Taking Stock
How Foresight Can Cut Our Losses
Currently, more money is being spent on breast implants and Viagra than on Alzheimer’s research. So in the very near future there should be a large elderly population with impressive breasts and magnificent erections, but no recollection of what to do with them.
—Sally Feldman
We’ve been born into a cult that has made a god of numbers. We worship rankings, quantities, statistics, profit margins, and polls … We want to know first, last, biggest, best, most, least, latest, and how much the baby weighs. We’ve mapped the genome. We’ve captured the quark. By God or by Newton we will know.
—Marilyn Ferguson
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
—Albert Einstein
We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.
—Al Gore
I have an embarrassing confession to make, right up front: I’m not a “confident consumer.” This morning’s New York Times may report that consumer confidence has risen to its highest level in more than three years, but as I begin writing this first chapter, I’m not any more confident than I was back then that our mainstream lifestyle can take us where we need to go. I’m confident enough in general, I guess, but I’m very uncomfortable being labeled a “consumer.” We’re far more than
consumers, aren’t we? We’re a brilliant species that creates human-scaled tools and art, works cooperatively, takes care of natural assets, and uses its awesome brainpower to solve both small and large challenges. But we aren’t giving ourselves the time, permission, or focus to do these things well.
What’s up? We aren’t eating like humans who need energy and vitality to feel great. We’re not taking care of the children the way humans have always done. We’re not designing products that last. And we’re overriding many of our most tried and tested instincts, taking direction mostly from the relatively “new,” rational side of the human brain that creates assembly lines, profit-and-loss statements, and missiles. We’re suppressing the more playful, empathetic, and intuitive side, missing great opportunities for fun and fulfillment.
I have a proposal. Rather than settle for a passive/aggressive, dysfunctional American Dream, let’s just recycle it. The people who track “consumer confidence” have their metrics on backward, in my humble opinion. Overconsumption is clearly a fundamental problem, not solution, in the maintenance of a healthy economy and planet. I believe it’s not just oil production that’s about to peak, but also human satisfaction. If we picture our position on a graph called “The Benefits of Consumption,” it appears we’re on a slope of diminishing returns. We’re consuming more now but enjoying it less, to paraphrase an old cigarette commercial.
Here are what I consider to be the two most critical economic screw-ups: First, our economy is out of alignment with the values that make us feel grateful to be alive. Values such as health, relationships with people, connection with nature, satisfying work, a sense of purpose, abundance of personal time, and freedom of expression are the real wealth, far more valuable than money and mountains of manufactured stuff. If we obtain these values directly, without money as a constant, meddling middleman, we don’t need as much money, and we don’t need to tear things apart to get it. The whole industrial metabolism of civilization—what some call “throughput”—can slow down to match the rhythms of nature.
Second, although we’re trained to think of the environment as a subset of the economy, when we think about it, we see it’s just the opposite. Everything is inside the environment. The economy is really just an opportunistic system of ideas and rules we made up, but the environment is reality itself—a wonderful place for our homes, farms, schools, and businesses to locate—as long as we’re trustworthy tenants. But without a more grounded, respectful ethic, we’ll never get back our damage deposit. In this era of overconsumption, production is allowed to be careless, and, as a result, the faster we produce and consume, the faster natural and cultural assets get
trashed. For example, of the roughly five thousand languages now spoken in the world, fewer than 20 percent will still be spoken by the year 2100. The disappearing languages, though rich in tradition, ties to the land, and loyalties to people, simply don’t translate in the global economy.1
It’s important to remember that the economy was invented when world population was ten times smaller but the planet seemed infinitely large and filled to the brim with resources. It seemed foolish not to produce and consume all we wanted, especially since this seemed to liberate the downtrodden individual. But in the guardian economy now being born—that acknowledges how small the world really is and how fragile its web of life—only the interest provided by nature will be consumed, never the principle. In the new “mindful money” lifestyle, there will be more sensible boundaries and constraints, just as there is when an architect begins to design a house on a new site. The lot is only so big, with a certain type of soil, certain solar exposure, and so on. We can be as creative as we want within sustainable parameters, but the limits of the Earth are as tangible and finite as the characteristics of a building lot.
Changing just one idea can change the whole world: the accumulation of money and consumption of manufactured stuff is not why we’re here. There are other ways to meet human needs, many of which are not currently being met. When we change the way we think about value, the world will begin to regenerate, almost overnight. We’re ready! One piece of evidence is that, according to the World Values Survey, a near majority of Americans (61 percent) believe that protecting the environment should be a higher priority than economic growth; that we should prevent the natural world from coming unraveled even if that were to mean some loss of jobs and a slower-growing economy. The good news is, saving our civilization from collapse will create jobs and help the economy, which can’t flourish in a battered, depleted environment.
