Abstract
Ours is an ecologically full world of some 6.5 billion people, more than half of whom live in material poverty. It is a world where the capacity of environmental systems to absorb abuse while delivering vital goods and services is more than fully taxed. Current patterns of global consumption deplete natural resources (like fisheries or ground water) faster than they regenerate. Prevailing networks of production create waste in volumes that overwhelm the absorptive capacity of natural systems (leading to problems like climate change). Taken together, 1.4 planets of ecosystem capacity and natural resource stocks are required to sustain human society, and we are quickly heading to 1.5 and beyond.1 Growing affluence among the world’s poor is yielding a class of “new consumers” for whom automobiles, a diet rich in meat, and larger homes with more possessions are the looming norm,2 and transnational corporations faced with saturated markets in the rich world work diligently to cultivate new consumer appetites among the new consumers of the poor world. Humanity seems locked on a collision course with massive ecological decline, destabilizing crisis, and authoritarian (even draconian) social and political response.3
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, the Global Footprint Network < http://www.footprintnetwork.org >
- 2.
For example Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, The New Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the Environment, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004.
- 3.
For a recent treatment of these possibilities, and at least one possible response, see Robert Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, White River Jct., Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishers, 2008.
- 4.
A rich literature exists on “contraction and convergence,” and on the limits of technological change and consumption shifting alone to fully blunt the dynamics of ecologic overshoot. See, for example, Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2006; Myers and Kent, op.cit.; Princen, Maniates, and Conca, Confronting Consumption, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; and Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius et al., Fair Future and Limited Resources, London: Zed Books, 2007. The nearby figure on “contraction and convergence” is taken from Sachs et al.
- 5.
In stark contrast to contemporary environmental discourses, which often view “crisis” as a necessary, even desirable precursor to policies of environmental sustainability and social justice, earlier environmental writers highlighted the undesirable consequences of crisis: authoritarianism, anti-democratic impulses, the search for quick fixes, even those that undermine essential liberties or civil rights. Today’s scholars of environmental sustainability could benefit from a close reading of this earlier literature. See, for example, Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect: Updated and Reconsidered for the Nineteen Nineties, New York: R.S. Means, 1991 (originally published in 1980), William Ophuls, “The Scarcity Society,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1974, pp. 47–52, and Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1977.
- 6.
Guha, op. cit., offers a template for how to think about such a process in his discussion of escalating consumption in India.
- 7.
David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2001.
- 8.
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, New York: Basic Books, 2003.
- 9.
According to Bullfrog Films, the film’s distributor.
- 10.
For more data and sources, see Michael Maniates, “In Search of Consumptive Resistance: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement,” in Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds., Confronting Consumption, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
- 11.
“The Fetzer Institute’s mission, to foster awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in the emerging global community, rests on its conviction that efforts to address the world’s critical issues must go beyond political, social, and economic strategies to their psychological and spiritual roots.” From http://www.fetzer.org/
- 12.
Meeting summaries are available from the Simplicity Forum at http://www.simplicityforum.org/congressreports.html
- 13.
13 TBYT’s “Time to Care Public Policy Agenda” is available at www.timeday.org
- 14.
Schor provides an accessible analysis of this treadmill. See Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, New York: Harper, 1999.
- 15.
See, for example, “Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment?,” at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/energy_2006_12.pdf
- 16.
For example Lynn Berger, The Savvy Part-Time Professional: How to Land, Create, or Negotiate the Part-time Job of Your Dreams, Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2006, or Page Hobey, “When No Could Mean Yes: How to Negotiate a Flexible Work Schedule,” at http://www.mommytrackd.com/no-means-yes
- 17.
For example Schor, op cit., and Maniates, op cit.
- 18.
The notion that critical “focusing events” – a deadly smog, rivers aflame, massive oil spills, energy price spikes – drive progressive environmental policy runs through much of the sustainable consumption literature. One consequence is the perception that policy progress requires crisis, which can be a debilitating assumption when the crises at hand are potentially catastrophic and irreversible. Another consequence of the focusing event logic is the assumption that viable political pressure can be mobilized by creating a focusing event (Greenpeace with its photogenic Zodiac speedboats doing battle with lumbering whaling trawlers is the classic example). Lost in the ensuing discussion about whether to manufacture focusing events or wait for the catastrophes on the horizon is a critical assessment of the “focusing event” logic itself. Do dramatic events indeed lie at the root of striking changes in environmental (and other) policy? Or are other, more pivotal forces, in play? For a defining articulation of focusing-event politics regarding environmental policy, see Anthony Downs, “Up and Down with Ecology: The Issue Attention Cycle,” The Public Interest, Volume 28 (Summer 1972), pp. 38–50. For a recent questioning of this focusing-event logic, and the price environmental scholars pay for so readily accepting it, see Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
- 19.
See http://www.timeday.org/tbyt_day.asp
- 20.
James Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
- 21.
Paid (or, indeed, even unpaid) vacations are not mandated in the United States, and only 14% of working American take 2 weeks or more of vacation a year.
- 22.
See, for example, P. Trunk, “What Gen Y Really Wants,” Time Magazine, July 5, 2007, at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1640395,00.html
- 23.
See, for example, MSNBC’s report on “Visitors to National Forests on the Decline,” November 29, 2008. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27970449/>
- 24.
See “Let’s Create A ‘Vacation Matters’ National Conference for 2009” at < http://timeday.org/right2vacation/vacation.asp>
- 25.
Unlocking the Origins of Political Opportunity: Student Roles and Power Potential in Social and Environmental Movements, Senior Research Project, Dept. of Environmental Science, Allegheny College. An abstract is available at http://webpub.allegheny.edu/dept/envisci/ESInfo/comps/2006abstracts.html#stallard Copies of the larger report are available upon request from Michael Maniates.
- 26.
See Peter Dreier and Richard Appelbaum, “The Campus Anti-Sweatshop Movement,” The American Prospect, November 30, 2002, and the homepage of the US Student Anti-Sweatshop Movement at http://www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org/
- 27.
See, for example, the India Resource Center’s Coca-Cola resources at www.indiaresource.org/campaigns/coke/index.html
- 28.
For example the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California Los Angeles at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html
- 29.
For example Harvard University’s Project on Global Working Families at www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/
- 30.
On the history and political costs of this emerging ethos of “politeness” in mainstream environmentalism, see Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
- 31.
From the preface of Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce, New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
- 32.
Portions of this chapter are drawn, in revised form, from Michael Maniates, “Struggling with Sacrifice: Take Back Your Time and Right2Vacation.org,” in Michael Maniates and John Meyers eds., The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
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Maniates, M.F. (2009). Cultivating Consumer Restraint in an Ecologically Full World: The Case of “Take Back Your Time”. In: Lebel, L., Lorek, S., Daniel, R. (eds) Sustainable Production Consumption Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3090-0_2
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