Five questions with Lucas Land
1. What does living simply mean to you?
It means asking the question, again, what does it mean to live and what do we need to live. Our lives are oriented around the gospel of consumerism, in which we derive meaning and worth from both what we buy and possess and the thing we want that we don’t yet have. Living simply is a reorientation of our whole lives around a different way of living, a new way of being and organizing our lives together. Living simply means choosing to opt out of the dominate way of living life that depends on the impoverishment of others and depletion of the earth’s resources to maintain it. It recognizes the interdependence of life on earth. Living simply cannot be done alone, as if it were just one more among so many lifestyle products available on the shelves of your local big box store.
2. Your blog focuses primarily on eating and where our food comes from – why is it important to you?
Everybody eats. Eating is not something we can boycott or choose to ignore. The act of eating connects us immediately to the earth, whether we realize it or not. Everything you eat, whether twinkies or organic arugula from your local farmer, ultimately comes from a plot of dirt somewhere in the world.
It turns out that the way our food is produced is connected to many of the most pressing problems that face our modern world. Hunger and poverty are the first to come to mind. The immigration wave in the United States was fueled in large part by agriculture and trade policies which forced 2 million Mexican farmers off their land. The majority of the world’s farmers are women. So, if you care about the treatment of women, agriculture has to be a part of that picture. We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic in the United States, while there are almost a billion people globally considered food insecure. Industrial agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, because of the loss of topsoil, petroleum based fertilizers, pesticides and tractors. Deforestation is related in many areas to agricultural production. The more I have learned about the way our food is produced the more I realize it is intimately connected to every aspect of our lives and a major part of many of our problems.
3. What steps have you taken to live simply in your day to day life?
I moved to a farm with my family to learn how to grow my own food sustainably. However, no matter how radical or alternative our lifestyle becomes, we still have to live in a world and with family that often run against the grain of what we’re trying to do. I try to give up new things. I try to live off of the rest of the world’s waste more by dumpster diving, reclaiming food, looking for other people’s leftovers before digging in my wallet. Living simply means we need to get more creative and more resourceful. We also have to discover new skills that our generation has lost; skills that create things rather than consume them; skills like knitting, canning, preserving, tanning, building, repairing and mending.
4. What’s been the hardest part of your simple journey?
Finding a community that walks with us on the journey. It’s too easy to get swept up in the flow of the dominant culture. We are bombarded and pressured, not just by advertisements, but by the lives of the people around us to believe the gospel of consumerism. There are lots of people who know that something is not right with the way we have organized our lives. They know something is rotten with our lives, food, clothes and relationships. They can feel it in their bones, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. And they can’t do much about it, because it runs so counter to the world they live in. That’s why you need other people around you to tell you you’re not crazy.
5. What advice would you give others who are on the living simple journey?
Don’t go it alone. Find others to learn from and walk with. Don’t get overwhelmed. The world is a crazy place with lots of problems. The more you try to live counter to the madness of the world we live in, the more it can seem hopeless and futile. Never forget what Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Every action of simplicity that rejects the exploitive ways of the dominant culture, no matter how small, is an act of revolution. There is no action so small that it does not matter.
Lucas Land graduated from George W. Truett Theological Seminary in 2008 with an M. Div. in Global Missions. He is currently the Urban Gardening Intern at World Hunger Relief, Inc. a farm outside of Waco that teaches sustainable agriculture, community development and international assistance. He lives at the farm with his wife, Sarah and two kids, Asher and Lydia and is author of the blog What Would Jesus Eat? You can find him on Twitter at: @wwje.
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