"I believe there is a hidden blessing in the economic crisis, in the necessary return to reality from a make- waste society. Many of us know, at some level, that we have become caught up in something deeply out of balance, that we are going way too fast, that we are speeding past too many of the things and moments that could really matter. Many of us sense that life is too precious and too precarious to live the way we are living...
"I knew how high ice cream is in saturated fat and sugar, and I was coming to see the link with heart disease… It was disturbing to consider that people might suffer more heart attacks as a result of the company's meteoric growth.
"In 1967, my uncle Burt Baskin, my father's partner in the company, died of a heart attack. A big man, he was only fifty-four years old. I was overwhelmed with grief for the loss of my beloved uncle and increasingly troubled by the existential dilemma I was facing.
I asked my father if he thought there might be any connection between the amount of ice cream my uncle ate and his fatal heart attack. "Absolutely not," he snapped. "His ticker just got tired and stopped working."
"It was not hard to understand why my father wouldn't want to consider that there might be a connection. By that time he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any other human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn't want to think that ice cream harmed anyone, much less that it had anything to do with the death of his beloved brother-in-law and business partner. But I could not keep from wondering.
"My dad had groomed me since my earliest childhood to one day succeed him at Baskin-Robbins. The company was expanding rapidly, with annual sales in the billions of dollars. But despite the considerable lure of great wealth, I felt called to a different way of life, one whose purpose wasn't focused on making the most money but on making the biggest difference. Every new generation has an instinct to step out on its own, but what was stirred in me felt somehow much deeper than a stereotypical father-son generational split.
"As a teenager, I had read the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who challenged the relentless pursuit of money and social status. "I love to see anything," he wrote, "that implies a simpler mode of life and a greater nearness to the earth." Seeing people too often make themselves what he called "slaves to the acquisition of money and things," he suggested that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without."
"Thoreau's books inspired me to think about topics that were never discussed in the household in which I grew up--issues such as the importance of contact with the natural world, self- reliance, personal conscience, and social responsibility. Meanwhile, I was living in a home with an ice cream cone-shaped swimming pool and a soda fountain that offered guests all thirty- one flavors. My father was proud of his Rolls-Royce and the many expensive classic cars he collected. His yacht was named The 32nd Flavor.
"If money was all that was needed to make a person happy, I would have been jubilant. But I wasn't, and my distress kept growing stronger. I had the distinct impression that even though humanity now had the potential to live upon this earth with more ease and comfort than had ever been possible in human history, we were collectively moving farther and farther away from that possibility.
"I thought that Gandhi was right when he said that there is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed, and so it pained me to see how often money was becoming the goal of our lives, rather than a tool in service to our ultimate goals...
"One of the reasons I wrote "The New Good Life" is to provide people with simple, easy and inexpensive suggestions on how to raise their quality of life while lowering their cost of living, and at the same time lowering their ecological footprint. The book is filled with hundreds of ideas, many of them counter-intuitive.
"Learning to live with respect for ourselves, respect for others, and respect for the whole earth community is no easy task in a culture that has become as out of balance as ours has. We have literally become out of phase with the deepest needs we have as people and as citizens of our dear planet earth..."
read the complete interview at OpEdNews
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