Tickle Me Elmo first went on sale in the summer of 1996. Children adored how the cuddly Sesame Street Muppet laughed when tickled, and stores across North America quickly began to run out of stock. With Christmas approaching, parents shouted at store staff to find them an Elmo doll; here and there fisticuffs broke out among overly eager customers. Elmo dolls began to sell on the black market for hundreds of dollars. Shoppers trampled one poor Walmart clerk with an Elmo doll in hand, breaking his ribs and knocking him out cold. “The crotch,” he would later mourn, “was yanked out of my brand-new jeans.” A million Elmo dolls had sold by Christmas. By then Mattel was taking over Tyco Toys, the company that owned Elmo. The following year Mattel was able to sell 7 million Tickle Me Elmos. Other fads would soon overtake Tickle Me Elmo, but the Elmo line of dolls has continued to sell well, even after Hasbro took over production from Mattel in 2011.
Doll sales are of course small change compared to the sales of cars or electronics or condos. Automakers sold more than 87 million new vehicles in 2015: 14 million more than in 2010.1 What indeed, as CNN’s Carol Costello asked Kalle Lasn of Adbusters, is the harm of buying an Elmo doll? After all, as her question was hinting at, any sale of anything is surely a sign of prosperity, of jobs and economic growth—all of which citizens want, and arguably even demand of their political leaders. Yet, as Lasn was trying to ask CNN viewers, are there no ecological limits on the globalization of economic growth and personal consumption? Is no one responsible for overconsumption, wasteful consumption, and intensifying ecological footprints?
Some consumers are certainly trying to take more personal responsibility. Certification and eco-labeling programs, such as Fairtrade and the Marine Stewardship Council, are helping consumers somewhat. So are NGO campaigns to expose shoddy corporate practices. And so are some government policies (e.g., rebates for installing home insulation) and corporate mechanisms (e.g., websites to trace food supply chains back to farmers). As I’ll demonstrate in this chapter, however, rising ecological footprints and unsustainable consumption are causing severe ecological strains—and, as I’ll develop even further in my later chapters, the world’s unwillingness and inability to tackle the problem of consumption in any serious way explains much of why environmentalism of the rich is failing to rein in the escalating global sustainability crisis.
Humans have always changed ecosystems to support consumption. This is our comparative advantage over other animals, and helps explain why we’re so adaptable and prolific as a species. Yet the past 500 years, and especially the last hundred, have seen something different going on, with the range, speed, and power of impacts becoming truly global in scale—what the historian J. R. McNeill describes as “the screeching acceleration of so many processes that bring ecological change.”2
Consumption began to take off in the late 1700s and 1800s during the British Industrial Revolution. Cheap energy and technological advances spurred economic expansion. Cotton and sugar plantations spread across the colonized world. Fishing and whaling fleets trawled the oceans; miners and loggers plundered the tropics; and European traders traversed the oceans. Clothes and exotic food became more accessible and affordable in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Already by 1899 the American economist Thorstein Veblen was writing of the emergence of a “leisure class” and the rise of “conspicuous consumption.”3 Long before the nineteenth century, emperors and popes had, of course, been seizing foreign lands to appropriate resources; however, by the beginning of the twentieth century capitalism and consumerism had become driving forces of global integration, gaining strength after World War II and then again after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Across the world sustaining economic growth has become necessary for stability and legitimacy: for getting elected and reelected in democracies; for the willingness of military officers to back a dictator; for the endurance of communism without resorting to the tyranny of a North Korea.
This does not mean that the making of one world market is over. At least to some extent states and communities still regulate foreign investors and trade to try to protect local commerce, jobs, and cultures. Yet the politics, ideologies, and institutions of today’s world order ingrain a belief in—and the need for—more open economies. To grow these economies, corporate and political interests distort information, limit options, and steer consumers toward particular choices. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of consumers expect, and indeed demand, more goods and services, including both low-priced and luxury options.
Consumers in these economies look more and more alike. They eat chicken, beef, and pork; they drink colas and bottled water; they wear suits, jeans, and sneakers. The better-off own computers and cell phones, and drive cars and regularly fly overseas. The similarity of so many consumers is why the world has more than 20 billion chickens and 15,000 KFC restaurants across more than 100 countries. This is why more than 1.4 billion cattle graze the earth and every day 34,000 McDonald’s restaurants serve 69 million customers across 118 countries. And this is why Coca-Cola is able to market 500 different brands and each day sell 1.9 billion servings across every country (although smugglers do the selling in North Korea).