In the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, my coauthors and I observe that people in the money-obsessed societies of the world—especially the United Sates—are victims of a disease with crippling impacts on individuals, families, communities, cultural traditions, and the environment. It leaves people feeling disoriented and disconnected—ideal consumer traits from a business perspective! We point out that affluenza is far from being a disease of the rich; the compulsion to purchase and possess happiness has
now infected all economic sectors in most countries of the world. Consumer researcher Van Kempen saw farmers in Mali wearing digital watches without batteries, and Tibetan nomads who proudly display their cell phones even though there’s no reception. And it’s the same in American low-income neighborhoods, where iPods, high-end running shoes, and leased or illicit Porsches are frequently on display. In a full 98 percent of American homes, at least one color TV beams thousands of behavior-defining commercial messages into occupants’ jingle-filled brains every week.
Isn’t this barrage of media a primary reason why so many people can readily identify one hundred commercial logos but fewer than ten plants? In a recent poll, average Americans were asked to name three Supreme Court Justices, and while only 17 percent could do that, 59 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges. This is America, where we spend more on garbage bags than ninety of the world’s countries spend on everything. Where, in 2005, more than two million filed for bankruptcy yet 13 percent of all homes purchased were second or even third homes. As Homer Simpson observed in an episode of The Simpsons, animals at the zoo are “bored, obese, and have lost their sense of meaning. The American Dream.”
Many of the symptoms we reported in Affluenza have gotten worse since the revised edition came out in 2005. The world is in effect spinning even faster; the global economy is heating up the new millennium with activities that are often inefficient, unjust, and unnecessary. Americans now fly 750 billion miles every year (an average of 2,200 miles per person, up from 650 in 1970). Even more astonishing, we collectively drive the equivalent of a billion times around the planet’s 25,000-mile circumference every year. No wonder we, and the Earth, are tired! We annually throw away more than 2.5 million tons of obsolete computers, TVs, cell phones, and other electronic products. We each burn the equivalent of 2,500 gallons of gasoline annually, when all energy uses are considered. It takes a lot of time and human energy to accomplish all this. The question is, do we deserve an award or a subpoena?
This year’s annual “directory of billionaires,” compiled by Forbes magazine, lists 15 percent more ultra-rich Americans than last year. The rich get richer, that’s nothing new. But what is new is the scope of the problem: the top 1 percent of American households now own 58 percent of all corporate wealth, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Yet, about 50 percent of Americans do not own any stock at all. In 2004, the top one percent of earners, including CEOs, received 11.2 percent of all wage income—up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and almost twice the 6 percent from three decades ago.2
Admittedly, most Americans are fascinated that software magnate Larry Ellison’s private yacht, the Rising Sun—453 feet in length—is as imposing as a luxury cruise liner (or battleship); and that Paul Allen’s slightly smaller yacht sports its own, portable submarine. But if we really examine the spectrum of wealth in America, it’s easy to see that many can’t even afford to float a Wal-Mart rubber ducky in their bathtub, since the price of tap water is rising as steadily as the price of petroleum. (Since 2001, its price has risen an average of 27 percent in the United States, according to the Earth Policy Institute). In fact, many at the very bottom of the economy don’t even have a bathtub. (Nearly one in three hundred are homeless and twice as many are in prison.) But while street people manage to fit all worldly belongings into a shopping cart or packing crate, we middle- and upper-class Americans, almost universally infected with affluenza, can’t seem to cram our stuff into houses twice the size of a typical 1950s American home.
In recent years American household budgets have skyrocketed for day care, elder care, health care, lawn care, pet care, house care, and hair care—in direct proportion to our often-frustrated quest to be “carefree.” Much of U.S. spending is for purchases far beyond subsistence, but there’s a growing segment of American society whose boats haven’t risen at all in the economic high tide of recent years, as the prices for such essentials as housing, food, health care, education, and transportation continue to creep up. Close to fifty million Americans are without health insurance; hundreds of thousands have had their retirement benefits cut; and tens of thousands have recently waved good-bye to jobs that were shipped overseas. From 1998 to 2005, U.S. consumer debt almost doubled, from about $1.3 trillion to $2.16 trillion, according to Federal Reserve analysts, and in 2006, Americans spent one percent more than they earned, the worst “savings” rate since the Depression. Many homeowners regard home equity as a “savings” account, and collectively they borrowed almost a trillion dollars from their equity in 2006. But experts say that financial well is going dry.
