Making the Good Life Last: Four Keys to Sustainable Living

Making the Good Life Last: Four Keys to Sustainable Living

Michael Schuler
$16.95
Publication Date: May 4th, 2009
Publisher:
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN:
9781576755709
Pages:
248

Description

In our materialist culture, the idea of “the good life”—fancy cars, designer clothes, once-in-a-lifetime vacations—leaves even those few who can afford it feeling anxious, empty, and dissatisfied. Michael Schuler deconstructs the assumption that consumption and constant stimulation equal happiness. He shows how, by applying the principles of sustainability to our personal lives, we can discover treasures of perennial value: a beautiful and healthy earth home, enduring relationships, strong communities, work that contributes to the common good, and play that restores our bodies and lifts our souls.

About the Author

A fifth-generation native of Dixon, Illinois, a modest town straddling the Rock River, Michael A. Schuler returned with his family to the upper reaches of the same watershed in 1988, after an absence of twenty years. Since then, they have made their home in Madison, Wisconsin, where Michael has served as senior minister of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, a congregation that has grown from 500 to 1,500 adult members during his tenure. In the fall of 2008 the Society completed a sustainably designed, LEED- certified, 23,000-square-foot addition to its original Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Meeting House in keeping with the organic principles that America’s greatest architect once championed.

Praise for Making the Good Life Last: Four Keys to Sustainable Living

“Sustainability isn't only, or even mainly, about light bulbs. It's about patience and prudence and the other virtues described in this book—it's about becoming mature as people and as a society. That's hard work but good work, and this is the manual.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature

"Sustainability requires each of us to rethink our moral and spiritual relationships with the planet, with each other, and with ourselves. No one understands this better than Michael Schuler. He tells of his efforts with friends and family to enact these values in his own daily life. It is an inspiring story."
—William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Changes in the Land

“Organize a study group around this book! Schuler has provided one of the most persuasive, cogent, readable, useful guidebooks I have ever seen to what really sustains an ecology, an economy, a society, and a human life that really matters.”
—John Buehrens, Past President, Unitarian Universalist Association

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