Consumer Culture

We hear it all the time: consumer culture is pervasive.  But what does that really mean?  People have always consumed.  We eat, we build homes and fill them with stuff, we wear clothing, we seek out entertainment and we use whatever technologies and transportation are available to us so long as we can afford the price.  Yes, those of us alive today have more wealth to spend on more products and many of those products are designed to break quickly or are made irrelevant by new products in a short time, but that systemic marketing-driven-perversion known as planned obsolescence doesn't necessarily separate us from people alive in earlier times.

Every generation has its' own cultural sensibilities, but by-and-large we humans are products of our environment and like most lifeforms we consume at the absolute limit of what we're capable of for as long as our environment will support it.  The problem today is that the environment can't support us for too many more generations at the rate at which we consume.  As we struggle to create growth in the economy, we are running out of raw resources and bumping against the limits of the biosphere to handle our wastes.  We have known this for some time.  Dr. M. King Hubbert first published his theory that would later become known as Peak Oil in 1956.  The book The Limits To Growth published in 1972 explained in almost prophetic detail the boundaries that we now seem to be struggling against.  Any number of pundits will tell you that the end is neigh whether because of physical limits, a broken culture or because of the corrupt systems of politics and economics.

The latter are really just an abstraction of true wealth.  That is to say the product of the application of energy, natural capital and labor; the pursuit of which typically yields three things: a consumable product, a profit for the producer and externalities which are consequences not dealt with by the producer. They include such things as lost habitat from clear-cutting a forest or loss of diversity due to starvation up the food chain as the result of over-fishing.  The producer takes the profits and the commoners (the rest of us and other parts of the living system) bear the off-ledger costs.

This system has become so ubiquitous that most of us don't even recognize the loss of a forest as a personal loss.  We have become so used to getting our food, fiber, fuel and medicine from the store that we don't even know that those things were freely available for most of history in our natural landscape.  Almost all land has been enclosed by private or government ownership and is no longer a resource available to the commons.  (Fortunately for us, the value of such land is so under-recognized that in most cases no one is policing it.)

So where does this leave us?  If you're at all concerned with the issues of our sick culture, depleting energy resources, our damaged environment and our dysfunctional economy and you're not ready to crawl under a rock and admit defeat, you're probably pretty frustrated these days.  Top down solutions don't work.  Influencing politics is nearly impossible without money and people who believe the world should consume less generally aren't the most ambitious of capitalists.  They certainly aren't winning many votes.  Many times we will seek strength in numbers and join like minded organizations to promote change.  There's one out there for everyone from left-learning environmental groups to right-leaning local militias and even a few that admirably defy definition using the dominant left-right paradigm.  What most of these organizations have in common is a surprising lack of effectiveness at initiating and sustaining meaningful change.  Though typically the higher the membership dues the better they are at pumping out marketing suggesting that the world is almost at a tipping point (if only you'll donate a few more dollars to the cause).  Meanwhile, if you're like most of us, you're still stuck in the grind.  You go to work, you drive a car, you try to cook for yourself and eat healthy, but occasionally grab a sandwich at a drive-though when you're in a hurry.  You're skeptical of the media, but haven't found any reliable alternatives. You know the world needs to change, but you're tethered to it just the way it is today and you don't feel big enough to make a difference.

Here I will postulate that the single most important thing we can do to change the world is to change ourselves.  If we want to end consumption as an 'ism', we must seek to become producers.  The trucks and trains and airplanes won't suddenly stop their tireless cross-stitching of the world just because you grow an onion, but I believe that if enough of us start doing a thousand little things to lessen our dependence on the systems that exploit our common natural wealth we will be working towards creating a better world. The way the world works now the economy channels natural forms of wealth into consumable goods and services.  Our consumption of them inequitably benefits the elite while passing off all of the externalities of that system like pollution, poor health and systemic poverty to the commons.  We are human, we will always consume and very few of us can make a clean break with society and become truly self-sufficient agrarians, but why should we let perfect be the enemy of good?

Next week we will start our exploration of the many ways we can each become producers.  You can do this almost regardless of your circumstance and once you start you will see how addictive it is.  As you make the transition you don't have to feel guilty about using a zip lock bag in your kids lunch.  The goal is to move towards being a producer and defy consumer culture by doing so.  It's a process, not a destination, but just to see how it feels, why not try wrapping that sandwich in something less disposable.  Look around, is there something you were going to throw out anyway or something that could be reused indefinitely that would work instead?