Where will the capital come from to keep consumer spending pumped up? Says Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for The Washington Post for the last thirty years, “The great workhorse of the U.S. economy—consumer spending—will slow. For six decades, consumer debt and spending have risen faster than income, but we’re approaching a turning point.”3 Since consumers are responsible for more than two-thirds of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, what will happen when household debt, lack of savings, an increase in the cost of living and other variables combine to reduce consumer spending?
Answer: The economy will continue to reinvent itself. The average
American, and the three hundred million people he represents, will become less wasteful and more conscious of durability, quality, and efficiency. He’ll rediscover real wealth—what really matters—as people always do when the game changes. He’ll become more conscious of what other people need and less obsessed with his own, often-trivial gratifications. He’ll become more active in local politics, and his TV time will shrink from an average of five or six hours a day (!) to thirty-five minutes. The U.S. GDP might possibly be smaller in the future, but it could represent greater real wealth overall if negative values like waste, pollution, climate change, stress, and environmentally related disease decrease while positive values like social relationships, renewable energy, bike trails, preventive health care, and compact communities with town centers increase.
According to the McDonald’s Corporation Web site, in 2007 McDonald’s has more than thirty thousand local restaurants serving nearly fifty million people in more than 119 countries each day. How many billion burgers (and cows) have been consumed now? Credit: Susan Benton
Here’s the bear trap we’ve caught ourselves in: Our economy is geared up to produce far more than we need to be content, and we’ve obediently bent ourselves out of shape to accommodate over-production. We do things that are unintelligent and inhumane to keep up with production. And the more goods we buy, consume, and throw away, the more energy we use up, since products and the materials they’re made of are filled with energy—for their extraction, transport, manufacture, and use. Since 1900, the U.S. population tripled, but the use of materials went up seventeenfold; annual emissions of carbon dioxide grew by a factor of fifteen. Life in America became
an all-you-can-eat cafeteria in which the atmosphere quickly turned from circus-like to sinister. It’s now all but illegal to stop eating, since corporate economists and politicians count on tireless consumer spending. One of the greatest, most nagging stresses we feel is, “How can we find the time to consume all this stuff?” But whenever that thought begins to cross our minds, a game show buzzer sounds, instructing us to “just keep eating.”
The truth is, maybe we just can’t eat anymore. The research firm Yankelovich Partners concluded in a 2004 survey that consumer resistance to marketing is peaking: 65 percent of American consumers feel they are constantly being bombarded, and 61 percent feel that marketers do not treat consumers with respect. Even more telling are the first tinges of green in a grassroots movement to throw advertising in the dumpster. While 65 percent think there should be more limits and regulations imposed on marketers; 69 percent are interested in products and services that would block marketing; and in keeping with the theme of this book, a full 33 percent (and growing) would be willing to have a slightly lower standard of living in order to live in a society with less marketing and advertising!4
I think of these various symptoms of affluenza as messages assuring us that our way of life is changing. They are evidence that shoddiness, manic advertising, and excess have just about run their course, and that we are waking up from the Dream—or is it the Nightmare—to invent a new way of thinking ; a new way of appreciating life. If health, happiness, and humility become new American benchmarks of success, we’ll no longer need hypergrowth or overconsumption. As a result, we’ll generate less stress, environmental destruction, depression, and debt! There doesn’t seem to be a downside.
In my ongoing encounters with affluenza, I sometimes compare the Western economy to a huge movie screen positioned right in front of life itself. We want and need to experience life directly and celebrate it with the plants and animals that also live here, but the big screen keeps getting in the way, numbing us down, booming commercials and redundant stories about rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, or heroes who “never said die” but died anyway. Meanwhile, behind that movie screen, the drilling rigs, cranes, draglines, semi trucks, chainsaws, and conveyor belts are hungrily converting materials and energy into products and profits.
It’s true that when we are extremely careful in the mining, forestry, farming, fishing, manufacturing and transporting processes that create the products, less harm is done. And in some cases, as in well-orchestrated organic
farming and local purchasing of food, no harm is done. The soil continues to be built even as crops are harvested; side effects from transportation, packaging and processing of the food are minimized. A system like this is an overall plus. However, with so many people demanding so many products, we find ourselves at a major tipping point. Like a man dying from several diseases at one time, the era of overconsumption is on its last legs because limits have been reached in several fundamental areas at once. These tangible, indisputable limits, all directly linked to excessive production and consumption, include economic limits like low savings rates and rampant debt throughout all levels of the economy; geophysical limits related to coming shortages of our essential resources, oil, water, soil, minerals, and climatic stability; biological limits like the loss of species, the shortfall of grain and the diminishing resilience of ecosystems; and psychological limits such as depression, hopelessness, and aggression.
