On Authentic Wealth | Introduction to the Summer 1993 edition
Emily Hiestand

©1993; revised slightly in 2024
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While my colleagues and I were shaping this issue on the subject of authentic wealth, some venerable amaryllis plants near my desk were beginning their annual bloom. Admiring them, and recalling the many years they have rebloomed, put me in mind of an observation, by Susan Witt of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, that one form of wealth lies in our stories about the experiences, people, and artifacts in our lives. Here’s a short, short story applying Witt’s idea to the amaryllis now coming into bloom.

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The original bulbs, in a collection that now numbers more than twenty, came as a holiday gift: two bulbs with amber, papery skins in a colorful box. That very winter both bulbs bloomed spectacularly and I read up on how to care for them to encourage them to rebloom the following year. All the instructions stressed how simple the sequence is. But in the early years of tending amaryllis, I several times failed to do the right things at the right times, one of which is to put the spent bulbs in a dark, cool cellar for nine weeks of rest. Even so, the bulbs often did resurrect at some point in the year, generating trumpet-shaped blooms with stamens that curved from luminous, pale-green throats. With no attention beyond compost, water and sun, these plants, continued to burst into life on our sunny enclosed porch. The intense sunlight and cool evening temperatures of our passive solar porch turned out to be ideal, very similar to their native habitat in the South African veldt. I was proud to be associated with these wonders and liked showing them off, first to the actor friend who had given me the original bulbs, a man who is himself as effortlessly glamorous as an amaryllis.

I bought a few new bulbs each year, eventually mastered the tending cycle, and soon had a small amaryllis forest in bloom each winter through the holiday season. It was always a joy to see the first thin line of green emerging from one of the ruddy-brown bulbs. And then to watch, as, over a fortnight, strap-leaves (pure Matisse in their arcs) started to spring from the bulbs, followed by the blossom stalks. The blooms last up to several weeks at full peak before they begin to wilt, and are lovely even then. Finally, the intact leaves go outside to where they soak up summer sun which replenishes the bulbs. By late August the leaves are losing color and structure.

Early one September, just when it was time to divide that year’s spent bulbs and put them away for their cool, dark nap, my elderly parents flew up to Boston for a visit. My father was quieter than usual on this visit, perhaps contemplating, as he sometimes must, unshakable memories from his time in WWII. But he likes household activities and agreed to help me dig up and divide the amaryllis bulbs. We worked under a dim porch light one evening, tamping the bulbs from their pots onto newspapers as my father's pipe smoke wafted over the cool porch. I noticed again that he and I have the same hand shape. We found that most of the bulbs were burgeoning with small "offsets" nested against the main bulb like garlic cloves, and that each bulb also had a healthy clump of short wiry roots. We figured out together how to separate the clump to give each gleaming bulb a proper root and how to replant them, my dad talking when he did in haiku-like phrases. I’ve come to realize where I first learned to revere a measure of solitude and quiet. We set all the bulbs at the right depth in terra-cotta pots and tamped them into place. We rolled up the newspapers. "That's done," my father said, warmly. Years later, especially on winter days when these plants are in bloom, memory will restore those treasured, peaceful hours with my late father.

Beyond the richness that experiences bring to our lives, the quest for an “economics of enough,” on both a personal or societal policy scale, can be elusive in a culture based on continual growth, and riven with economic discrepancies and practices that damage many human lives and the natural world as well. There are many forms of capitalism, and it often bewilders me that our country has opted for a relatively untempered version that treats all its citizens to the cruel premise that there is no such thing as enough. It helps to know that this premise is not universal; in Sweden for example, the idea of “just enough” — not too little, not too much — is a national ethos, known by the single word lagom. The word also carries the meanings of “in balance,” and “ideal” and the Swedish proverb Lagom är bäst can be translated as “the right amount is best” and "Enough is as good as a feast.” Other countries who have similar views include Norway, Finland, Ukraine, Thailand, Indonesia, Greece, Slovakia, and Poland.

Our own national psyche continues to be individualistic, but we may find some answers in personal stock-taking as well as by helping align public policy with a broader sense of human and planetary well-being. The time for both is nigh, for as James Robertson says, “conventional economics now conflicts with social as well as ecological needs, with fairness and justice, with…spiritual values, and with common sense."

In compelling, distinctive ways, all the contributors to this issue of Orion urge that economic principles be redefined to integrate ethical values. Our contributors find meaningful forms of wealth in care for the land and creatures, in creativity, in democratic participation, and in the nurture of family and community.

Like the authors in this edition, the emerging theory of ecological economics is grappling with the very definition of “the good life.” A fair, green economics attempts to integrate some fundamental values, among them: community, liberty, equity, and health of the earth. Stephen Viederman, president the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, has written eloquently on this subject, pressing for an economics guided by the whole moral compass. In this view, the degradation of nature, gender and racial oppression, and economic pain are interrelated symptoms of violent or ignorant efforts to control an “other.” And it is an instance of ecological thinking to recognize that an economics that supports the health of the earth can almost certainly occur only in a society that achieves social and economic justice, for these conditions are linked at the root.

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for Orion Magazine, Summer 1993; updated slightly in 2024
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