Here’s an exercise for you to try.  Next trip you are to take, try to pack light.  The longer the trip, the better an exercise it will be, but even a short trip can provide a useful testing ground. It’s not just about reducing the weight of your baggage in the literal sense. It’s more about flexing some ‘mental muscles’ few of us use. We have become accustomed to taking everything we think we might need for even a weekend visit or day trip to the beach. And what we forget, we can always buy, right?

Well, this exercise, which likely runs counter to the very underpinnings of most of our realities, is to learn to distinguish between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’.  The question then is ‘what is essential for life’, and the more we exercise this question either in moments of ease or stress, the more we strengthen a ‘survival skill’.  The lost ability to distinguish between wants and needs is a vital skill for the survival of society in the long term.  And that long term is rapidly becoming ‘near term’ as we delay coping with the reality that we live on a small, small planet… and we are collectively gobbling up its resources quite literally as though there were no tomorrow.

If we do not learn to change, individually and as a society, indeed there may not be.  The deep ecology then is to learn to do more with less, to learn to discern what is essential… and to resist the urge to buy things for casual use.