful person checks the veracity of information before amplifying it on social platforms.

As we learn to live lightly in our physical environment, so too we should stop polluting our epistemic or informational environment. 

One might object that, in a noisy world no one can hear your “light living”, so that the impact of a single person’s moderation would be negligible.

But to quote Jamieson again: “We must begin from where we are – changing ourselves, changing our leaders, and changing our institutions – but from here we can change the world. Biking instead of driving or choosing the veggie burger rather than the hamburger may seem like small choices, and it may seem that such small choices by such little people barely matter.

“But ironically, they may be the only thing that matters. For large changes are caused and constituted by small choices. And in the end, however things turn out, it is how we live that gives meaning and significance to our lives.” DM