Question for Discussion:
Do Americans
Over-Consume? Should Americans reduce their
material consumption in order to preserve the
global environment?
Readings: Orr, "None So Blind;"
Orr, "The Ecology
of Giving and Consuming;" Berry, "The
Joys of Sales
Resistance," Ehrlich, "Too Many
Rich People"
Video: Affluenza
Volumes
of Bottled Water Consumed
Pearson, The Bottled Water Craze
Center for a New American Dream
CNAD: How Much is Enough
Bill McKibben: How Much is Enough
The
Myth of the American Dream
All Consuming
Passion: Waking up from
the AmericanDream
The New Politics
of Consumption: Why Americans
Want So Much
More Than They Need
PBS: Affluenza
About Affluenza: Americans Addiction to Consuming
Spending our way to Disaster
Affluenza: Shopping Fever
OverConsumption: Everyone's Problem
Overpopulation and the Effects of Consumerism
Overpopulation is Bad, but OverConsumption is
Worse
A Declaration of Independence from
OverConsumption
Towards a Solution to OverConsumption
Adbusters: Buy Nothing Day
Adbusters Campaigns
The BlackSpotSneaker (Anti-Nike ad)
Never Enough: AntiConsumerism Campaign
Redefining Progress.org
The Center for a Sustainable Economy
How Can we Change Consumerism?
How Much is Enough? The Rich are Consuming
the World
Spending Ourselves to Death
Bend Over and Consume
No Middle Way on the Environment
How Many Simple Things Do People Need
to Do to Save the Planet
If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?
How Many People Should the Earth Support?
Quotations on Consumerism/OverConsumption
World GDP and Population data
TOO MANY RICH PEOPLE:Weighing Relative
Burdens on the Planet
Volumes
of Bottled Water Consumed
Pearson, The Bottled Water Craze
To better understand Berry's style of writing, let's look at another writer who also uses humor, sarcasm, cynicism, and exaggeration and overstatement to make his points. Like Wendell Berry, Russell Baker in his article, "The Big Cash Register," suspects Americans' consumerism, materialism, individualism, obsession with money, and fascination with buying
and selling things.
The Big Cash Register
By RUSSELL BAKER
Is there anything left but money, the market,
the bottom line and more money, plus money, money, money?
Not in New York, friend. In New York people are standing on street
corners comparing their mutual funds. In restaurants they are sitting
over third-rate meals at $60 a plate and gossiping about apartments
renting for $10,000 a month.
Two-bedroom limousines deposit and collect people at Broadway theaters
where ticket prices run up to $75 per seat.
Men walk the streets with mobile telephones pressed to their faces.
They are talking to London, Zurich, Hong Kong, Wall Street, Tokyo
about the latest price of gold, diamonds, industrials, durables, perishables,
pork bellies, potato chips, francs, beans, mustard, chopped onions.
Alan Greenspan's finaglings with the cost of money are being passionately
debated. Everyone says he will soon raise interest rates again to
stop more people from getting jobs. This serves a double purpose.
Bankers will feel more comfortable about money while welfare clients
will enjoy an exhilarating challenge, now that they have to find jobs
or do without money.
In a lighter, wittier, more insouciant age, an age less consumed by
money, someone would write an amusing song about such unmoneyed oddballs:
"Yes, we have no more money,
"We have no more money today. . . ."
This song will not be written in New York, however, unless market
surveys and focus-group studies show it will sell enough records to
rake in dollars by the million.
Up at Elaine's, writers with $300,000 advances for unwritten books
grouse that their publishers are threatening lawsuits to get their
money back. Down at the Four Seasons, publishers say it doesn't make
sense to fool with writers who can only do $20,000 books when by paying
millions to best-seller producers they can make millions more.
In New York, books -- like films, music and paintings -- have become
"product" with which some conglomerate's cost center is
expected to fatten its bottom line.
Rubes from out of town stand in Rockefeller Center gaping at the thought
of all that money it cost General Electric to buy NBC. Then they go
over to Sixth Avenue and gape about all that money Westinghouse paid
to buy CBS.
Visitors whose gapers are not exhausted move on to gape at ABC, which
cost the Disney money octopus all that money.
