etsy Taylor grew up in rural Maryland. her father was a country doctor, her mother a nurse, and the family was steeped in service and frugality. Taylor's childhood memories include plenty of home-canned tomatoes, composting, and glimpses of patients having their stomachs pumped in the living room.
After graduating from Duke University in 1976, Taylor moved to Washington, D.C., and got involved in the antinuclear movement. In the late eighties, she married Denny May; their two children, Emily and Gus, are now fourteen and eleven. Taylor has worked for numerous environmental and social justice organizations. Most recently, she was executive director of the Merck Family Fund, making grants to environmental and social programs: northern forests, inner-city youth. And then, in 1996, the late Donella Meadows, Dartmouth professor and environmental guru, urged Taylor to form a group that would move Americans toward an environmentally sound way of life.
Taylor balked. Even after a life spent in activism, she found the idea of dedicating herself to tightening Americans' belts pretty alarming. She didn't even know how to start or what such a group would do. And she'd have to take a pay cut. "I had a good job," she remembers, "and I had to let go of all that security and fulfilling work. Work for which there were models."
She agonized. And then she did it. What helped her was Quakerism. She had joined in the 1980s, after Jimmy Carter's administration had given way to Ronald Reagan's, and environmental optimism had given way to despair and stridency. Taylor found herself asking painful questions: How can activists reach the hearts of the unconverted, so many of whom aren't even interested in politics? How does an activist deal with her desire to change the world, when the world is reluctant and her desire is frustrated?
Quakerism, Taylor found, appealed to her because it "allows for deep listening, deep appreciation of mystery." Central to this approach was opening herself to the possibility of grace and faith -- yet letting go of the need to achieve them. It "liberated me to be more of a peaceful activist," Taylor says. "I think there's a frenzy to activism. You always feel so outgunned." This hard-won acceptance helped her through the 1980s. In 1996, it helped her take up Meadows's challenge to found a new kind of nonprofit.
CNAD's approach is shot through with something like mercy. Key to its message is happiness. "Consuming less can lead to happiness by freeing individuals from the treadmill of insatiable desire," says board member Juliet Schor, a Boston College sociologist and author of The Overworked American and The Overspent American. "Consuming less also helps to free people from the need to earn high incomes and the long hours and high stress that accompany many jobs."
CNAD's slogan is "More Fun, Less Stuff." Its website offers plenty of pats on the back for those who cut back. If a thousand people halve the amount of junk mail they receive by filling out CNAD's online form, they will save 170 trees and prevent nearly 46 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution, the main cause of global warming. If a thousand people stop eating shrimp for a year, they will save the lives of 12,000 pounds' worth of fish and birds that are accidentally killed along with the shrimp.
Leading by example, CNAD's own employees work four days a week. Part-time work means less pay, which neatly nudges the staff to consume less. It also makes them more energetic, happier employees, says Taylor. "There is a hunger among many Americans to live differently -- because it feels better, not because it's good for the environment," she adds. "If we can get to the same end, why not?"
hen i next talked to betsy taylor, two months had gone by. the September 11 terrorist attacks had shocked the world, and in the aftermath, CNAD had found itself even more outgunned than usual, as political leaders from Bill Clinton to George Bush urged Americans to do their patriotic duty and go shopping. CNAD had editorialized against that directive, suggesting that the citizenry's first instinct -- to simply be together -- was the right one. And Taylor, who had rediscovered the international side of her own passions, had started working to bring together environmental scientists and economists to look at the global impacts of constant economic expansion on a planet that is not getting any bigger.
"The environmental indicators are overwhelmingly frightening," she says. "The economic indicators are too. We have a lot of signs of human distress. Water scarcity. Climate change. We're losing species at a rate beyond comprehension."
And then Taylor says something surprising: Once in a while, she finds the "More Fun, Less Stuff" approach hard to take. "Sometimes it seems too light," she says. "I think I'm the heavy heart in the group. Yes, I ground myself in a life of balance. I meditate. I remind myself that I'm not going to change the world, that I'm only a tiny part of a big machine.
"But what brings me into the office every day is that every day counts," she says urgently. "Because we have just enough time, just enough time to turn this around. That's what's in my heart. It really is."
