Lucid, challenging, and beautifully written, How Much Is Enough? advances a compelling central argument: The fortunate 1.1 billion earthlings in the elite "consumer class" are living beyond the planet's means. The middle and lower classes may envy the consumer class's affluence, and may seek to attain it, but surely the Earth can't support everyone living that lifestyle.
Driving solo to crosstown workplaces, munching McMuffins made with eggs trucked in from the next state, cranking up the air conditioning to beat the heat that seems worse than last year's--actions the world's elite take for granted--are unsustainable. Yet we are heading in a direction assuming, at best, we can. "Over a few short generations," Alan Durning observes, "we have become car drivers, television watchers, mall shoppers...and the words 'consumer' and 'person' have become virtually synonymous."
The environmental costs of our hyperconsumption are staggering. We in the consumer class produce most of the excess carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas. We cause nearly all of the acid rain; we create nearly all of the chemical waste. Our chlorofluorocarbons destroy the ozone layer. The resources required to sustain our automated, throwaway lifestyle and high-fat diet are drawn at great ecological cost from all over the Earth.
Curiously, our runaway consumption does not seem to have made us much happier. There is almost no difference in the levels of reported happiness found in very wealthy and very poor countries. "Because human wants are insatiable," Durning asserts, "the consumer society fails to deliver on its promise of fulfillment through material comforts....Consumerism has hoodwinked us into gorging on material things while we suffer from social, psychological, and spiritual hunger."
To many, these will be familiar themes, yet still worth reading because they're so powerfully rendered. Durning's language is distinctive and vivid: In the consumer society we are serenaded by "the unctuous voices of the marketplace"; we are seduced by "the mall...designed in minute detail to prompt impulse buying."
The last indictment is especially compelling. Without resorting to polemics, Durning conveys a disdain for the mall that's infectious. His introductory reference to the recently completed Mall of America launches the book on just the right trajectory. "[The Mall] stands in my mind as a microcosm--a sort of icon--of what I believe is now the world's prevailing definition of progress: higher consumption."
No mall can capture our imagination the way Durning's grandmother does a page later, at the end of his introduction. Durning dedicates the book to Elizabeth Cressey "for the example she has provided. Despite the proliferation of wastefulness on all sides, her quiet ethic of conserving has never left her....Now 88 years of age, she walks and rides the bus wherever she needs to go, and, undeterred by failing eyesight, still identifies flowers for those of us who have lived too hurriedly to learn their names."
Of course the book is about more than this, but it's this contrast - between what the Mall of America stands for and what Elizabeth stands for--that stays with you. These are the passages you'll read to friends who are beginning to suspect that they too are dying of consumption.
FINE PEARL THAT IT is, How Much Is Enough? has at its core a crucial imperfection. Eager to point the way to sustainable lifestyles, Durning does not adequately address the key problem of human selfishness.
An implicit call for change in human motivation echoes throughout the book. Here and there the call is explicit, as at the end of the first chapter: "Ultimately, sustaining the environment that sustains humanity will require that we change our values." But can we change those values? And must we change them?
Like Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, Durning recognizes the reasons for pessimism about our chances as a species. Hyperconsumption--and the harmful industries that attend it--will surely knock the ecosystem out of whack too fast for us to adapt...unless, both argue, there's a shift in human nature. McKibben calls for a broadening of our love--an expansion of individual concern beyond oneself and one's family and neighbors. Likewise, Durning writes about the need to "climb down the consumption ladder a few rungs" and observe "the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule."
Many of us would like to believe in the ascendance of unselfishness, in the broadening of love, but we lack the necessary faith. We tend to think that, if we're doomed, perhaps our doom is built in: Human self-interest is not a variable, and our earth-shaking successes may carry the seeds of inevitable demise.
We cling tenaciously to our individual freedoms. Time-saving devices like cars and supermarkets feel like a right rather than a privilege, as do such comforts as refrigerators, clothes dryers, and air conditioners. So we question Durning's reasonableness when he challenges us to consider giving them up.
Think about natural selection, survival of the fittest. Here we stand, a million years old, creatures of highly evolved productivity and consumption. It's what got us this far; it's what we are. Durning's yearning for the evolution of individual self-restraint has a romantic appeal but, let's face it, such self-restraint is not human. No, the expansion of our genuine concern beyond our loved ones--i.e., the expansion of our love--is too much to hope for.
In Graham Greene's words, "One cannot love humanity; one can love only people." By the same token, love of the planet is beyond us as well.
AND YET THERE IS hope--there's always hope. But true hope lies less in the call for a change in individual motivation, and more in the notion that groups can make choices that no single member of the group would make.
Each of us in the consumer class will continue to drive--unless we as a group make driving much, much more expensive. Each of us will crank up the air conditioning in the summer, each of us will buy fruit from other climates in the winter--each of us will hyperconsume while it remains easy to do so. Put more broadly, each of us will take the easier path, unless all of us take the harder path.
This view of human nature is less optimistic than Durning's but more forgiving. We should stop beating ourselves up: The damage we're doing to the Earth is a result not merely of our errors, but of our nature.
It was not wrong for Henry Ford to develop the car; it was human. It was not wrong for our species to incorporate meat into our diet, although that diet now poses grave problems. By recognizing such fundamentals, we can do away with some of the righteousness, the piety, that characterizes the environmental movement today, and move toward genuine solutions.
We may save ourselves--we may pull back from the brink--not by changing human nature, but by recognizing the inherent dangers of human nature, and together applying the brakes.
Jeff Balch was a writer and political activist living in Chicago when this review appeared.
How Much is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Fate of the Earth. By Alan Durning. W.W. Norton & Co., 1992. $19.95 (cloth), $8.95 (paper).
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