While we banter on our cell phones and noodle around in our SUVs, battles-to-the-death are being fought for control of such resources as diamonds, copper, and exotic hardwoods. Says Worldwatch Institute researcher Michael Renner, “If you purchase a cell phone, for example, you may very well be paying to keep the war going in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rival armies fight for control over deposits of coltan, a commodity that just over a decade ago had little commercial value, but is now vital for the one billion plus cell phones in use today.” Guerrilla wars in Africa, Asia, and South America (mostly Columbia) have killed or displaced more than twenty million people and have raised at least $12 billion a year for rebels, warlords, and repressive governments around the world, according to Renner, author of The Anatomy of Resource Wars.5
In Nigeria, oil thieves known as “bunkerers” drill into pipelines, often blowing themselves up along with many others. About a quarter of Nigeria’s 2.3 million-barrel-a-day production-flow is regularly choked off by warlords who demand a better quality of life for Nigerian citizens—especially themselves. When insurgents send e-mails announcing they plan to attack an oil platform, they also send tremors of financial insecurity into oil futures markets from Tokyo to New York.6
The good news? By reducing consumption, we also reduce war, fear, and despair.
Certainly, we need to have a sense of hope and joy about the world and our place in it. We need to be confident we can create a better world. But
we also need to base our actions and behavior on the truth. The discomfort we feel when we hear the “bad news” is something we should acknowledge, not shrink away from. We’re strong enough to deal with the challenges—we’ve been training for them for thousands of years. The clarity of purpose, camaraderie, and lightness we’ll gain by attacking these challenges together as a species that used its strong cards (our brains and social instincts) will give us the momentum we need. Truthfully, discomfort has always been a powerful catalyst for change. This important evolutionary warning prompts us, “Hey, wake up, we need to move on, now!” When we perceive the way things actually are, we also see that it’s far more desirable to change than to have hell come looking for us (“We deliver”).
Polar bears have become a graphic symbol of global warming. Because the small islands of sea ice where they hunt are melting so rapidly, even these world-class swimmers are drowning in alarming numbers. Credit: Dan Crosbie Canadian Ice Service
As we listen to reports about climate change or the rising prices of food, oil, and water, my friends and I often ask one another, “When will we make the fundamental changes that will make our lives less destructive and less fearful?” Some suggest that our addiction is so strong that we won’t change until we absolutely have to, when global catastrophe strikes and resource prices spiral out of most people’s reach. My own comments usually go in two directions: First, if we perceive that life can be better without the detours and dysfunction, we may decide to change our priorities in this decade, and become historical superheroes! (This is the good news). Second (the bad news), we are in fact already experiencing catastrophe, most easily perceived regionally. For example, some eastern cities ran out of landfill space years ago and are now begging neighboring states to take their waste. (New York City alone ships six hundred tractor-trailers out of state every single day.) Cities from Sacramento, California, to Sydney, Australia, are running out of potable water
supplies and a new industry is emerging: the tug-boating of huge plastic bags containing up to five million gallons of “bottled” water from water-rich countries like Turkey to arid ones like Cyprus. Already, insurance companies refuse to provide coverage to residents of coastal, hurricane-prone areas; meanwhile, many inland areas are experiencing such record-setting, regional catastrophes as flashfloods, forest fires, drought, and plummeting water tables—all related to our lifestyle and its side effects.
In the United States, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, Norway, and about eight other major oil-producing countries, oil production has already reached maximum output and begun to decline, forever. Even in nations where production is still on the upswing, major fields are declining. Back in the 1940s, the United States was the Saudi Arabia of the world, producing about two-thirds of the world’s oil; brashly, we built our economy around the idea of limitless supplies. Today, U.S. output contributes less than one-tenth of global production from roughly 3 percent of the world’s reserves. Our fields are played out.7
We already see what regional catastrophe looks like in places like New Orleans, with its one million environmental refugees; in famine-stricken Africa, where millions have died from civil war and lack of clean water; and the great plains of China, where chronic dust storms turn day into night and farmland into desert. But it’s also true that we can prevent the holocaust of planetary catastrophe if we read the persistent warning signs, stay calm, and take strategic steps to create a more efficient, less consumptive world. Consider this book to be last rites for an era dying of affluenza, as well as a birth announcement for a brilliant new economy that historians may refer to as a just-in-time renaissance. Long live our emerging, moderate lifestyle, rich in green technologies, relevant information, human relationships, great health, and magnificent art!
