In fact, if everybody decided to give it a try and used all the same plastic pots and peat soil mixes, it would be another one of those smallest of individual impacts that are a collective disaster.

For even just noticing such balances of cost and benefit, such ecological connections, both negative and positive, however, it is more than good to get your hands into some soil.

For one, if you are so inclined, gardening is a pleasurable activity. You are outdoors and in green surroundings, or at least getting some growing greens onto your windowsill. In seeding and caring for plants, you handle something real, you engage in an activity that shows your direct influence on the world – and you also have to delay gratification and mind the balance between your ability to influence what is happening and the world’s own workings:

You plant those seeds, you care for those plants, but you are not completely in control. You cannot do whatever you want, and the results may not be exactly those you wanted. Rather, you will have to play with the needs of those seeds and plants, give them what you know or think they need, maybe ask others with more experience, and see what comes of it.

You can make the conditions more conducive to the germination of the seeds, and you can give the plants more space, more light (or shade), more nutrients – but it is much easier to do too much, be too impatient and not attentive enough and to kill them, than it is to see them thrive.

Often enough, though, it also turns out that even plants have a will to survive and thrive, and may even stay alive under the care of someone who does not exactly have much of a green thumb.

One of the best experiences in a little such modern homesteading – whether on windowsill, roof garden, or rural kitchen garden – regards the diversity of edible plants humans have (or, as one is unfortunately required to say, had) developed: Only a few species provide for most of our sustenance, but even so, there has been a large diversity of varieties within them, and there are still more species that are or have been contributing to human diets.

Author's polytunnel for the chile pepper growing for ChiliCult - www.chilicult.com. More than just a few seeds, but they were all started in an apartment...

Many of those heirloom varieties / landraces have been lost, but not so few are still around, being kept alive by indigenous groups, small farmers and gardeners… and as they are adapted and, in their continuing cultivation, adapting to the situations in which they are grown, there are varieties among them for many an other context.

And so, a chile pepper (these are a particular fascination of the author’s and some of the most diverse and easiest to grow – and fun – foods/spices) that was grown in and for hot and dry environments with rather more shade may be well-adapted for also being grown on an urban windowsill where it’s getting more warmth, less light, and water only when the forgetful grower thinks of it…

It’s only too commonly the case that such landraces have only been surviving in the care of gardeners less bound to market dictates for efficiency and wholesale value – and they provide a little sustenance, quite a bit of local/cultural lore and inspiration, and a lot of fascinating stories and sensuous experiences. [For the case of chilli peppers, check out www.ChiliCult.com]

Playing with food plants holds another big lesson. Turns out that small patches of land can, if effectively used, provide quite a bit of food – and food growing can be a lot more difficult and frustrating than many a nostalgic pronouncement makes it sound.

Aphids may even get indoors, snails in the backyard decide to chomp off the stalk of a prized herb and leave the rest to rot as if in defiance of the gardener’s best efforts.
Then again, the same herb may grow back even more strongly, and two twigs of some standard variety of it in the supermarket would have set you back $2.50 (at least) whereas the plants in the garden plot just wait for you to pick them, and in whatever diversity you found trading seeds with others…

If you want to or have to live frugally, hardly anything is more helpful than having a diversity of chile peppers and/or herbs at hand, making it easy to spice up the simplest, and most variable, of dishes – and particularly those made of greens you could also grow yourself or get cheaply, and use for some of the healthiest and most pleasurable of meals…

It’s hardly frugal, in fact, but easily a feast. A riot of colors, tastes, flavors, aromas. A contribution to good health. Skill in cooking and the pleasure of social eating.

Potato Fields in the Ecuadorian Andes

At the same time, we have always relied on our surrounding environments to get what we need and want; and the wealth of a country has been seen as being not only economic/financial or social and cultural, but also natural and biological: only a country with the right mix of high resource availability was seen as rich.
If there are not enough resources – not least food – to power an economy and feed a people, power is hard to gain (but too much could be just as detrimental as too little).

Now, with global demand for resources having risen tremendously due to population growth and economic development, competition for raw materials and fossil fuels has been on the rise. Even agricultural land has become an object of speculation as food prices have gone up and caused unrest, at least partly contributing to the “Arab Spring” of 2011.

The future seems clear – and dark: There is only so much to go around, meaning that the merry wheel of strife for supremacy will go into another few rounds. So, even if climate change or other environmental issues should not throw a wrench into the machinery of “modern,” “developed” economies, nations will have to compete – if not resort to the extension of politics (and competition) by other means: war.

Or so the usual story goes – and it’s no wonder, given where we get our advice: economics.

Economics, after all, is the discipline dealing with the allocation of scarce resources. The most bucks for your bang, whether that’s financial capital, labor power, oil, or natural resources.
The inputs, the raw materials, are all coming into the system from their reservoirs outside, just as waste is going out there again. Resources can be used more efficiently or in the production of goods with higher monetary return, but not really created themselves. (Never mind the talk of oil production, for example: It is extraction, not production.)

No wonder, then, that economics does not know anything but zero-sum games around scarcity (and even in abundance), and falls into the easy competitive mode.

It does not understand the ecology of happiness – that there is and has to be enough, that there are productive and creative ways that work with and even build productive (cultural) ecosystems, and that there are more purposes than monetary profit alone.

The grass is greener on the other side… unless you find ways of growing your own well.

From Stuart McMillen's "Type III Ecosystem" Cartoon

Ecology as a scientific discipline only studies how species interact with their environments. As a side effect, though, it finds how species form ecosystems that are more productive and richer in life, each representing a resource for others.

It’s a strife, too – “nature red in tooth and claw.” Or at least, people with a worldview informed by economics like to describe it as such.

