Consumption

The American middle class, more than any other group, defines and embodies the contemporary international vision of the "good life." Yet the way this class of people lives is among the world’s premier environmental problems, and may be the most difficult to solve.

Only population growth rivals high consumption as a cause of ecological decline, and at least population growth is now viewed as a problem by many governments and citizens of the world. Consumption, in contrast, is almost universally seen as good—indeed, increasing it is the primary goal of national economic policy. The consumption levels of the past two decades are the highest achieved by any civilization in human history. They manifest the full flowering of a new form of human society: the consumer society.

This new manner of living was born in the United States, and the words of an American best capture its spirit. In the age of U.S. affluence that began after World War II, retailing analyst Victor Lebow declared: "Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption....We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate." Most citizens of Western nations have responded to Lebow’s call, and the rest of the world appears intent on following.

The gaping divide in material consumption between the fortunate and unfortunate stands out starkly in their impacts on the natural world. The soaring consumption lines that track the rise of the consumer society are, from another perspective, surging indicators of environmental harm. The consumer society’s exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust, poison, or unalterably disfigure forests, soils, water, and air. We, its members, are responsible for a disproportionate share of all the global environmental challenges facing humanity.

Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—destitution—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world’s billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.

If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder, How much is enough? What level of consumption can the Earth support? When does having more cease to add appreciably to human satisfaction? Is there a level of living above poverty and subsistence but below the consumer lifestyle—a level of sufficiency?

The difficulty of transforming the consumer society into a sustainable one can scarcely be overestimated. We consumers enjoy a lifestyle that almost everybody else aspires to, and why shouldn’t they? Who would just as soon not have an automobile, a big house on a big lot, and complete control over indoor temperature throughout the year? The momentum of centuries of economic history and the material cravings of 5.5 billion people lie on the side of increasing consumption.

We may be, therefore, in a conundrum—a problem admitting of no satisfactory solution. Limiting the consumer lifestyle to those who have already attained it is not politically possible, morally defensible, or ecologically sufficient. And extending that lifestyle to all would simply hasten the ruin of the biosphere. The global environment cannot support 1.1 billion of us living like American consumers, much less 5.5 billion people, or a future population of at least 8 billion. On the other hand, reducing the consumption levels of the consumer society, and tempering material aspirations elsewhere, though morally acceptable, is a quixotic proposal. It bucks the trend of centuries. Yet it may be the only option.

If the life-supporting ecosystems of the planet are to survive for future generations, the consumer society will have to dramatically curtail its use of resources—partly by shifting to high-quality, low-input durable goods and partly by seeking fulfillment through leisure, human relationships, and other non-material avenues. We in the consumer society will have to live a technologically sophisticated version of the lifestyle currently practiced lower on the economic ladder. Scientific advances, better laws, restructured industries, new treaties, environmental taxes, grassroots campaigns—all can help us get there. But ultimately, sustaining the environment that sustains humanity will require that we change our values.

For most of us in the consumer society, the proposition that our way of life is exceptionally affluent no doubt seems farfetched. After all, we live modestly compared with the truly rich, and making ends meet is often a struggle. Just as the world’s top fifth—the "consumer class"—makes the remainder appear impoverished, the top fifth of the consumer class—the rich—makes the lowly consumers seem deprived. In the United States, for example, the highest-paid fifth of income earners takes home more than the remaining four-fifths combined, and top corporate executives earn 93 times as much as the factory workers they employ.

The relation between the rich and the consumer class is a microcosm of that between the consumer class and all people. The rich earn more, consume more natural resources, and disturb ecological systems more than average consumers do. Still, on a global scale, the rich are best taken as a subset of the consumer class, because, in terms of ecological impacts, the greatest disparities are not between the rich and the consumers but between the consumers and the class of people below them.

The ecomonies that cater to the global consumer society are responsible for the lion’s share of the damage that humans have inflicted on common global resources. The consumer class’s use of fossil fuels, for example, causes an estimated two-thirds of the emissions of carbon dioxide from this source. The poor typically are responsible for the release of a tenth of a ton of carbon apiece each year through burning fossil fuels; the middle-income class, half a ton; and the consumers, 3.5 tons. In the extreme case, the richest tenth of Americans pump 11 tons into the atmosphere annually.

High consumption translates into hugh impacts. In industrial countries, the fuels burned release perhaps three-fourths of the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. Industrial countries’ factories generate most of the world’s hazardous chemical wastes. Their military facilities have built more than 99 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads. Their atomic power plants have generated more than 96 percent of the world’s radioactive waste. And their air conditioners, aerosol sprays, and factories release almost 90 percent of the chlorofluorocarbons that destroy the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

As people climb from the middle-income to the consumer class, their impact on the environment makes a quantum leap—not so much because they consume more of the same things but because they consume different things. For example, South African blacks, most of them below the consumer class, spend their limited budgets largely on basic food and clothing, things that are produced with relatively little damage to the environment. Meanwhile, South Africa’s consumer-class whites spend most of their larger budgets on housing, electricity, fuel, and transportation—all more damaging to the environment.

The influence of the consumer class is felt strongly in regions populated mostly by poorer classes. By drawing on resources far and near, we consumers cast an ecological shadow over wide regions of the Earth. Every piece of merchandise in the retail districts of the consumer society creates its own ecological wake. A strawberry in a Chicago supermarket in February is likely to have come from Mexico, where it might have been grown with the help of pesticides made in the Rhine Valley of Germany and a tractor made in Japan.

