|
Overconsumption: Everyone's
Problem
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time ... But if you have
come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Lilla Watson, Brisbane-based Aboriginal educator and activist.
Over the past few hundred years, Mankind (and I use the term 'man' deliberately as it
has largely been the responsibility of men) has conducted a huge experiment with our
precious Earth and its human communities.
The pursuit of material wealth by people with financial and capital power in largely
unaccountable institutions is having the effect of molding diverse cultures, natural and
mental environments into a monoculture that serves the interests of the modern-day
corporation. This grand experiment has employed the ideologies of corporate globalisation
and economic rationalism to concentrate power in a way that damages ecosystems and
violates the rights of human communities.
If we are to halt these trends, we are faced with the challenge of reducing the global
economic power of the institutions, systems and international trade and investment
agreements of corporate globalisation, thereby increasing the freedom available to
Majority ('Third') World and Indigenous communities to control their own destinies. At the
same time we are faced with the challenge of transforming the growth-obsessed development
that plagues the Minority ('First') World and which threatens to reduce human and
ecological diversity to a consumerist monoculture. This, in part, depends on our ability
to understand that growth and development are not the same thing.
The overconsuming, overdeveloped lifestyles and industries of the Minority World have
depended upon the military and economic oppression of labour and ecosystems of Majority
World and Indigenous communities. For everyone on this planet to 'enjoy' the materialistic
lifestyle of the average Australian, we would currently need five to six Earths in order
to supply the necessary raw materials, sink functions for consumer and industrial wastes,
and life-sustaining services such as clean air and water.
Analyses by The Earth Council (www.ecouncil.ac.cr)
- an organisation set up to monitor the recommendations made by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit
- demonstrate that humanity as a whole is consuming at a rate 35% beyond the limit where
nature can still sustainably regenerate itself. Australia's per capita consumption exceeds
the per capita limit by over five times. As the figures upon which these analyses are
based are a few years old, the current situation is likely to be even worse than this.
According to the 1998 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program,
the 20% of the world's people in the highest-income nations account for over 50% of carbon
dioxide emissions, compared to only 3% for the financially poorest fifth. The consequent
global warming is likely to affect the financially poorer countries the most - for
example, the land area of Bangladesh could decrease by 17%, due to rising sea levels. The
report cites the alarming rates of deforestation in some Majority World countries, with
over half of the resulting wood and nearly three-quarters of the resulting paper used in
industrialised nations.
The situation runs even deeper than the exploitation of the resources of the Majority
World communities, however. The transcorporate marketing machine, which globally spends
several hundred billion dollars per year on product/service advertising and promotion, has
been extending its reach to young people and the middle and owner classes of the Majority
World. While India's middle class, for example, may be a small percentage of its overall
population, in numeric terms it represents a major new market to which to sell a swag of
unhealthy and environmentally destructive products and services.
For many people in the Majority World, television and tourism represent their only
exposure to what life is like in the industrialised nations. The main picture that they
get from this is that life in North America or Europe is glamorous, that people are
wealthy and need to do little work.
Corporate advertising does not just attempt to make products/services appealing to
people ... it spends billions of dollars on reshaping people's attitudes, self-esteem and
emotions so that they become the types of people that are more likely to buy. It induces
social pressures and is supported by state-sponsored institutions that firmly embed a
culture of consumerism, of "you are what you buy". As a result, people in the
Majority World are psychologically pressured to see their traditional culture as
'backward', and the new way of living presented to them on television sets and modelled by
tourists as the outcome of 'progress'.
Consumer culture is clearly being exported on a global basis, to enable transnational
corporations to sell their products to single, global monocultural markets rather than
having to diversify and individually market their products/services to the thousands of
different human cultures and linguistic groups. Consumerism is being sold as a means
through which young people in the Majority World can find 'freedom' and 'liberty' from
their traditional social structures.