That struggle for existence does not result in collapse so much as in a shift between dynamic equilibria, though. It is not usually destructive, but rather ends up being creative, resulting in a dynamic, shifting stability.

Looking at human history, we may well have been the cause of many a species’ extinction, we certainly have changed our environments tremendously, and many a society has failed and fallen.

There is a good chance many groups in many a place will fail in the future, too – but there are human beings eking out an existence, and there have been great civilizations, just about anywhere on Earth it has been possible to extract and/or create enough.

The Amazon before 1492 seems to have been not “pristine forest, [but] cultural parkland,” managed so as to sustain great human numbers – by also sustaining its ecological functioning. Chinese civilization has radically altered what species there are in the region, even what the very terrain looks like – and it has been around for thousands of years.

Longji Rice Terraces, China

The rise and fall of civilizations, and the continuous existence of indigenous groups the world over, have been the result of their success (or failure) not only to extract resources from a given environment, but also to shape that environment to provide enough, more, or even more than enough…

… and in creating functioning cultural landscapes and/or the ways of (making a) living that fit in well with their natural and human-made environments, we can also create more diversity (as we had done with cultivated varieties of food plants), more resources, more stable and productive foundations for our lives and happiness.

In a world of billions of people looking for a better life, it’s high time we took our cue from the ecological approach (again).

We all try to live affluently off the same resources and destroying the ecosystems that give us not just the raw materials but even the conditions we need for our lives, we are all sure to fail.

We work on creating more and consuming less, living and making a living in ways that fit in with their ecological contexts and the requirements for our own truly good lives, creating rather than drawing down the ecological capital that is the foundation for our flourishing, we will see how far we can get in this story of our own writing…

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth … because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Even among those who seek greater happiness and a better life – or even those who seek to “change the system” and “save the planet” – comfort rules.

Happiness is sought in ever-more of the same consumption, all too often of shopping for stuff, aiming for more. Not all that rarely, it is recognized that more stuff does not really make happy, but it is replaced only by a chase after ever-greater experiences – and they again end up just being consumed one after another, pre-packaged, without much consideration of their greater impact on the world and on life (and life satisfaction).

Concern about greater impacts of our doings on the world, unfortunately, also tends to remain in ever-more-of-the-same. Protest and activism against environmental destruction and unsustainable activities is often directed against particularly prominent examples. That is understandable, but in doing so, it just takes the easy route of assigning blame to others while the involvement of all of us, including the protesters, is hardly changed.

Personal lifestyle changes may easily be all the worse in just adding a green veneer to lives of overconsumption and unhappiness, trying to feel good about the little personal steps taken by buying fair-trade and organic things while continuing to drive to work, fly on vacation, and avoid thinking about the wider ramifications of such a way of life.

Really, changes to better ways, and better ways themselves, are not so convenient and easy…
They may actually imply giving up on some things, after all. They also mean walking into the unknown. Having to do more, work harder, become better.

In that, though, they avoid the stale convenience of contemporary normality barely made bearable by the trance of TV shows and “fun.” They escape from the wait for worse that has become so commonplace. They do not fall prey to the struggle for affluence that delivers not much more than “the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development” (as Paul Theroux described modern China).

Rather, they are really, eco-logically and happily, better.

How so? Exactly by being harder, in a way. Not, though, the hardship that is all too common nowadays, where relative poverty is just as desperate a situation as a life of affluence, because both make the people living them mere playthings of greater forces, rather than human beings capable of changing things.

After all, agency and self-efficacy, the feeling that we ourselves are actually shaping things and having some influence on the course of our lives, is easily the most dangerously missing part of modern existences. We need to provide enough for ourselves and ours, and preferably “producing” it – whether that be by farming, begging, or through jobs – but we also need the feeling that it’s ourselves having influence on that. We need that feeling as much as we need to breathe.

To be fully human, we need sense as much as we need mere existence. Then, we can choose to enjoy the free time and the pleasures of having enough – the dolce far niente – or we can go on and aim for more and better.

Modernity has come to be defined by providing ever more comforts and amenities, by the replacement of daily drudgery working to keep things going – cleaning, cooking, social eating at particular times, having to deal with awkward conversation partners… – with conveniences that just have to be bought.
There are good sides, no doubt – but in the process, too much skillful living has been replaced by mindless consuming, and it is costing us both our happiness and the world.

So, when there is a suggestion of better ways that are more work, the common reaction is rejection – but really, what we need is to become more active again, to remember that life is not about avoiding all its labors and pains, but about living realistically.

You accept that responsibility, you also take up the power to effect change and create better.

It may be high time for a Winston Churchill moment of “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” … Or maybe Martin Luther King: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

Hard happiness is something different, though, for it is not blood, toil, tears, and sweat, nor sacrifice, suffering, and struggle, but rather the hard – and true – happiness of a life lived skillfully and purposefully, sensually and sensibly.

So, do you want to keep living in comfortable numbness that makes easy jobs hard and unsatisfying, and sweet doing-nothing hardly enjoyable, all while shaping a dubious, dangerous future? Or will you be in the forefront, get started, lead the ways – or at least, follow when you see examples that show #ecohappy better to work, creating happier and eco-logically  better ways and opening up promising futures?

Interestingly, it has been taking the internet’s P2P ethos and possibilities to lead us to remember that, and there are lots of ideas about collaborative consumption and work, and quite a few (start-up) initiatives aiming to help.

One example just getting started is unstash – a platform for collaborative consumption, with a glorious version of those manifestos that are beginning to lose their luster in this fast-paced world, yet contain deep statements to think about and live by (maybe the best-known of which is the Holstee manifesto prominently featured on Brain Pickings):

Once again, time to do, to change, and to be before you buy.