Back To Basics Organization Hopes To Put The Dream Back In The American Dream

Throughout her career, Betsy Taylor has been drawn to organizations trying to improve society the peace movement, the nuclear-freeze campaign, environmental reform.

But for the past year she has focused on a project so idealistic it almost sounds like a joke. Taylor, 41, is launching a national Center for a New American Dream.

She hopes it will provide a nonpartisan forum in which Americans can talk about an overriding theme of the 1990s that nobody seems to address directly: If we are the richest people on earth, why aren’t we happier? And the forum aims to offer solutions - ideas and models for ways people might break the work-and-spend grip that materialism has on their lives.

“We want to spark a national conversation,” said Taylor. “Our hope is to change the society. This idea can be seen as hopelessly utopian or as something that people desperately want.”

She’s banking on the latter, contending that the old American dream of opportunity has deteriorated. For many, it’s become a weary race for consumer goods; for others, the abrupt loss of a job they’d counted on for life.

Taylor is director of the Merck Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation based in Takoma Park, Md. Merck is a modest player, with an asset base of about $35 million, and gives away about $1.5 million a year, mostly to projects to sustain a healthy planet.

Last year, in a new move, the fund commissioned a nationwide poll attempting to measure the impact of materialism on the collapse of community. The survey revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with materialism, with 82 percent of the respondents agreeing that “most of us buy and consume far more than we need.” And 67 percent agreed that “Americans cause many of the world’s environmental problems because we consume more resources and produce more waste than anyone else in the world.”

The survey, conducted for Merck by the Harwood Group of Bethesda, Md., included random-sample telephone interviews with 800 adults and four focus groups representing a demographic cross-section of the population. “The poll response took us by surprise,” Taylor said in a recent telephone interview.

And it kicked her into action. With $100,000 Merck Fund seed money, she convened a conference last spring, pulling together dozens of thinkers who spent three days wrestling with the thesis that materialism has not bought happiness and the possibility of creating a “sustainable” society that does not borrow from the future.

How to talk about the need for change was a major theme at the conference, which struggled with vocabulary, acknowledging that such words as “consumption” and “sustainability” often draw blank stares. Asked to define the problem in “sound-bite” phrases, they came up with lines such as, “We’re working for the economy and it’s not working for us,” or “The Earth has enough for every person’s need but not every person’s greed.”

An eight-member board of directors has had several planning sessions for a permanent center. An executive director and a site (probably either Washington, D.C., or Seattle) will be announced in June.

“I’m trying to nurse this baby along,” Taylor said. “Our plan is to build a major membership organization, and not in a polarizing way. If you come at it with a political agenda, it won’t work.” She thinks the project’s timing is right on target and applicants for the directorship came from “every sector you can imagine,” she said, “from ex-priests to corporate vice presidents.”

It’s clear to her the project has tapped into something dynamic. “People are hungry to talk about this, and there is no place to do it,” she said. “They are up to their ears in credit card debt, they don’t have time for their kids, for their community. They’re beginning to say, ‘Is this it? Is this what it’s about?”’

Taylor, however, sees positive indicators that the “shop till you drop” frenzy of the 1980s is being rejected on many levels. Although we’re not hearing it at the political level, she noted, many in the religious community, and even in the business sector, are starting to make the connection that environmentalists have long preached.

Many Americans are taking matters into their own hands. In a surprising Merck poll finding, 28 percent of those surveyed said that in the past five years they had voluntarily made changes in their life that resulted in making less money in order to have a “more balanced life.”

Taylor points to a flood of how-to publications - books on ways to downsize, to live more simply - and newsletters with names like Tightwad Gazette and Penny Pincher Times.

“One of the most obvious things about our society is that our richness is not giving us satisfaction. It’s sort of the elephant in the living room no one will mention,” said board member Dana Meadows, professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and the author of “The Limits to Growth.”

The survey, Taylor said, revealed paradoxes: Americans are ambivalent about what to do. They express a deep appreciation for material things, plus a feeling that people should be allowed to make their own choices with money, and can’t be expected to change. Eighty-nine percent agreed that buying and consuming is “the American way of life.”

They see the environment as connected to these concerns in a vague way but have not thought deeply about the ecological implications of their own lifestyles.

Taylor, who continues to work primarily for the Merck Family Fund, is also the acting board chairwoman of the incipient center, an ironic double load for someone leading a crusade to simplify life. “It’s a lot,” she said, “but if you want to turn things around, you can’t always be in balance.”