In her work on the process of dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as the five stages that precede death. Regarding the passing of our excessive way of life, I’d guess that we Americans are collectively in the bargaining phase, though of course some individuals are in denial and others are quite angry about the price of gasoline, for example. Many others are moving through depression about the scope of the problem. Fortunately, many have come to accept that changes are not only necessary but can be quite positive. Why carry the heavy baggage of overconsumption? These front-runners have already rolled up their sleeves and are ready to do whatever it takes to change the world for the better. Indeed, our future may rest on their good energies and sense of hope.
What’s being born is far more important and exciting than what’s dying.
We’re moving toward a sustainable, zero-waste economy that wasn’t possible without some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. But first—let’s face it—we each need to acknowledge that we have a common ailment. (“I’m a citizen of the industrial world and I have … affluenza.”) Confident there’s something better waiting for us on the other side of change, we need to accept the diagnosis with finality: It’s impossible for overconsumption as a way of life to continue. This is no fire drill, ladies and gentlemen! Let’s look, together, at the sobering but very real evidence, remembering to forgive ourselves, drop the anger, and prepare to move on. Hearts and minds are like parachutes: They work best when they are open.
Throughout history, we’ve lost an Easter Island here, a Roman Empire there, but now we face major ecological and economic disruptions at the planetary scale—the whole ball of wax, so to speak. These challenges can’t just fix themselves if our current, high-impact lifestyle continues. They aren’t about interest rates or stock indexes but something much more fundamental: empty shelves, resource exhaustion, and human despair. Just since 1950, the U.S. economy expanded fivefold as demand for such materials as timber, steel, copper, meat, energy, aluminum, cement, and plastic climbed higher and higher. (The global economy expanded sevenfold in the same time frame, as world population tripled.) Many economists regard this awesome trajectory as the world’s greatest success story, but it can also be seen as history’s darkest hour.
Neglecting to monitor the busy activities behind the movie screen that separates us from industry, we didn’t see how quickly the Earth was being stripped and how quickly habitats were being destroyed. We didn’t realize that every day, about four hundred pounds per capita of earth are moved to construct highways and buildings, mine for copper, drill for oil, and harvest timber. It didn’t really occur to us that each product we use leaves a pile of rubble back at the source; for example, that a one-tenth-of-an-ounce gold ring requires the mining of three tons of ore that typically smother another critical piece of biological habitat.
At the time my life began, marketing analysts such as Victor Lebow were formulating a game plan for America—one they believed would make each of us extremely happy, and some (of them) extremely wealthy. In 1955, Lebow wrote, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption … We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”8 In the giddy years of what seemed like an economic miracle, most of us shrugged our shoulders, smiled naively, and hit the accelerator, saying, “That works for me.”
Every day, most Americans sacrifice four pounds of unrecyclable stuff to the garbage truck gods—trash bags bulging mostly with packaging, food waste, and paper advertisements. We don’t question this familiar scene; it’s just the way we do it. But behind the huge movie screen that obstructs our view, the story is far bloodier. This is where things got so quickly out of control, while we floated in a pleasant American Dream-world. (“Row, row, row your boat …”) Do you ever wonder why the seashore has fewer pretty shells than it used to? For roughly the same reason that the Earth has fewer pretty species … billions of people demand a constant supply of resources to furnish oversize houses with exotic hardwoods and delicate ivory sculptures for the mantel. The problem is, what looks cute on the mantle can be a holocaust back at the source, or at the end of a product’s useful life. For example, many of the millions of recycled computers that have died of viruses, dust, or obsolescence end up creating health and ecological havoc on the other side of the globe.