Conventional economics, the centralisation of power to transnational corporations and the
politics of 'free' trade do not just affect those in the Majority World. In industrialised
nations like Australia, these forces conspire just as strongly to convert peoples' needs
for human relationships and personal development into artificial needs for consumer
products and services. The origins and reinforcing mechanisms behind consumer culture in
the Minority World are complex, having their roots before the Industrial Revolution, but
have nevertheless been seized upon by the modern day corporation in an attempt to mold the
world into an image of its own making.
Local and national environmental problems, growing social inequities, alienation, overwork
and a range of other ill-effects of the growth economy are significantly compromising the
quality of our lives here in Australia. Indeed, while narrow conventional indicators such
as GDP suggest that economic welfare is expanding, more balanced economic indicators such
as the Genuine Progress Indicator demonstrate that the costs of continued economic and
consumption growth are outweighing the benefits (see www.rprogress.org).
Overconsumption is part of an addictive illness sometimes called "Affluenza".
Australia has approximately 208,000 millionaires, about three times as many as in 1993.
Financial wealth is no longer seen as an exclusive club of the super-wealthy. More and
more people are looking to get into the act, joining the growing numbers who are 'money
rich and time poor'. Many make major sacrifices to their relationships and spiritual lives
in their attempts to get richer - yet feel compelled to want more once their initial goals
are achieved.
In this sense, it is not appropriate to speak of development as a process by which we help
'poor' communities overseas. All communities have their own patterns of wealth and
poverty, and in industrialised nations our poverty tends to lie in the realms of
disconnected spirit, broken community, dysfunctional relationships and a lack of passion
and spontaneity. We are all poor and wealthy at the same time, in similar and different
ways across communities.
Traditional development thinking emphasised that 'we' had the answers to help 'them'. A
newer wave of thinking has emphasised that 'we' need to change ourselves (eg reduce our
consumption) in order to help 'them'. It is argued here that a further evolution in
development thinking is required, that we need to challenge our overconsumption and the
social influences of consumerism to help liberate us all from the economic and political
structures that dominate us.
Changing our consumption patterns, and challenging the structures and processes that
promote consumerism, are parts of an interdependent system of changes required to work
towards a just, diverse and ecologically sustainable world for all. To make a difference,
consumption-reduction needs to enhance and be enhanced by efforts to:
~~ re-localise economic processes so that a greater proportion of our needs are met
through local production under bioregionally-based community control;
~~ build community that encourages reduced ecological footprints and real experiences of
Earth-connectedness;
~~ develop new global institutions that regulate trade and investment in the service of
the environment and human rights, while ending, transforming or radically restructuring
those institutions that put everything at the mercy of 'free' trade and global capitalism;
~~ make policy changes away from economic fundamentalism and towards a new economics that
is responsive to the needs of the Earth's ecosystems and to cultural and social values.
Furthermore, living lives with less consumption and more Earth- and
community-connectedness is perhaps the most powerful thing that we can do to inform people
in the Majority World of the dangers of following the consumer tread-mill, of trying to
play the impossible game of 'catch-up' development. Coming from societies lavished with
conspicuous consumption, we do not have the integrity to say "it's not in your
interests to follow our pathway based on consumer culture". We also cannot further
oppress Majority World communities by saying "You must remain the same in order to
help us save ourselves in the West".
But by telling our stories of people and communities in industrialised nations who are
rejecting consumer culture, and the global economy that pushes it, people in the Majority
World will have access to information that they don't receive through their television
sets. By asking whether they are concerned with the changes happening to their lives and
societies, we can invite them to work with us (and hear their invitations for us to work
with them) to co-create something new that draws upon both the ancient and new evolving.
By being self-reflective and open to signs that we are oppressing and/or not valuing our
Majority World and Indigenous friends in our consumption patterns and in our other ways of
living, we can open up new discoveries about ourselves.
This set of papers on sustainable consumption discusses both individual and systems-level
ideas. We hope that these ideas will help to promote a new, decentralised society where
people, communities and the environment are valued. It suggests a range of things that we
can do to close this grand experiment of consumerism and corporate globalisation, to help
liberate us all from the systems and conditioning that limits our freedom to be creative,
compassionate and fully alive people.
|
