by Dean Zatkowsky

I happened to be visiting Yellowstone National Park on my 51^st birthday, and noticed that I was wearing the same black sweater I wore in Yosemite on my 18^th birthday.  Before the sweater was mine, it had been my brother-in-law's letterman sweater in the late 1960s.

When I reminded my sister that my favorite sweater for thirty-three years had been her husband's for who knows how long before I got it, she said, "They don't make sweaters like they used to."

Her son corrected her: "No, they don't make consumers like they used to."

***

Recently, I participated in a garden installation party, where neighbors gather to help each other dig beds and plant food. When I commented that it would be hard for the twenty attendees to keep track of their tools, the master gardener leading the effort said, "Not for me. Mine are the ones with the oiled handles." In other words, she took care of her tools, and the other nineteen participants did not. Sure enough, several shovels and hoes broke that day because their wooden handles had suffered the long-term effects of our hot, dry weather. The professional gardener's tools held up just fine.

***

A group of young people just spent the last week of term at the University of Oregon dumpster diving at apartment buildings and dormitories, which I understand is considered an illegal activity. They retrieved dozens of pairs of shoes in excellent condition - some still in boxes; lots of clothes in perfect or near perfect condition; tools; pots and pans; books; working televisions; a working laptop computer and nearly one hundred functional ink jet printers. They kept some of the warm clothing (apparently discarded by graduating students returning to warmer climes), but donated most of their discoveries to Goodwill.

For years I've heard that consumer spending drives the US economy, and I've always responded that an economy dependent on people buying things they don't need with money they don't have is not an economy, but a Ponzi scheme. Today, as that Ponzi scheme unravels, it looks as though government and industry are aligned in their desire to weave it back together rather than imagine alternatives. After all, the Ponzi scheme works just fine as long as suckers at the bottom keep pitching in.

Apparently, people cling to our consumerist economic model because they fear diminishment of our standard of living, but I'm pretty sure we would not have to live with less if we could learn to appreciate the value of what we already have.