In Guiyu, China, and villages throughout Asia and Africa, thousands of laborers work for $1.50 a day, scavenging precious metals from electronic waste. This is where our mountains of recycled computers, cell phones, and TVs end up—in scavenge heaps far from the eyes of the media. In Guiyu, laborers burn plastics and smash hard drives, wearing no protective equipment. They breathe in bits of a thousand different chemicals and compounds, many of them toxic. (One of the computers is probably my old IBM—I can imagine bits and bytes of articles and book chapters, smashed unceremoniously as circuit boards are drenched with acid to extract tinctures of gold and silver.) The lead in cathode-ray tubes is scavenged from monitors, and leftovers are thrown in a pile or into the nearby river where water samples contain up to 190 times the acceptable level of pollutants allowed by the World Health Organization.9
I witnessed a similar story in a village near Hanoi, Vietnam, where furniture makers apply very volatile coatings to shoddy plywood furniture, right in their own homes. When our team of environmental consultants toured the factories, the air was hazy with fumes that settled onto open woodstove pits in the worker’s kitchens. The workers held cigarettes in fingers caked with toxic toluene, potentially contracting cancer from several sources at once. Some wore steady-release aspirin patches on their temples because of chronic pain caused by their work. The truth is, we saw broader smiles on the faces of the less “fortunate” Vietnamese, whose yearly incomes averaged $400 a year compared with the furniture makers’ $6,000. Every morning at six, we’d walk past thousands of low-income Hanoi residents
doing tai chi by West Lake; or playing badminton before going to work. Each small house or apartment in Hanoi had colorful potted flowers in front, and most people seemed content just to be alive.
We know, of course, that a fast-food burger comes from somewhere, though we’d rather not know all the details (we’ve heard just enough rumors of the livestock factories and slaughterhouses where billions of animals meet their fate). We can easily grasp the fact that each hamburger patty has used enough energy to drive 20 miles (growing of the grain that feeds the cow; the transportation, the processing, the packaging, and so on). But most people are surprised to learn that the water expended to produce a single burger could supply half a year’s worth of showers for the burger eater. (This water is used to irrigate the feed grain; the wheat for the bun; to wash down factory floors; and so on). Food scholars tell us that if we ate just 10 percent less meat in America, sixty million people could eat the grain, directly, that livestock would have consumed at the feedlots. The hang-up seems to be one of recipes and cultural tastes. We eat what we’ve learned how to cook. “Hmmm, what can Hamburger Helper help besides hamburgers?” But a trip to the bookstore or library yields the perfect cookbook, with fifteen-minute, meatless recipes like we enjoy in five-star restaurants these days.
In the classic little book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by Alan Durning and John Ryan, the life stories of such things as coffee, shoes, and computers are narrated in great detail, taking us behind the scenes to how things are made. For example, the typical T-shirt may say Cancun or Disneyland on its chest, but it’s been many more places than that. (I’m paraphrasing their great research and colorful writing in this discussion.) 10
Look down. That 4-ounce shirt you’re wearing—half cotton and half polyester—began its life as a few tablespoons of petroleum from Venezuela, as well as the cotton harvested from 14 square feet of Mississippi cropland. Its life will be over when the collar starts to fray—or when you stop exercising and it “shrinks”—but in between the shirt’s birth and death are a universe of people, technologies, and places, including migrant farm workers who make a living spraying pesticides that damage their central nervous systems, kill the life in the soil, and only minimally hit the target crops; irrigation systems that water exceptionally thirsty cotton crops; huge air-conditioned harvesters whose parts come from twenty different countries;
diesel fuel that comes from Mexico; cotton gin operators who separate fibers from seeds; and truck drivers who deliver the fibers to a textile mill in North Carolina, where the yarn is coated with polystyrene for easier handling. At each step, energy is expended and wastes are generated—many of them toxic. And that’s just for the shirt’s cotton!
To provide petroleum for the polyester, workers spin a diamond drill bit into a Venezuelan oilfield. After spilling a mixture of diesel fuel, heavy metals and water in the process of lubricating and cooling the drill bit, the operators pump oil and gas to the surface, as crude oil leaks from derricks, pipelines and storage tanks. The crude oil is refined in the Caribbean city of Curaçao, where the factory emits dark clouds of air pollution. Then 3 percent of the crude oil is shipped to Wilmington, Delaware, to be used for petrochemicals, and it’s there that the T-shirt begins to emerge, as long chains of PET plastic are drawn apart to form polyester fibers. Then the T-shirt’s fabric is dyed and sewn in a Taiwanese-owned apparel factory in Honduras, where the workers make about thirty cents an hour. Your shirt is mounted on a cardboard sheet made of pinewood pulp from Georgia, wrapped in a polyethylene wrapper from Mexico, and stacked in a corrugated box from Maine.
