Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The private car, plastics and the new media technology industry are prime examples
of this, with considerable amounts of research and development being invested in
ensuring that use value is secondary to exchange or commodity value. Obviously, a
different form of rationality, an ecological rationality, needs to come into play.
Money makes the world go around?
It has long been established with tools such as the Index of Sustainable Economic
Wellbeing (Ekins, 2000) and major studies like those of Robert E. Lane (2000) that
more goods and increasing demand through advertising does not necessarily mean
greater human happiness and contentment. As Lane writes:
Although it is said that the function of the market is to satisfy human wants
and so maximize various satisfactions, it is not true that the function of advertis-
ing is to maximize satisfaction; rather, its function is to increase people's
dissatisfaction with any current state of affairs, to create wants and to exploit
the dissatisfactions of the present. Advertising must use dissatisfaction to achieve
its purpose.
(2000: 179)
Hamilton (2003) writes of a growth fetish, which has basically failed to improve
the quality of people's lives in the more developed countries. Crime, drugs, environ-
mental destruction, job insecurity, family breakdown, rampant and conspicuous
consumerism, economic inequality, feelings of political impotence, and corruption
are identified as key factors that are wrong with contemporary Western society.
'Social democracy is being superseded by a sort of market totalitarianism,' he writes
(2003: 21). Robert Frank (1999) has shown that our satisfaction with our materialistic
way of life depends very much on how we see ourselves in relation to others - and
not just those similar to ourselves. Kasser (2002) examines a number of psychological
studies into the effects of consumerism on everyday happiness and psychological
health. People who are highly motivated by materialistic values seem to have lower
personal well-being than those who believe a materialistic way of life is relatively
undesirable. What increases psychological health and well-being are feelings of safety,
security, autonomy, authenticity and connection to others. Those people who tend
to watch a great deal of commercial television have materialistic values reinforced
through advertising and popular TV programming on celebrity lifestyles, leading to
a tendency to (over)idealize possessions and wealth, to buy themselves out of unhappi-
ness (retail therapy), and to enter less into community and other social activities.
Freedom of choice and an overabundance of goods and services comes at the cost
of feeling pressured and compelled to keep up. Materialistic people also tend to show
little interest in environmental and ecological issues, and exhibit little empathy or
intimacy in their relationships. It seems that many of us are not happy and, in the
present cultural circumstances, are unlikely ever to be so. One recognition and reaction
to this has been the growth of the voluntary simplicity movement - the intentional
personal downsizing of wants and commodity needs, the reduction in working hours
or the search for more fulfilling and less stressful employment, and the desire perhaps
to live with a much reduced environmental impact (Durning, 1992; Andrews, 1997;
Schor, 1998; Maniates, 2002). Those who adopt this simplified lifestyle, usually
