At the Summit:
> Home
> Schedule

Coverage:
> See all reports
> Gallery
> Random!
> Video

 

Poster promoting awareness of Time Day issues created by graphic design students at the University of Minnesota Duluth, working under Assistant Professor of Art and Design, Joellyn Rock.
Photo by Joellyn Rock

by Jennifer Hattam
Living Well Session

Moderator: Johanna Zetterberg
Presenter: John de Graaf

In the late 1960s, social scientists were anticipating a threat that seems unthinkable today: too much free time. Thanks to increased productivity, efficiency, and mechanization, they predicted, Americans in the year 2000 would work only 14 to 20 hours a week and enjoy 7 to 10 weeks of vacation a year.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Americans now work, on average, 350 hours (that's nine weeks!) more a year than Europeans to enjoy a similar standard of living. A quarter of us receive no paid vacation. Constantly tired and frantic, we spend little quality time with our families, gorge on fast food and skip exercise, fall asleep behind the wheels of our cars, and then konk out in front of the TV at night. Little wonder that Americans have the worst health of any industrialized nation. Our rapid gains in productivity have impoverished our lives rather than enriching them.

What does this have to do with the environment? Plenty. A busy, stressed-out nation has less time to connect with nature, less time to get involved in their communities, less time to learn about environmental issues—in short, less time to devote to saving the planet. Studies have even found that the more hours people work, the less likely they are to recycle. Busy people are also more likely to use throwaway "convenience" products; hop in their cars instead of biking or walking; and take environmentally unfriendly shortcuts like using pesticides on their gardens.

To break the cycle, says John de Graaf, co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, we need to take back our time. His organization, the Take Back Your Time Campaign (www.timeday.org), posits solutions both personal (set aside even an hour a week for "slow, quiet, life-renewing activities") and political (lobby for paid childbirth leave, sick days, and vacation). Like the striking textile workers in the early 1900s, we need to demand "bread, and roses too."

-- 09/09/2005 Fri
1pm