People who are all gaped out lie on hotel beds stunned by thoughts
of how much money, money, money it must have cost Rupert Murdoch to
create the Fox network to adorn his worldwide conglomerated money-making
machine.
Lying on those hotel beds, out-of-towners surfing the TV cost centers
of these four gigantic corporations are badgered to buy cars, beer,
denture adhesives, heartburn nostrums, furniture,telephones, toe-fungus
preventatives, frozen waffles, exercise machines, meal-in-a-can provender
for health-conscious geezers, hearing aids, tennis shoes, Caribbean
cruises . . .
In East Side wine shops East Siders with overflow money sticking out
of pockets and ears are paying $140 a bottle for French wine. And
buying it by the case. Some by the gross.
Down in Wall Street's fabled canyons young men in wide suspenders
toss around hundreds of millions of other people's money, money, money
and debate, between buys and sells,whether to upgrade the second car
to a Porsche or a Ferrari.
Meanwhile, from all over the land communications pour in from C.E.O.'s
inquiring whether any small countries with pleasant climates are for
sale to buyers to whom price is no problem. With the money these birds
pull down these days, the trophy house and trophy wife are no longer
enough to satisfy their needs to thump themselves on the chest. They
now need trophy countries.
Moving through so much money leaves a person marveling at how rich
you can become in this place, especially if you have a good agent,
good investment banker and good lawyer.
It makes you think of famous old-timers who sold too cheap. In
New York you think of Judas selling out for 30 pieces of silver and
want to weep. Poor guy didn't even ask for any stock options.
New York Times, April 22, 1997
In order to understand Berry's argument against consumerism and salesmanship and his support for sales resistance, let's look at some of the figures the describe the amount and percentage of goods that Americans consume. (See the surveys of American attitudes on Consumption and consumer lifestyles taken by the Center for the New American Dream.)
1. Important Guiding Principles
2. What are most Americans' Guiding Principles
3. Criticism of How Much We Buy and Consume
4. Root Causes of Environmental Problems
5. Major Changes Needed to Protect the Environment
6. Effectiveness of Our Actions to Protect the Environment
7. Concerns about Children and Future
Generations
8. Deepest Aspirations are Non-Material
9. Compared to My Parents at My Age
10. Americans Ready to Take Action
Ehrlich, "Too Many Rich People"
" The relatively small population of rich people therefore accounts for roughly two-thirds of global environmental destruction, as measured by energy use. From this perspective, the most important population problem is overpopulation in the industrialized nations.
The United States poses the most serious threat of all to human life support systems. It has a gigantic population, the third largest on Earth, more than a quarter of a billion people. Americans are superconsumers, and use inefficient technologies to feed their appetites. Each, on average, uses 11 kW of energy, twice as much as the average Japanese, more than three times as much as the average Spaniard, and over 100 times as much as an average Bangladeshi.
CNAD: How Much is Enough
The Myth of the American Dream
About Affluenza: Americans Addiction to Consuming
A Declaration of Independence from
OverConsumption
How Much is Enough? The Rich are Consuming
the World
Champagne and Poverty: Global Consumption
How Can we Change Consumerism?
Berry, "The Joys of Sales Resistance,"
"I am more and more impressed by the generality of the assumption that human lives are properly to be invented by an academic-corporate-governmental elite and then either sold to their passive and choiceless recipients or doled out to them in the manner of welfare payments. Any necessary thinking—so the assumption goes—will be done by certified smart people in offices, laboratories, boardrooms, and other high places and then will be handed down to supposedly unsmart people in low places."
"III. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money."
"Of course, education is for the Future, and the Future is one of our better-packaged items and attracts many buyers. (The past, on the other hand, is hard to sell; it is, after all, past.) The Future is where we'll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live and consume forever."
"The Free Market. The free market sees to it that everything ends up in the right place—that is, it makes sure that only the worthy get rich. All millionaires and billionaires have worked hard for their money, and they deserve the rewards of their work. They need all the help they can get from the government and the universities. Having money stimulates the rich to further economic activity that ultimately benefits the rest of us. Needing money stimulates the rest of us to further economic activity that ultimately benefits the rich."