The globalization of Western-style consumerism further explains why in 2012 sales of PVH’s Calvin Klein brand earned $7.6 billion across more than 100 countries and its Tommy Hilfiger brand hit $6 billion in sales across more than 90 countries. It explains why Nike can generate annual sales of around $25 billion across 190 countries. It explains why more than 7 billion cell phones are in active use worldwide and why Apple had sold more than half-a-billion iPhones by 2014. And it explains why consumers in China and India are leading the buying charge for Buicks, Volkswagens, Hondas, Toyotas, Hyundais, Fords, Fiats, and BMWs—and why the world is heading toward as many as 3 billion cars on its roads by 2050.4 The working poor tend to buy more fast food, unbranded products, and discounted goods than high-income earners. Of course many affluent people shop in stores such as Walmart and Costco and Target. But it’s mostly the rapid worldwide growth in lower- and middle-class consumers that is allowing discount retailers to prosper.
Walmart is the world’s leading discount retailer. Back in 1979 it turned over $1 billion in revenues. Since then it has taken the world by storm. Now, with a workforce of 2.2 million and more than 11,000 retail outlets worldwide, it’s by far America’s largest private employer. And Walmart is continuing to grow, with, as mentioned, revenues in fiscal year 2015 setting another record high of $486 billion. Walmart is maintaining its position as the world’s largest company by expanding especially quickly in China; as of mid-2014, the company was operating more than 400 Walmart Supercenters, Sam’s Clubs, and discount stores across 170 Chinese cities, with plans to open another 100 stores in China by the end of 2016. Walmart is working as well to expand across the rest of the developing world—for example, in 2011 acquiring Massmart, which at the time was operating 350 stores in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.5
Every week at least 100 million customers go through a Walmart checkout. To stock its stores Walmart relies on a worldwide network of more than a hundred thousand suppliers. Long supply chains provide flexibility and create savings. But these also tend to conceal social and ecological costs. Even more worrying, as consumer goods traverse continents and oceans, and as firms take risks to try to gain competitive advantages and capture new markets, these costs tend to drift into the most fragile ecosystems and vulnerable communities, often with unclear and unknown risks that can last for generations. Most consumers are unaware of, and feel little responsibility for, the environmental risks and damage of consumption in other countries and for future generations. A commercialization of values—reinforced through advertising and branding—is further weakening efforts to promote social justice, economic equality, and ecological integrity.
At the same time, supplying consumer products is increasingly necessary for political success and social stability. Even revolutions must mollify consumers. Consider the politics of Venezuela after Hugo Chávez, leader of the “Bolivarian Revolution,” and president of Venezuela from 1998 until dying of cancer in 2013. After promising to continue the revolution President Nicolás Maduro put in place price and currency controls on basic goods when he was elected in April 2013. Just a month later Venezuela was thrown into crisis when toilet paper ran low. Counterrevolutionary forces were causing “excessive demand,” grumbled Commerce Minister Alejandro Fleming, then proclaiming: “The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper. We are going to saturate the market so our people calm down.”6
Of course the consequences for global sustainability of a person using toilet paper in Venezuela are not nearly as great as a person shopping along London’s Oxford Street or New York’s Madison Avenue. And the global consequences of consuming depend on where you reside, how much you earn, how much power you wield, and what you actually do. Still, we cannot escape the hard reality that the ecological footprints of individuals and economies are continuing to rise as markets and brands globalize. Nor can we escape the hard reality that humanity’s footprint is already well above the earth’s capacity to regenerate itself and very few high-income consumers are living within their fair earth share.7
Making and transporting so many consumer goods is requiring increasing amounts of timber, minerals, land, food, and water. Using consumer products entails further environmental costs. Consider the consequences for water usage in North American households. An average toilet in North America requires 6–30 liters per flush. Per cycle a washing machine uses 170–190 liters, while a dishwasher uses 40–55 liters. And a typical shower sprays out 5–19 liters per minute. Even a dripping faucet can drain away 280–750 liters of water every week. In total an average North American residence consumes around 350,000 liters of water a year.8
Calculating the full environmental costs of consumption is hard to capture in a simple or single statistic. The concept of “ecological footprint,” which Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed at the University of British Columbia, offers some insight. Using United Nations data, ecological footprint analysis tries to assess how much cropland, forestland, fishing grounds, grazing pasture, built-up land, and carbon sinks it takes to support a national economy, converting this into the average “global hectares” of productive land and sea that each person is using to live (a country’s per capita ecological footprint).
