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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1107 - Last but not least, we cannot live a good life in an ugly, unhealthy environment. Even those unaware of this suffer from the lack of an environment befitting their nature and from noise, light and air pollution: their senses are being dulled, their capacities are declining and their sense of wellbeing is decreasing. I am scarcely wrong in supposing that for most people these constitute the indispensable conditions of life. None of them are necessarily connected with the multiplication of material goods and services or their circulation on the market. We experience the opposite: when we choose from the price catalogue of consumerist “wellbeing” (each according to the measure of his/her solvency of demand), we sacrifice the opportunity to choose something outside of what the system based on prodigality and its perpetual increase has to offer: meaningful work, good company, health and a safe social or whole and diverse natural environment. This is unfortunately not helped by sorting our ever-multiplying waste, buying products with an environmentally friendly sticker or taking part in a self-awareness training in the meantime. To be happy, we would first need to free ourselves from the illusion of plenty, which actually makes our lives increasingly impoverished, and from the compulsion to grow, which only increases our vulnerability. (Voluntary self-restraint?2) I can imagine few things more suitable for discrediting Green goals and the ecological movement than the principle of self-restraint. The ecological movement follows goals that it holds to be good precisely because they make life better and more beautiful, i.e., they fulfil it instead of restraining it. They would like to limit the destruction of the resources needed for life and their dependence from technological-economic necessities. It is more than misleading to label the fight against the application and endurance of coercion as selfrestraint, for at most we can talk of the restriction of the restriction of freedom. Refraining from meaningless waste is not renunciation and on no account loss. True, the Greens are full of ideas for how to ensure the material conditions of our existence with significantly more simple means (regarding nutrition, heating, housing, hygiene, transport, etc.), but simplicity is not for them a goal in itself. They believe that this would allow people to devote much more time and energy to solving the more complicated, interesting and, let’s face it, important problems of life. The avoidance of unnecessary complications, known as voluntary simplicity, is therefore not renunciation, just as sensible thrift is not either. Self-restraint would be the renunciation of something good.