"That unlimited economic growth can be accomplished within limited space, with limited materials and limited intelligence, only shows the unlimited courage and self-confidence of these Great Minds. That unlimited economic growth implies unlimited consumption, which in turn implies unlimited pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, only makes the prospect even more unlimited."
"My joy comes from my instantaneous knowledge that I am not going to buy either piece of equipment. When the inevitable saleswoman comes to tell me that I cannot be up-to-date, or intelligent, or creative, or handsome, or young, or eligible for the sexual favors of so fair a creature as herself unless I buy these products, dear reader, I am not going to do it. "
Orr, "None So Blind: The Problem of Ecological
Denial;"
"Willful blindness has reached epidemic proportions in our time. Nowhere is this more evident than in recent actions by the U.S. Congress to deny outright the massive and growing body of scientific data about the deterioration of the earth’s vital signs, while attempting to dismantle environmental laws and regulations." (85)
"Denial is the willful dismissal or distortion of fact, logic, and data in the service of ideology and self-interest.....And denial is apparent in every historical epoch as a willing blindness to the events, trends, and evidence that threaten one established interest or another." (86)
"In our time, great effort is being made to deny that there are any physical limits to our use of the earth or to the legitimacy of human wants. " (86)
"The power of competition and the ingenuity of technology to find substitutes for scarce materials, it is believed, will surmount physical limits. Markets are powerful institutions that, properly harnessed, can accomplish a great deal. But they cannot substitute for healthy communities, good government, and farsighted public policies. Nor can they displace the laws, both physical and moral, that bound human actions. " (86)
"We do not doubt for a second that we now face some genuine crises and that we will face others in the future. But for the most part, ecological deterioration will be a gradual wasting away of possibilities and potentials, more like the original medical meaning of the word “consumption.” (90)
Orr, "The Ecology of Giving and Consuming;"
"...A GREAT GLOBAL DEBATE is under
way about the sustainability and fairness of present patterns of
consumption.’ On one side are those speaking for the poor
of the world, various religious organizations, and the environment
and argue adamantly that wealthy Americans, Japanese, and Europeans
consume far too much. Doing so, they believe, is unfair to the poor,
to future generations, and to other forms of life. It is stressing
the earth to the breaking point. Others, who believe themselves
to be in the middle, argue that we do not consume too much; rather,
we consume with too little efficiency. Below the surface of
such views there is, I suspect, the gloomy conviction that it is
too late to rein in the hedonism loosed on the world by the advertisers
and the corporate purveyors of fun and convenience. Human nature,
they think, is inherently porcine, and given a choice, people wish
only to see the world as an object to consume, with the highest
purpose of life to maximize bodily and psychological pleasure."
(140)
"The first step involved bamboozling people into believing
that who they were and what they owned were one and the same...
The third step was to make as many people as possible compulsive
and impulsive consumers, which is to say addicts, by means of daily
bombardment with advertising."
(142
"Do we feel guilty about the gluttony, avarice, greed, lust,
pride, envy, and sloth that drive our addiction? A few may But most
of us, I suspect, consume mindlessly and then feel burdened by having
too much stuff. Our typical response is to hold a garage sale
and then take the proceeds to the mall and start all over again."
(143)
"Do we consume too much? Certainly we do! In businessman and
economist Paul Hawken’s words:
"Is it possible, in other words, to create a society that lives within its ecological means—taking no more than it needs, replacing what it takes, depleting neither its natural capital nor its people—one that is ecologically sustainable and also humanly sustaining? " (Orr, 144)
"The process of design begins with questions such as the following: How does the proposed action fit the ecology of a place over time? Does it keep wealth within the community? Does it help people to become better neighbors and more competent persons What are the true costs, and who pays? What does it do for, or to the prospects for, the children?"
