Individually, our everyday choices might seem to have no consequences at all for the global environment. What, for example, is the impact of a farmer burning an oil lamp on the Pampas in 1814 or a child eating a bowl of rice in Shanghai in 1889? What, really, is the impact of a man driving a Model T Ford over the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, or a lawyer switching on a bedside lamp to read The Grapes of Wrath in London in 1946, or a teenager opening a Westinghouse refrigerator for a glass of milk in Canberra in 2008? Yet, cumulatively, all these individual acts of consumption—like raindrops in a typhoon—must have consequences. So, too, must all the processes that make consumption possible.
What, then, are the environmental consequences of consumption? How do they affect our health and safety? These may seem like obvious questions in a world of rising consumption and escalating strains on so many ecosystems. Yet few books have ever tried to answer them, and most of these have focused on the more immediate impacts of consumption on local ecosystems and lifestyles. Examining these questions through a wider lens and from a different angle, I analyze not only the direct consequences of consuming, but also the environmental spillovers from the corporate, trade, and financing chains that supply and replace consumer goods: what, to capture the full resulting global patterns of harm, I call the “ecological shadows of consumption.” Taking this approach puts the primary responsibility for global environmental damage squarely on those with power and wealth while still accounting for the micro-responsibilities all of us bear as consumers. By emphasizing how political and economic processes displace the costs of consumer goods onto distant ecosystems, communities, and times, it reveals the far-reaching effects of our personal choices, effects that few of us ever see—or want to see. And by pushing the analysis beyond progress in improving particular products, it uncovers a core cause of the continuing slide into a full-blown global environmental crisis.
Mapping the pathways of cause and effect for every ecological shadow of consumption would require many lifetimes of research. Rather than lightly touch upon an endless number of products, I chart the histories of just five, representing a range of political economies, from high-end manufacturing to low-end hunting. Each history unfolds over three chapters and concludes with a summary of its lessons for understanding how and why ecological shadows form, shift, and fade.
I begin with two of the most widespread—and deadly—manufactured products of the last 100 years: the automobile and leaded gasoline.Extending my analysis into households, I then turn to a product more often praised for enhancing food security than for causing global harm: the refrigerator. I end with two animal products: beef and the harp seal. Although the last one may strike some readers as out of place (because luxury furs involve far fewer global consequences than beef), I chose to include it to probe how consumption at the periphery of the world economy differs from consumption at the core—essential for a comprehensive analysis, given the large number of consumer goods whose political economies more closely resemble those of the harp seal than of the automobile, leaded gasoline, the refrigerator, or beef.
At every turn, I’ve sought out sources and examples of positive change—safer cars, cleaner air, superior refrigerators, organic beef, rebounding ecosystems—indeed, far more often than some readers might expect in a book titled The Shadows of Consumption. I’ve done so partly to avoid prejudging my conclusions, and partly to find ways to mitigate the shadow effects of consumption.
This approach has uncovered many trends toward a growing environmentalism over the last four decades. Governments around the world are empowering environmental agencies, reforming national policies, and negotiating and strengthening international environmental laws. International institutions and aid donors are supplying developing countries more funds and technical assistance for environmental initiatives. Global activists are running more campaigns to educate consumers and to lobby firms and governments for further environmental reforms. More corporations are producing more goods under policies of corporate social responsibility. And more consumers are buying more “green” products from “green” markets.
In every case, the globalization of environmentalism is making resource use more efficient by reducing the per unit ecological impacts of consumer goods. Yet these same cases, I will argue, also reveal why so many of the current efforts to manage the global environment are failing. Much of this “progress” is incremental and local, doing more to protect fragments of privilege and power than ecosystems or poor people. Mean-while, some parts of the earth—places like Africa and the Arctic—are having to pay a disproportionate share of the costs of rising consumption as the globalization of corporations, trade, and financing shifts, intensifies, and casts ecological shadows into more remote regions.
On an ever-larger scale, this accelerating process of change is shifting environmental burdens to fragile ecosystems and to poorer people less able to cope with the consequences. It is hiding costs in distant lands and assigning them to future generations, leaving firms, governments, and wealthy consumers unaccountable for much of the global environmental change now happening. It is contributing to wasteful and excessive consumption among the wealthy while sacrificing basic needs like food and shelter within poorer communities. It is deferring costs and exposing all consumers to long-term health and safety risks. And finally, over time, as states work to protect citizens and economies, it is deflecting environmental costs into spaces with less political and economic power—the tropical rainforests, the poorest communities, the weakest states, the open oceans, the atmosphere—tipping these into crisis and toward collapse.
The global picture shows the continuing decline in the integrity and stability of many of the world’s environments. Glaciers and old-growth tropical rainforests continue to recede. Deserts and dangerous chemicals continue to spread. Natural resources and freshwater supplies continue to dwindle. Species continue to die out and oceans to empty of life. And, perhaps most alarming of all, the climate is changing as greenhouse gases warm the earth, with much higher seas and fiercer storms now on the horizon of this century. At the same time, billions of people are at greater risk of environmental diseases and accidents as pollution and congestion worsen in cities, industrial farming expands in rural areas, and chemicals from “new and improved” consumer goods leach into aquifers, food chains, and households.
Most in power no longer publicly dispute such trends. Instead, they tend to point to advances under the rubric of “environmental management”—to business partnerships, eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility, voluntary compliance—measuring change in their small worlds and applauding policies and institutions that displace costs onto people with less capacity to protest. This creates illusions of progress, leaving far too many of us optimistic about the value of incremental solutions, and far too few of us willing to challenge an “unbalanced world,” where so many ecosystems and people are “dying of consumption.”
The conclusions of this book strike hard at how the policy community is analyzing and handling global environmental change. Its title, The Shadows of Consumption, may give some readers pause, but, as an optimist, I hope that its subtitle, Consequences for the Global Environment, will invite them and others to learn how and why consumption has unbalanced our global environment, a necessary step for moving toward a more balanced—and thus a more sustainable—global political economy of consumption: the theme of the final chapter.