Ecological footprint analysis is a helpful way to start to understand the consequences of consumption. But we need to keep in mind that it only includes “measureable” resources and waste flows, and doesn’t capture the full impact of personal decisions and lifestyle. Doing so in one statistic is impossible: there are simply too many people, making too many different choices, in too many different settings, with too many diverse consequences. Also, as advocates readily admit, footprint analysis concentrates on the consequences of consumption of renewable resources and does not capture well many of the other effects of our lives: biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, and plastic garbage, to name just a few issues. Moreover, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the concept of ecological footprint does not capture much of the indirect—or unintentional—or unknown—shadow effects of consumption that can take years, decades, or even generations to appear, as was the case of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) drifting skyward from refrigerators, air conditioners, and hairsprays to deplete the ozone layer.
Still footprint analysis does help us to compare (very roughly) the environmental impact of consumption across countries as well as get a general sense of what would be a person’s (and country’s) fair earth share. Worldwide, the average individual footprint is about 2.7 global hectares. National averages range widely (as do personal footprints within countries). The national average across Africa is around 1.5, while it’s 4.7 in the UK, 6.4 in Canada, and 7.2 in the United States. In addition, footprint analysis allows researchers to compare (again, very roughly) the global ecological footprint with the earth’s productive biocapacity, which, as those who conduct footprint analysis measure it, was around 12 billion hectares in 2010. That year humanity’s ecological footprint was over 18 billion hectares—at least 2.5 times higher than in the early 1960s, and at least 1.5 times above the earth’s capacity to regenerate renewable resources and assimilate waste. Even if we assume total biocapacity is holding at 12 billion hectares (unlikely given declining global environmental conditions), at best a person’s fair earth share in 2016 would be around 1.6 hectares; yet high-income earners typically consume 3–6 times that amount.9
The consequences of the rising global footprint for the earth’s 8–9 million species have been devastating. Each day another 10 to 500 species of fungi, bacteria, protists, plants, corals, and insects go extinct, on top of the at least 600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish lost over the past 500 years (far above “natural” rates of extinction). The near future will bring even greater rates of extinction. Already, more than 40 percent of amphibians, 25 percent of mammals, and 13 percent of birds are under threat of extinction. And some of these are on the brink of extinction. Just four northern white rhinos, for instance, remained after the death of one in a Czech zoo in July 2015: one in the San Diego Zoo and three in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. On our current trajectory some scientists are even warning of the possible loss of three-quarters of all species over the next two centuries.10
At the same time the populations of many species have crashed or are crashing. Since 1970 the populations of more than 4,000 species of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, and reptiles have fallen on average by more than half. Like the Atlantic cod, more than half of commercial fish species are now in biological crisis (exploited to below 10 percent of their initial population). Another one-third of commercial fisheries are nearing this state as overfishing, pollution, and climate change combine to deplete stocks. Ocean life in general is in crisis, with sharks, whales, and dolphins, among many other species, under severe threat. The decline of seabirds is a telling sign of the severity of the crisis. Since 1950 roughly 70 percent of all seabirds have been wiped out—hunted for food, tangled in fishing gear, dying in oil spills, poisoned by plastic garbage and toxic sludge, and unable to adapt to climate change. Blast fishing, inshore pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change are imperiling the coral reefs as well. Already, a fifth of the world’s coral reefs are too damaged to ever recover, while around half of what’s left is heading quickly toward the same fate.11
Tropical rainforests are similarly in crisis. More than half have been cleared since 1950, and, despite some local successes in reducing the loss of tree cover in countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, since 2000 the overall rate of tropical deforestation has continued to rise steadily as forest loss accelerates in West Africa, the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, and the Gran Chaco region of South America. In 2014, as much as 10 million hectares of tropical forest—more than the total area of Hungary—was irreparably degraded or cleared for timber, palm oil plantations, soy plantations, and cattle ranches. Just 15 percent of the remaining rainforests still have the ecological integrity to retain full biodiversity. At least half of all primate species—including apes, lemurs, monkeys, and orangutans—are heading toward extinction. And this is but a small sign of the catastrophic loss of biodiversity as at least half of all terrestrial species are indigenous to tropical forests.12
