Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Later critics of consumerism included German historian Oswald Spengler, who wrote that “Life in
America is exclusively economic in structure and lacks depth”; Mohandas Gandhi, who regarded
a simple life free from possessions as morally ennobling; and Scott and Helen Nearing, authors of
ism like Duane Elgin, Juliet Schor, Helena Norberg-Hodge, and Vicki Robin have argued that re-
lationships with products or brand names are dysfunctional substitutes for healthy human relation-
ships and that consumer choice is a soporific stand-in for genuine democracy.
A second and more crucial problem with consumerism, say the critics, has to do with resource
limits. Environmental scientists assert that, regardless of whether it is socially desirable, consumer-
ism is physically impossible to maintain in the long run. The math is simple: even if consumption
only grows a fraction of one percent every year, all of Earth's resources will eventually be used up.
The consumer economy also produces an unending variety of wastes, of which water, air, and soil
can absorb only so much before planetary life-support systems begin unraveling.
astating social and environmental consequences from the relentless growth of human population
and resource consumption; he even managed to foresee the current climate crisis. A few years later
a team of researchers at MIT began using a computer to model likely future scenarios ensuing from
population expansion, consumption growth, and environmental decline. In the computer's “stand-
ard run” scenario, continued growth led to a global economic collapse in the mid-21st century. That
blistering reviews from mainstream economists but has since been vindicated by independent retro-
spective analysis.
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More recently, E. F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, William Rees, and other advocates of ecolo-
(natural resources) as if it were income—an obvious theoretical error with potentially catastrophic
real-world results.
A Self-reinforcing System
Often these critiques have led to a simple personal prescription: If buying ever more stuff is bad for
the environment and turns us into vapid mall drones, then it's up to each of us to rein in our con-
sumptive habits. Buy nothing! Reuse! Recycle! Share!
Yet treating consumerism as though it were merely an individual proclivity rather than a com-
plex, interdependent system with financial, governmental, and commercial components is both
wrong and mostly ineffectual. Consider this simple thought experiment: What would happen if
everyone
were to suddenly embrace a Gandhian ethic of voluntary simplicity? Commerce would
contract; jobs would vanish; pension funds would lose value; tax revenues would shrivel, and so
would government services. Absent sweeping structural changes to government and the economy,
the result would be a deep, long-lasting economic depression.
This is not to say that personal efforts toward voluntary simplicity have no benefit—they do,
for the individual and her circle of associates. However, the
system
of consumerism can only be
altered or replaced through
systemic
action. Yet this is hampered by the fact that consumerism has
become self-reinforcing: those with significant roles in the system who try to rein it in get whacked,
while those who help it expand get stroked. Nearly everybody wants an economy with more jobs
and higher returns on investments, so for most people, the incentive to shut up and get with the
