“Rainwater Harvesting” as a parallel to building your life
One of the many books I was reading this month was “Essential Rainwater Harvesting”, a book in the Sustainable Building Essentials series, available from the Rochester Public Library. While I was reading this book in support of my desire to be more efficient with rainwater (especially important in the drought we’re in), and to preview books I’m intending to have my children read as part of their environmental education, I couldn’t even get out of the Introduction before drawing connections.
Specifically, connections between my desire to care for the environment, and my desire to care for people’s finances. They have so much in common.
And unlike the way most people think about finances, I also think about your finances as a way to support what you love – your parents, your children, your community, your natural world.
… in our consultancy practice, our clients are often looking for more than a simple rooftop harvesting system. They want homes and homesteads that leverage and interact with the environment, producing their own energy and food, harvesting and storing water, cycling nutrients, and restoring the surrounding ecosystems.
Essential Rainwater Harvesting, by Rob Avis and Michelle Avis
What if your finances were so stable, you could afford to give financially to your favorite non-profits? What if your finances were so stable, you could afford to buy more expensive, long term sustainable products that you can pass down the generations? What if your finances were so stable, you could help send your grandchildren to college? What if you could afford to retire while you were still young and healthy enough to volunteer in your community? The parallels of having resilient natural ecosystems and having resilient financial ecosystems are amazing.
Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage an imbalanced world.
Andrew Zolli, co-author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
So what does resilience look like? Often the opposite of modern-day designs, whether that’s of water and energy systems, or of our finances. And it has five key characteristics.
| Characteristic | Resilience | Modern-Day Design |
| Efficiency | Focus on maximizing efficiency. Enduring, repairable, low tech. | Unlimited resource mentality. |
| Productiveness | Collect resources and produce abundantly. Services and products are recognized, values, and encouraged. | Consumers, constant external inputs required for all needs. |
| Appropriateness | Design the system for the needs, use the right tool for the job. | Fossil fuels used to make up for design shortcomings |
| Interconnectedness | Design is cyclical and very connected, feedback influences behavior for beneficial course correction. | Design is linear and unconnected, no feedback, no acknowledged consequences for actions. |
| Redundancy | Backup is key, long term thinking. | No redundancy. Critical systems have no backup. |
How often do we treat our finances like they’re an unlimited resource, like there will always be the next paycheck, always be money in the checking account, always be room on the credit card?
Instead of constantly trying to balance on a slackline, what if you re-designed your life so that the aspects you are juggling now instead supported each other? How much better would that feel?
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