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yours, which was dust to begin with. He’s dammed the river to irrigate his fields, so that only a trickle reaches your place, and it’s nasty. You’re beginning to see that these problems are deep and deadly, that you’ll be the first to starve, and the others will follow. The family takes a vote and agrees to do a handful of obvious things that will keep down the dust and clear the water—all except Fat Brother. He walks away from the table. He says God gave him good land and the right to be greedy.
    The ancient Greeks adored tragic plays about families like this, and their special word for the Fat Brother act was hubris . In thetown where I grew up we called it “getting all high and mighty,” and the sentence that came next usually included the words “getting knocked down to size.” For most of my life I’ve felt embarrassed by a facet of our national character that I would have to call prideful wastefulness. What other name can there be for our noisy, celebratory appetite for unnecessary things, and our vast carelessness regarding their manufacture and disposal? In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty even in wartime, especially in wartime, to get out and buy those cars and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even shoes. For some, “wartime” became a matter of waving our pride above the waste, with slogans that didn’t make sense to me: “Buy for your country” struck me as an exhortation to “erase from your mind what just happened.” And the real meaning of this one I can’t even guess at: “Our enemies hate us because we’re free.”
    I’m sorry, but I have eyes with which to see, and friends in many places. In Canada, for instance, I know people who are wicked cold in winter but otherwise in every way as free as you and me. And nobody hates Canada.
    Hubris isn’t just about luck or wealth, it’s about throwing away food while hungry people watch. Canadians were born lucky, too, in a global sense, but they seem more modest about it, and more deeply appreciative of their land; it’s impossible to imagine Canada blighting its precious wilderness areas with “mock third-world villages” for bombing practice, as our air force has done in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta Range. I wonder how countries bereft of anywild lands at all view our plans for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world’s last immense and untouched wilderness, as we stake out our right to its plunder as we deem necessary. We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.
    In our country, we seldom question our right to burn this fuel in heavy passenger vehicles and to lead all nations in the race to pollute our planet beyond habitability; some of us, in fact, become belligerent toward anyone who dares to raise the issue. We are disinclined as a nation to assign any moral value at all to our habits of consumption. But the circle of our family is large, larger than just one nation, and as we arrive at the end of our frontiers we can’t possibly be surprised that the rest of the family would have us live within our means. Safety resides, I think, on the far side of endless hunger.