(Orr, 148)
"Without quite intending to do so, we have created a global culture of consumption that will come undone, perhaps in a few decades, perhaps a bit later. We are at risk of being engulfed in a flood of barbarism magnified by the ecologists’ nightmare of overpopulation, resource scarcity, biotic impoverishment, famine, rampant disease, pollution, and climate change. The only response that does credit to our self-proclaimed status as Homo sapiens is to rechart our course." (Orr, 153)
"The problem is not one of potential but one of motivation. To live up to our potential, we must first know that it is possible for us to live well without consuming the world’s loveliness along with our children’s legacy. But we must be inspired to act by examples that we can see, touch, and experience." (Orr, 154)
Let's not look at the percentage of global consumption Americans consume. See the World GDP and Population data . Looking at this data we can see that the United States with 4.74 percent of the global population consumer 27.7 percent of the total global production. The United States, however, has only the fifth highest per capita income in the world. So we aren't the richest nation. But the United States along with the other richest nations consume the vast majority of the total global production:
"A group of 9 nations representing the highest per capita income account for 60% of the total world GDP. Extending this to 43 rich nations accounting for 20% of world population, they represent 84% of world GDP; 57 nations with 30% of world population account for 90% of world GDP. This amounts to say that the poor 70% of world population receives only 10% of the total world income!"
Clearly, Berry is right when he argues that America is a consumerist, materialistic, individualistic society. And that Americans along with other rich nations consume the vast majority of the global resources. But the survey data indicates that despite their acceptance of this consumer lifestyle, many Americans worry about the health of the environment, the need to reduce their consumption and waste, and worry about their future and their children's future. How do we account for this? If American society is a consumeristic society, why aren't more Americans proud of their way of life, how they treat the environment, and secure about their future? The survey data clearly indicates that many Americans are ambivalent about consumerism as a way of life.
Berry argues that American society at heart is based on salesmanship. Americans are constantly being sold products and lifestyles by business, government, politicians, and even artists and writers. He suggests that America even has an "academic-corporate-governmental elite" that specializes in trying to sell Americans their scientific, technological, intellectual, cultural, social, and political expertise. Berry uses our present educational institutions as an example of how this salesmanship works. Americans are told that the purpose of education is "make people able to earn more and more money." Any part of education, culture, science, or other branch of arts and learning is irrelevant to the larger goal of teaching people how to earn more and more money. Of course, the larger object of earning money is that so Americans spend it, accumulating all the material goods they can to increase their economic, social, and cultural status. The larger goal of all this "salestalk we are constantly bombarded with" is to convince Americans that in "the future we'll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live and consume forever." That is, of course, if we continue to consume in the present and work to buy even more goods in the future. However, Berry argues that constant consuming will not and can not solve all of Americans' problems: " For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope." If Americans resist this consumerism and salestalk, and practice "sales resistance," then they will be freer, more independent, happier, and more satisfied.
Berry now challenges the popular environmentalist slogan, "Think Globally, Act Locally." He argues that "global thinking is not possible." We cannot understand either our global environment or our expanding global industrial society. Berry charges that those who try to think globally end up causing a lot of trouble, because they are thinking abstractly; they don't see and understand the place they live in. In order to understand our local places, he suggests that we get "off our horses and out of our cars" and actually explore the real place and environment we inhabit. Berry concludes that we can only help our global society and environment by learning to ask and answer the right local questions about how to live in our place. By trying to think globally, we end up creating abstractions that prevent us from understanding and working with our local environments.
Berry now examines what we can do as individuals by acting locally and thinking locally. He argues that "the real work of saving the planet will be small small, local, and humbling." Only by starting in our local places and taking small, concrete steps can we begin to remake our "local cultures" in order to make them sustainable and in harmony with our local places and environments. His larger point is that we can't really manage or change the globe. We can only be responsible for being better stewards of of our own homes and communities. Only through the daily, concrete acts of individuals in their local communities trying to make a difference will our cultures and societies be changed. However, if we continue to allow our individuals lives to be dominated and controlled by economic, political, and cultural elites who try to sell us infinite economic growth, increasing consumption, global development, and the infinite promise of science and technology, our global industrial society and our local places will continue to face environmental and economic decline. For Berry, the key to solving the environmental crisis lies in each individual realizing that every action in their daily lives in their local communities and environments either contributes to creating a sustainable society and culture or supports global environmental destruction. Thus, only by thinking and acting locally can we begin to make a difference.
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© 1997 by Chris H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
Created 20 Jan. 1997: Last Modified: 5 Dec. 2003
E-mail: cclewis@spot.colorado.edu
URL: http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/ecology/car.htm