The box is shipped by freighter to Baltimore, by train to San Francisco, and by truck to Seattle. It’s displayed on a department store shelf brightly lit by a 150-watt flood lamp, and that’s where you find it, calling out to you. A lot of work has gone into it, but you’ve never once thought about that. (It’s not like in the old world, when the village tailor asked, “How do you like the shirt I made for you?”) Still, it’s a bargain at $12, and you take it home in a low-density polyethylene bag from Louisiana, feeling like one shrewd consumer. Pulling the shirt out of the dryer (where, if it was mine, it shrank), you wonder, come to think of it, why retailers shouldn’t be paying you to display the shirt’s very profitable commercial logo. The energy that will go into washing and drying your shirt over its useful lifetime will dwarf the energy that went into its manufacture. Of course, it would help if you got out your clothespins and clothesline rather than using fossil fuels to bake and shrink it dry …
The story of your T-shirt is only one small episode among many billion stories of products that occur every day. Yet many continue to believe that all economic growth is unquestionably good for the environment and people—that the products we use leave squeaky-clean footprints in the environment as well as pumping up the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices. In a recent poll about the health of species, 44 percent agreed with the statement, “What I do does not impact the health of natural habitats.”11
In the absence of a resurgent grassroots voice, most politicians and media-meisters continue to report what their sponsors and the general public
want to hear: The Earth has limitless resources and a limitless capacity to clean up after us. This story may be a soothing one but it’s not factually correct. We’re on a collision course with dwindling resources and disrupted systems, including the inconvenient truths of climatic instability and shortfalls of grain, oil, and water that support the economy. Impacts like these have already occurred on a regional scale many times in human history, with civilization-crunching results, and now they are beginning to happen at a planetary scale. As the number and appetite of global consumers continues to expand, in effect the Earth shrinks.
The average American’s “ecological footprint” (the land needed to provide the materials supporting his or her lifestyle) is 30 acres, or roughly thirty football fields of prime land and sea, year after year—which is roughly twice what the average Italian or German thrives on. As engineer Mathis Wackernagel explains, there is of course a finite amount of land on the planet—28 billion acres of biologically productive land and sea. Dividing that finite acreage by 6.5 billion humans, each of us has a theoretical right to about 4.3 acres. (However, that acreage also includes the rest of the world’s species, which are steadily and alarmingly being crowded out.)12 Using up in just a few generations resources that nature concentrated over the eons is a bit like going temporarily insane and gambling away your life savings in a single casino spree. But that’s exactly what we’re doing.
The average American baby will be taught to expect a lifestyle that requires 30 acres of productive land and sea on a continuing basis. A wealthy American’s lifestyle might require more than fifty acres—ten times a fairly distributed amount available for each human. Credit: Marjolane, See Through Me
Let’s face it, the working, spending, and consuming life can really drain a person’s energy. And for what? As Lily Tomlin points out, “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” The thought of being just one more ratlike species is not very exciting, is it? We buy a plastic wastebasket at a
discount store and take it home in a plastic bag. Then we take the wastebasket out of the plastic bag and put the bag in the plastic wastebasket—over and over again. That’s why I believe we need to create a new, better-fitting lifestyle as quickly as possible. All the baggage we carry (physical, emotional, and psychological) is getting very heavy; it’s time for us to reinvent a more moderate economy based on how nature actually works and what humans actually need. I have to admit, however, that there are still many, many people who aren’t willing to listen to mounting evidence about environmental dysfunction. Their mantra is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but mine is, “If it ain’t fixable, don’t break it.”
The week before Christmas in the year of 9/1 1, many Americans were still reeling in a state of post-traumatic shock—baking cookies for neighbors, lighting candles, and waving little flags-on-sticks. A friend called, advising me to get a copy of that week’s Denver Business Journal, where, he warned me, I’d been slandered in an article called “On the Lookout for Radicals.” The journal’s editor referred to me as a terrorist, suggesting that I should be tried before a secret military tribunal. My first and strongest reaction was a bewildered, “Hunh?”
“Being alert for threats to America,” he wrote, “I read Mr. Wann’s article and immediately detected signs of thinking that—if played out to logical conclusions—could lead to the destruction of the United States as we know it. Wann is a weekly columnist at a big metropolitan newspaper. He has influence. He can sway minds. He must be stopped.” The thing is, I agreed with him about the “destruction of the United States as we know it.” I’m an advocate of a much better, much more sensible United States!
It turns out I was stopped—at least temporarily—not too long after that editorial. After an intense yet exciting stint as a columnist with the Denver Post, I was dismissed via a short, perfunctory e-mail that also went to the paper’s owner. It appeared that others had also found my wise-consumption commentary unpatriotic—or at least unprofitable; some were CEOs whose companies advertised in the newspaper.
