Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
program is overwhelming. Arguments against consumerism may be rationally irrefutable, but few
people stop to think about them.
If mere persuasion could dismantle consumerism or replace it with something better, it would
have done so by now.
Crisis Time
Still, as the critics have insisted all along, consumerism as a system cannot continue indefinitely; it
contains the seeds of its own demise. And the natural constraints to consumerism—fossil fuel lim-
its, environmental sink limits (leading to climate change, ocean acidification, and other pollution
dilemmas), and debt limits—appear to be well within sight. While there may be short-term ways of
pushing back against these limits (unconventional oil and gas, geoengineering, quantitative easing),
there is no way around them. Consumerism is inherently doomed. But since consumerism now ef-
fectively
is
the economy (70 percent of US GDP comes from consumer spending), when it goes
down the economy goes too.
A train wreck is foreseeable. No one knows exactly when the impact will occur or precisely how
bad it will be. But it is possible to say with some confidence that this wreck will manifest itself as an
economic depression accompanied by a series of worsening environmental disasters and possibly
wars and revolutions. This should be news to nobody by now, as recent government and UN reports
spin out the scenarios in ever grimmer detail: rising sea levels, waves of environmental refugees,
droughts, floods, famines, and collapsing economies.
9
Indeed, looking at what's happened since the start of the global economic crisis in 2007, it's
likely the impact has already commenced—though it is happening in agonizingly slow motion as
the system fights to maintain itself.
The Happy Alternative
It is not too soon to wonder what comes after consumerism. If there is good news to be gleaned
from the story just told, it is that this mode of economic existence is not biologically determined.
Consumerism arose from a certain set of circumstances; as circumstances change, other economic
arrangements will offer adaptive advantages.
If we have some idea of the circumstances that are likely to emerge in the decades ahead, we
may get some clues to what those alternative arrangements may look like. As we've already seen,
the consumerist economy of the 20th century was driven by cheap energy and overproduction. All
signs suggest the new century will be shaped by energy limits, environmental sink limits, and debt
limits—and therefore by declining production per capita. Under these circumstances, policy makers
will surely strive to provide a
sufficiency
economy. But how do we get from a consumerist economy
to a sufficiency economy?
Perhaps the most promising clue comes from the emerging happiness movement. Since the
1970s, the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has experimented with gross national happiness
Nations to advocate widespread international adoption of GNH. Concurrently, the New Econom-
ics Foundation of Britain has begun publishing an annually updated Happy Planet Index (HPI),
11
which ranks nations by the self-reported levels of happiness of their citizens and by the size of their
ecological footprints.
