Twenty-year-old Esther Shank’s generation faces overwhelming influence of the “green” movement on a daily basis.

“Almost everything in the stores now have a ‘green’ label on them, but what does it really mean to be green?” she says. “And how can one be green without spending all the money the stores demand for their green products?”

This year, Shank worked as a young adult story collector for Living More with Less 30th Anniversary Edition with New Stories and Suggestions for Living a Sustainable Life.

“This book can give a lot of answers to these questions,” Shank says. She is a student at Eastern Menno­nite University, Harrisonburg, Va., and is from West Liberty, Ohio.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher, editor of this edition, says she chose young adults as story collectors because “many of the young adults I know are far ahead of where I am in terms of their awareness of climate change and global poverty and their willingness to make lifestyle decisions based on these realities.”

She also wanted the book to feel relevant to young people and not serve simply as a “commemorative or nostalgic edition that would be meaningful only to people who remembered its publication in 1980,” she says.

The five story collectors were born after the first edition came out, and for Shank the timing excited her. Just months before Valerie asked her to help with the book she finished reading Doris Janzen Longacre’s first edition of Living More with Less. Longacre died of cancer in 1979 at age 39, before she completed the original manuscript.

Another young adult story collector, Karina Kreider, says her interviews demonstrated the importance of small decisions in daily life. She interviewed 10 people and wrote 13 articles, although the book does not include all of them.

“Decisions like being aware of how you dress and how you use leftovers take little effort, yet can make a large impact,” she says.

Kreider says her generation often faces the notion of living simply, but “what that means, practically, is often left out or too vague to be of any true value. … Stories of what people around us are doing are of huge importance in closing the gap between the theoretical and the applicable.”

Kreider studies theology at Theologischen Seminar Bienenberg, the European Mennonite Bible school in Switzerland. She grew up in Akron, Pa., and is a member of Pilgrims Mennonite Church.

Paul Boers, 23, a story collector from Elkhart, Ind., says the new edition offers insights on technology and Internet use—issues and dynamics Longacre did not face in her day.

“It’s always important for a community to go back and evaluate its values in the face of what’s happening in the broader world,” he says.

Boers says an unusual story from two young men who biked to Mennonite World Conference in Paraguay in 2009 stands out as a reminder of the rewards of sustainable life choices.

Boers works as a children’s librarian and a correspondent for The Elkhart Truth.

At times the project felt overwhelming to Weaver-Zercher. “I constantly worried about whether I was getting the balance of old material and new material right,” she says. “I also worried that the contributors were, in general, a fairly privileged group of people who are choosing to live with less.”

She says she especially appreciated the stories of groups of people who were doing more-with-less things together, which “helped me move beyond the question of, What can I change in my own little household? to, What can I do with others to work on these issues?”