What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

While so many aspects of the green movement—farmers’ markets, composting, gray water, solar power—represent commendable efforts to improve life within a community, there’s a spirit of separatism that can’t be disentangled from these things. The allure of hard work and self-reliance, when paired with a distrust for modern institutions, can curdle into an impulse to divest from society altogether. Whether this impulse is manifested in the suspicions of disaster preppers or the purism of the homeschooler, there’s a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection. But our fear of the “other” is also more mundane than that. It’s a way of choosing the inconveniences of self-reliance over the indignities and sacrifices of compromise. Perhaps it’s better (this thinking goes) to acquire the skills to face down a hungry bear in the woods or trudge through the snow to buy a few bolts of calico than it is to expose your child to a teacher who doesn’t inspire her, or to a doctor who doesn’t listen closely enough. That’s a pastoral fantasy that easily overshadows our hunched, bleary-eyed, flickering-screen lives—but the fantasy is also a product of those lives, which create awkwardness and fear of direct confrontation in a population unaccustomed to face-to-face contact, accommodation, and collaboration. But most of all, this d...