Hanging my head on that wintry day, rereading the article that condemned me, I wondered how I’d fallen so far, so fast. Change-agent, maybe even sustainability superhero (in my dreams) one week, and terrorist the next! I’d been getting phone calls and e-mails from dozens of readers telling me to keep up the good work—someone needed to be saying what I was saying—when all of a sudden I was being pilloried by free marketeers for
“shaking the foundations of our society.” The Business Journal editor continued, “Wann believes our society is built on ever-expanding consumption and personal dissatisfaction with a perceived lack of material goods. He calls it ‘affluenza,’ like it’s some kind of disease. I don’t know about you, but I could use a touch more affluenza, if you know what I mean.”
I did indeed know what he meant. I was well familiar with this kind of attitude after twenty-some years on the environmental front. Tell them about rising temperatures or falling water tables and somehow they’ll turn it into “progress.” At the age of thirty-five, I’d gone back for a master’s degree in environmental science, then spent ten years as an EPA analyst and communicator and twelve years (and counting) as a freelance writer and filmmaker. I’d been bumping into people like this editor every step of the way. It was easy to imagine him elbowing a colleague and whispering, with a wink, “I don’t know about you, but we could use a bit more environmental degradation, if you know what I mean.”
All right, so maybe that’s an exaggeration (or maybe not), but I have, without a doubt, witnessed selective and calculated blindness throughout my career. I’ve researched and written in depth about the large percentage of our economy that’s conveniently ignored—waste, pollution, fraud, negligence, planned obsolescence, and other profitable spin-offs. While the Gross Domestic Product continues to climb, the Genuine Progress Indicator (a more accurate tracking system that subtracts the “bads” from the total) continues to fall. Our official national yardstick doesn’t allow us to subtract the oil spills, car accidents, energy waste, and lawsuits from the GDP, to come up with a more sensible assessment on how we are really doing. In terms of GDP, the economic hero is a terminal cancer patient going through a messy, expensive divorce, whose sports car is totaled in an accident that was his fault. The data from his misfortunes make the GDP go up. But the reasonably happy guy with a solid marriage who cooks at home, walks to work and doesn’t smoke or gamble is an economic nobody, in the eyes of economists.
The editor quoted directly from my column: “While we frantically climb the peak toward economic milestones that are always still further up the trail, less time and care are given to things that really matter, like family and friends, personal health, environmental vitality, community and cultural traditions. Rather than exhilaration, we often experience vertigo, from uncertainty as to whether we’re living well. Are we spending our time, human energy and money in ways that really make sense? We may be the nocontest world champions in economic prestige, but at what real cost?” He responded to this earnest, out-of-context paragraph, writing, “Yeah well, and your point is, Dave? What could be more American than spending money?”
He had me. Spending has become the quintessential American trait. Maybe I was being un-American. Maybe I shouldn’t question the direction America is headed, and just go along with it. Maybe I should just download the latest lifestyle software and go deeply in debt to buy a Hummer that gets eight miles per gallon, because it’s good for the economy, and darn it, God Bless America!
Or maybe not.
I wrote a tactfully worded e-mail inviting the editor to join me for lunch so I could explain how patriotic I really am. How I’m trying to base my lifestyle on biological and social realities rather than oblivious optimism and returns on investment. How I’ve actively promoted sustainable, economically viable technology and design for thirty years; have written eight books, and produced many TV programs and videos on these topics. I wanted to tell him how I helped design the neighborhood I now live in, where people know and support each other; and how I personally use less than half the resources the average American does. Predictably, he wriggled out of the invitation, assuring me that he had “only been kidding” in the editorial.
I’d been infected by a carrier of affluenza (it made me feel better to think of him as a germ), the very disease I was trying to fight. The Denver Post soon replaced my print “inches” with those of a consumer advocate who was also a TV commentator, whose columns seemed to be mostly about new gadgets and how they could make our lives more convenient. For the next half-year or so, people asked me when my columns would reappear. Like me, many believed that dissent is what fine-tunes and maintains a healthy democracy. Like me, they refused to perceive overconsumption—a highly destructive and often morally questionable pursuit—as a national religion and patriotic duty.
Ironically, the staggering increases in income, mobility, and information don’t appear to be increasing our happiness, as the next chapter demonstrates. The things we value the most—meaning, purpose, relationships, and time to enjoy life—are being swept away. The burning question is, Can we wake up in time to make personal and social changes that can still prevent cultural death-by-overconsumption? Only if we agree to seek help to break our various addictions: to drugs, naive optimism, hyperactivity, media, and stuffed lifestyles. Good riddance to all of it—there’s something much better now being born.