Deforestation more generally is contributing as well to soil erosion, water disturbances, and climate change—with, for example, net annual forest loss accounting for something like 15 percent of total yearly anthropogenic carbon emissions.13 Overconsumption, dams, and irrigation for industrial agriculture are further stressing global freshwater supplies. So are desertification, droughts, biofuels, and overgrazing—each year leaving another 12 million hectares of land unsuitable for cultivation. And so is the loss of more than half of the world’s wetlands. Today, more than 1 billion people do not have sufficient fresh water; another 2–3 billion people go at least one month a year without enough fresh water. Rivers, lakes, and aquifers are drying up around the world; and many are severely polluted from sewage, industrial waste, garbage, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. The United Nations is projecting an even more severe freshwater crisis by 2025: with 1.8 billion “living with absolute water scarcity” and two-thirds of the global population living with water shortages.14
Manufacturing and industrial farming are contaminating every ecosystem with hazardous waste, toxic pesticides, and persistent organic pollutants. The chemical industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the past half century. Back in 1970 chemical output was worth around $170 billion; four decades later output was worth well over $4 trillion. Sales of chemicals doubled from 2000 to 2010 as demand soared across the emerging economies. At least 144,000 chemicals are now in commercial use—and every week companies concoct more compounds to “improve” production processes and consumer products. International agreements and domestic regulations are doing little to slow the rising mountains of hazardous and toxic waste. Every year, for instance, sees another 45–50 million tons of electronic waste pile up as hundreds of millions of consumers upgrade computers, cell phones, televisions, microwaves, dishwashers, and many other electrical products. Of this amount just 6–8 million tons are recycled fully and safely. Much of the world’s e-waste ends up in Asia and Africa for disposal and unsafe salvaging.15
The garbage from everyday living is reaching even the most remote spots on earth. Vast graveyards of plastic debris now swirl in the North Pacific Ocean, growing bigger by the day as plastic bottles, plastic bags, and plastic toys wash off the lands of North America and Asia, breaking down into tiny plastic beads en route to the calm gyres of the Pacific. The Arctic, already undergoing severe ecological disturbances from global warming, is now polluted with DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and dioxins as these (and other) persistent organic pollutants from pesticides, incinerators, and industrial processes “grasshopper” across the planet on air currents (in a process of evaporation and condensation) until settling in cold climates and then bioaccumulating in wildlife and people.16
Over this century, warmer temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, and violent storms will inflict even more damage to the world’s ecosystems, as well as put the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people at even greater risk. How much damage and suffering this will bring is still anyone’s guess. The models of leading climate scientists are becoming more intricate and precise, however, and the growing consensus is deeply worrying. One example among many is a 2015 analysis by former NASA scientist James Hansen, who, along with his 16 coauthors, concluded that even an increase of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels could be “highly dangerous” for the stability of the oceans, possibly causing sea levels to rise as much as 10 feet by the end of this century with consequences far worse than the worst-case scenarios modeled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.17
Such biological trends and possibilities do not bode well for a world with rapidly rising consumption and where multinational corporations are upheld as sustainability leaders. As the Global Footprint Network calculates, if one day everyone were to consume like Americans do today “we would need 5 planets.” Saving our “one planet” has been a rallying cry of environmentalists since at least the 1960s. Progress in the world’s wealthiest places, however, has been far greater than in the poorest regions, and when world demand for “natural resources” from a poor or politically weak region is high or rising, as in much of the tropics and high seas, successes have been rare, and often short-lived. Moreover, humanity is not only overconsuming the earth’s resources, it’s filling the oceans and lands and skies with toxins and waste. One of the greatest failings of environmentalism of the rich, as I explore next, has been controlling the unclear and long-term risks of introducing new products, technologies, and chemicals in the pursuit of economic growth, new markets, and corporate profits.