The tractor, perhaps constructed with Korean steel cast from iron ingots dug from the territory of tribal peoples in Papua New Guinea, was likely fueled with diesel pumped from the earth in southern Mexico. At harvest time, the strawberry may have been packed in a box made of cardboard from Canadian softwood pulp, wrapped in plastic manufactured in New Jersey, and loaded on a truck made in Italy with German, Japanese, and American parts. The ecological wake of the strawberry—like the production lines themselves—span the globe.

We consumers bear a huge burden of responsibility for the ills of the Earth. Yet our consumption too seldom receives the attention of those concerned about the fate of the planet, who focus on other contributors to environmental decline. Consumption is the neglected variable in the global environmental equation.

An economy’s total burden on the ecological systems that undergird it is a function of three variables: the size of the population, average consumption, and the broad set of technologies—everything from dinner plates to communications satellites—the economy uses to provide goods and services. There are good reasons for emphasizing technology and population. Technologies are easier to replace than cultural attitudes. Family planning has enormous human and social benefits aside from its environmental pluses.

Yet the magnitude of global ecological challenges requires progress on all three fronts. For example, simply stopping the growth in rates of global pollution, ecological degradation, and habitat destruction would require within four decades a twentyfold improvement in environmental performance of current technology—but such an advance is farfetched. Autos that go three or four times as far on a tank of fuel are feasible; ones that go 20 times as far would defy the laws of thermodynamics. Tech-nological change and population stabilization cannot suffice to save the planet without their complement in the reduction of material wants.

The basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: Each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations to meet their own needs. Put into practice, that elementary-sounding principle translates into radical changes. It implies, for example, that we consumers have an ethical obligation to curb our consumption, since it jeopardizes the chances for future generations.

The first step of reform is uncomplicated. It is to inform consumers of the damage we are causing and how we can avoid it. New values never arrive in the abstract. They come entangled in concrete situations, new realities, and new understandings of the world. When most people see a large automobile and think first of the air pollution it causes rather than the social status it conveys, environmental ethics will have arrived.

Personal efforts to live more gently on the Earth reach their logical conclusion in the quest for simpler living more generally. The goal is not ascetic self-denial, but a sort of unadorned grace. Some people come to feel, for example, that clotheslines, window shades, and bicycles have a functional elegance that clothes dryers, air conditioners, and automobiles lack. These modest devices are silent, manually operated, fireproof, ozone- and climate-friendly, easily repaired, and inexpensive. Because they are less "convenient," they breed a degree of forethought and attention to the weather that grounds life in place and time.

Volunteer simplicity is an ideal, and for most of us in the consumer class it may be an unattainable one. Our choices are constrained by the social pressures, physical infrastructure, and institutional channels that envelop us. We feel cruel refusing to buy our children toys that their playmates all have. We would immobilize ourselves if we abandoned our cars while still living amidst mass-transit-less, anti-pedestrian sprawl.

We do not have the option of trading extra salary for reduced working hours because our employers do not offer it, and we could not accept it quickly anyway. Mortgage and car payments, insurance premiums, college tuition, utility bills—we spend most of our disposable income on big-ticket items where the monthly outlay is determined for long stretches at a time. Thus a strategy for reducing consumption must focus as much on changing the framework in which people make choices as it does on the choices they make.

Individual action and voluntary simplicity alone do not appear capable of uprooting consumerism. What must we do, then, to dig it up? The answer may lie in combining the political and the personal. To rejuvenate the ethic of sufficiency, a critical mass of individuals committed to living by it must emerge. But if they are to succeed, they must balance their efforts to change themselves with a bold agenda to challenge the laws, institutions, and interests that profit from profligacy.

Propagating lower consumption as an ethical norm ultimately requires that we revive the non-consuming philosophy that lies dormant in our culture—our collective memory, wisdom, and ways—and use it to mold a new culture of permanence. A culture of permanence will not come quickly. We can expect no instant revolutions in social values, no moral awakening or "paradigm shift." All we can realistically hope for is painfully slow progress against consumerism, punctuated by rapid advances.

Strategic targets clearly include the kinds of laws and policies that favor consumption over leisure, and high-impact commodities over low-impact ones—cars over buses, for instance, or disposables over durables. The best targets are the parts of our consumption that are wasted or unwanted in the first place. Most Americans would rather never see the 37 percent of the mail they receive that consists of unsolicited sales pitches. And each day, the United States turns more than 23 square kilometers of rural land to new housing developments, "industrial parks," and commercial strips that would mostly be unnecessary if Americans insisted on well-planned land use inside city limits. Despite the ominous scale of the challenge, there could be many more people ready to begin saying "enough" than prevailing opinion suggests.

Unless we climb down the consumption ladder a few rungs, our grandchildren will inherit a planetary home impoverished by our affluence—a planet whose climate has been drastically altered in mere decades, whose air and water are poisoned, whose fertile soils are worn down, whose living species are decimated in number, and whose wild habitats are shrunken and fragmentary. Furthermore, unless we lower our consumption we will have no authority to object to the world’s present poorer classes despoiling the Earth.

Ultimately, the linked fates of humanity and the natural realm depend on us, the consumers. We can curtail our use of those things that are ecologically destructive, such as fossil fuels, minerals, and paper. And we can cultivate the deeper, non-material sources of fulfillment that are the main determinants of happiness: family and social relationships, meaningful work, and leisure. Or we can abrogate our responsibilities and let our lifestyle ruin the Earth.

In the final analysis, accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity, and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water’s edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations.