Transforming environmentalism to control the shadows of consumption will take years of consultations and negotiations. The following musings are therefore intended simply as a way to begin a conversation. Working toward more “balanced consumption,” I submit, has the potential to mitigate many, if not most, of the damaging ecological effects both of individual consumption and of the corporate, trade, and financing structures producing consumer goods.
Any lasting progress toward more sustainable global patterns of consumption will require a mix of policies and incentives. Wealthy consumers can assist by pursuing more personal balance between needs and indulgence—by practicing, in the language of Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, more “cautious consuming” guided by values like “thrift,” “frugality,” “simplicity,” and “self-reliance.”1 All consumers can work toward balance by reusing, conserving, and, to a lesser extent, recycling, more consumer goods. But, as the analysis in this book shows, consumers alone cannot significantly diminish the ecological shadows of consumption, much less eliminate them. The world must reorient the structures and processes that guide consumption to create more balance across and within societies, reducing the inequalities of consumption, and allowing living standards to improve for the poor without doing grave harm to the global environment. Any transformative change must also address the imbalances between the inputs into growing economies and the sustainability of ecosystems.
Achieving more balance will demand measures to rein in some of the damaging environmental consequences of multinational corporations, trade, and financing. I see the following as a necessary beginning. Multinational corporations will need to eliminate double standards for domestic and foreign operations. Manufacturers will need to take a more precautionary approach to replacing one technology with another. The prices of traded goods will need to better reflect ecological and social costs. States will need to ensure that trade and trade agreements do not lower environmental standards. And more financial aid will need to go toward compensating poor people living in degraded ecosystems. Inter-national laws on the environment will need to be so well drafted and enforced that firms and states cannot meet obligations simply by casting ecological shadows elsewhere. Governments will also need to create incentives to reduce overconsumption and wasteful consumption, aiming to protect the earth itself and not, as occurs now, merely their respective countries. Activists will need to campaign to expose these shadows as well, so that everyone begins to see national initiatives that deflect harm elsewhere as causes of the escalating global environmental crisis, not as “solutions” or “sustainable development.”
To address this tall order, let’s first take a closer look at how consumers can help.
Billions of consumers are now reusing or recycling items like bottles, cans, and newspapers. The world needs responsible consumers, and most efforts to reuse or recycle goods promote sustainability. Not all, though, involve straightforward gains. Thus curbside recycling in many cities uses trucks to collect discarded goods and factories to sort and clean them, requiring both money and energy while also producing pollution. On occasion, for lack of buyers, authorities end up dumping recycled waste into landfills. Many consumers are unaware of what happens after dropping a can or bottle in a recycling bin; for others, this act alone seems to alleviate their worries about the consequences of drinking from a Styrofoam cup or driving a 5,000-pound SUV.
Still, personal efforts like recycling bring many benefits even when the outcomes don’t match those promised. This book contains a stream of examples of people choosing to reduce waste and environmental damage. More people are choosing careers as “environmentalists”—from activists opposing the seal hunt, to policy makers in environmental agencies, to environmental analysts in the World Bank. Many others are making smaller efforts, buying more energy-efficient appliances and trading in gas-guzzlers for hybrid cars. More people are turning off unnecessary lights as well as turning down heaters and air conditioners. More people are eating organic beef and drinking fair-trade coffee. More people are buying eco-certified timber or seafood. More people are boycotting real fur coats. And just about everyone is now fueling cars with unleaded gasoline. The list goes on and on.
Some consumers, then, are altering some practices. Whether motivated by environmental concerns or by self-interest (such as saving on energy bills), these consumers are lessening the impact of personal consumption of particular goods on the global environment. This is a positive trend, and this book contains convincing evidence that it’s gaining in strength. Still, such efforts alone do not have the power to transform global patterns of consumption casting ecological shadows. As a global constituency, consumers are too diverse—and themselves too changeable—to induce enough lasting change. Moreover, this diversity and changeability is increasing as the current wave of economic globalization shifts markets at even faster rates across even more cultures.
Thus, as this book has shown again and again, the crosscutting choices of consumers even within one state tend to increase environmental impacts overall. Even as sales of hybrid cars in the United States are rising, for example, sales of sport utility vehicles and other light trucks are climbing toward half of all vehicle purchases. Such crosscutting tendencies are magnified as markets go global. Consumption of Canadian seal furs is a good example. With each passing year, as chapters 20 and 21 have charted, the activist campaign to convince consumers that Canada’s seal hunt is immoral and unsustainable has been gaining supporters. After getting the European Union to ban the import of whitecoat pups 6-12 days old, it even managed to bring an end to the commercial hunt for harp seals in the 1980s. To this day, few Europeans will buy (or wear) a fur from a harp seal (even from the older pups). Yet, because demand for seal furs in other cultures, notably, those of Russia and China, is high and growing higher, the seal hunt is now even larger than before the campaign began in the 1960s.
The “sustainable” meat industry is another example of the power of globalizing markets to swamp the benefits of changing local purchasing patterns. Consumption of organic beef and chicken is increasing in North America and Europe; yet pound-for-pound the consumption of meat from industrial farms is rising there even faster. Worldwide, consumption of industrial meat has increased more than fivefold since 1950, and per capita consumption has more than doubled.
Educating consumers and expanding green markets within particular cultures can reduce individual impacts and allow economies to produce more goods with fewer inputs. Eliminating ecological shadows, however, will require far more than educating citizens and expanding environmental markets. It will require efforts to prevent environmentally harmful products, with their attendant ecological costs, from being shifted into “emerging” markets as sales of such products in “educated” and “green” markets shrink. And it will require tough measures to transform how multinational corporations, trade, international financing, and state policies currently distribute the costs and benefits of globalized consumption.
Although humans must consume to survive, meeting basic needs accounts for only a fraction of the environmental damage from rising consumption. Much of this damage arises when corporate advertisers, playing with words, facts, and perceptions, induce consumers to go far beyond basic needs, to supersize their desires, to recognize new “needs.” What is safe? Necessary? What is healthy? Desirable? To increase their profits and market shares, corporations have long answered these questions in ways that confuse—and at times deceive—consumers. Do we really need to kill every germ to protect our children? The makers of the disinfectant Lysol—who claim it kills 99.9 percent of harmful germs—say we do: “Life demands Lysol. That’s a fact.” It’s easy to laugh at such blatant hype. Yet corporate indifference to truth in advertising—or truth in research—rarely produces a laughable outcome.
The tobacco industry is a notorious example. Today, no objective physician would deny the deadly effects of smoking. The World Health Organization estimates that illnesses related to tobacco—notably cancer, strokes, and heart attacks—killed around 100 million people in the twentieth century alone. Still, even with millions dying, cigarette companies continue to manipulate and conceal research, delay and block regulations, work the courts as part of standard business, and target ads at young people. Governments in many wealthy countries strive to “protect” consumers from these firms both by educating them about the perils of smoking and by mandating nonsmoking areas. As a result, tobacco sales in these countries are declining. At the same time, however, total sales continue to climb worldwide as more and more people take up smoking in developing countries. The health consequences are appalling: smoking kills about 5 million people every year—a number the World Health Organization predicts will double by 2020.
There are also many instances of corporations exporting harm to offset declining sales at home. In some cases, national policies put in place to protect citizens and local environments in wealthier countries create incentives for companies to export ecological costs to poorer places. The resulting consequences can be as appalling as those of tobacco. International environmental agreements can reduce, mitigate, and even prevent some of the consequences of these corporate double standards, as the agreements to protect the ozone layer have clearly shown. Corporate technology transfers and international aid can also accelerate processes within poorer regions to deal with the shadow effects arising from different corporate standards. In rare instances, corporate codes of conduct can create opportunities for multinational corporations to hold affiliated suppliers to higher standards than local laws require. Change can even occur swiftly when corporate interests in expanding new markets trump those profiting from old ones—as happened after the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, when it took just four years to replace leaded with unleaded gasoline across sub-Saharan Africa.
But such efforts alone are often too slow—and too late—for the people and ecosystems most at risk. Governments at all levels need to put in place much tougher measures and disincentives to prevent the unequal practices of multinational corporations from displacing ecological costs. NGOs can assist here by campaigning to reveal these costs and to highlight double standards—while consumers can help by boycotting corporations that continue to profit from displacing them. A binding international code of conduct would greatly increase the capacity of states to control the harmful behavior of multinational investors and corporations.
Mitigating the tendency of exporters and investors to deflect the eco-logical costs of consumer goods will require corporations to respond to new environmental rules and norms proactively—with precaution. All too often in the past, they have responded to environmental measures by denying, delaying, then gradually replacing the “problem” products with “improved” ones (often doing so in wealthier markets first). And, as the histories of leaded gasoline and CFC refrigerators show, a common result is to replace one ecological stressor with another: lead with benzene, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). At the same time, in pursuit of greater profits and larger markets, they have kept developing and selling new consumer goods. Many of these goods continue to bring consumers convenience or pleasure. Some, like air bags or smoke alarms, make life safer, and a few, like computers, transform people’s lives, altering everything from relationships to global commerce. The value of innovative corporations extends beyond serving consumers better: they can also help economies and societies prosper.
Nevertheless, introducing new goods runs the risk of replacing present harms to people and ecosystems with future ones. How safe are the wonder chemicals in nonstick pots and pans? Or in fire-resistant rugs, mattresses, and pillows? No one really knows for sure. Only a handful of the tens of thousands of chemicals in consumer goods have undergone rigorous testing for harmful side effects. Could such effects partly explain the rising rates of cancer in countries like the United States? Preliminary testing on just a few thousand has shown that hundreds of these chemicals can cause tumors in laboratory animals. What will happen when these chemicals accumulate, combine, and age? Again, no one knows for sure.
What we do know is that corporations routinely introduce new products with little understanding of the environmental consequences. No doubt the benefits of many will outweigh any future costs, but some will prove harmful, even deadly to people and ecosystems. It’s naive to assume they won’t. Who in 1928—or 1938 or 1948 or 1958—could have foreseen the global aftermath of Thomas Midgley’s award-winning discovery of wonder refrigerants—stable, nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons? Who could have foreseen that CFCs would drift into the upper atmosphere and, generations later, deplete the ozone layer? Indeed, no one even conceived of such a possibility, at least not publicly, before the 1970s.
Still, firms and governments, by taking a precautionary approach, could do far more to reduce the risks of introducing or modifying consumer goods. What would this involve? The core idea, explains Kerry Whiteside, professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College, is for governments and firms to follow a “strategy of anticipatory preventative action.” Such a strategy demands “better science and more self-conscious political judgments.” Better science and politics, in turn, means “doing science differently, with more dialogue between practitioners in disparate disciplines and more transparency in relation to the nonscientific community.” It also requires far more humility because “progress consists in recognizing our inability to master the world.”2
Taking a precautionary approach also requires a critical change in thinking—accepting that the burden of proof that a new chemical, organ-ism, or device is not harmful must rest with those proposing to introduce it into an ecosystem. Here it’s necessary to “resist the temptation to believe that every technological risk is worth taking or that we will be able to repair whatever damage we do to our surroundings.” It’s necessary as well to ensure that those who harm others compensate them, even if it takes many generations for the harm to appear. Developing a precautionary approach to protecting the global environment further demands institutions and policies that embrace “not only fellow citizens in one’s own nation-state but also people across the globe and their successor generations.”3
Such changes will not come about easily. The U.S. government rejects precaution as a basis for most of its policies and decisions—and so do most other governments—arguing it would stifle innovation and slow economic growth. Still, over the last few decades, precautionary thinking has been gaining traction in a few places, although slowly, unevenly, and under various definitions. It first emerged in environmental legislation in Germany in the 1970s, then spread through Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, many European governments as well as some international treaties and documents refer to it; France even amended its constitution in 2005 with an environmental charter that includes a precautionary principle in Article 5.
Nevertheless, the global effects of these changes in Europe remain weak. A key reason is the reaction of multinational corporations to a call for more precaution. Almost all now display a public profile of responsible investment, with thousands of businesses in over 100 countries currently members of the UN Global Compact, which states in principle 7: “Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges.”4 This may sound promising, but, thus far, corporate practices haven’t come close to living up to that promise. No multinational corporation takes a true precautionary approach to environmental management. Many still invest after only perfunctory assessments of environmental impacts; many continue to mine natural resources under unrealistic models for sustainable yields; many still make and transport goods without accounting for ecological costs; and most continue to introduce new products after only limited research that tends to downplay any risks. Here the global trading system, spreading consumer goods across countries with ever-increasing speed, can cause a seemingly small corporate error to grow into a force powerful enough to damage the earth’s capacity to sustain life.
No simple solutions exist to mitigate the shadow effects of trade. States can neither abandon nor severely restrict international trade—within current economic structures, too many societal benefits flow from exchanging goods and services across borders. Yet measures are still necessary to protect vulnerable people and ecosystems. International agreements to restrict, if not ban, trade in endangered species and the export of hazardous waste can help. Eco-labels and organic markets can also shift demand toward products from more sustainable sources or with smaller environmental impacts over a life cycle of use (such as more energy-efficient appliances). Government policies can help as well to ensure that consumer prices reflect more of the social and environmental costs of natural resources, manufacturing processes, and transportation. But restricting trade with import tariffs or export bans can also distort prices and incentives, causing environments to degrade at even faster rates and protecting inefficient producers, which, in turn, can reduce government revenue—collected through levies or taxes—for environmental management. The history of logging in the tropics is full of such examples; government policies to control the timber trade and protect domestic processors partly explain rising deforestation rates in some tropical countries.
States and international institutions like the World Trade Organization need to guide global trade with anticipatory strategies to prevent ecological shadows, as do corporations when investing in new places or marketing new goods. This requires stronger measures to ensure that trade and trade agreements don’t serve to lower environmental standards. It also requires greater efforts to include the ecological and social costs in the prices of consumer goods, both to raise revenues for local communities and to reduce wasteful consumption and overconsumption. Currently, prices of many, if not most, traded goods do not adequately account for the ecological and social costs. Take the price of a typical piece of tropical plywood: although it generally reflects the corporate costs of logging, processing, transporting, retailing, fees, and taxes, it does not reflect either the ecological costs to the rainforest and local animals—and to the global climate over the long term—or the social costs to the local people. This is equally true for many other traded products, such as beef from the Amazon.
On the other hand, believing that the answer lies in localizing trade or banning international trade outright can cause as much harm as believing “free” trade will solve all problems. Although specific, targeted international trade bans are certainly necessary to protect species nearing extinction, state or regional bans can backfire, causing new markets to emerge with even fewer environmental controls. Moreover, trade restrictions can protect inefficient firms and stimulate wasteful consumption, as was the case for plywood exports from Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s. Undercutting the economic or social value of an ecosystem can produce compelling incentives to convert it into a different ecosystem with higher value—such as burning down a logged rainforest to develop a soybean plantation or cattle ranch.
International institutions need to hold states more accountable for the global environmental effects of restricting trade for local reasons. In many instances, global costs outweigh local benefits. China’s decision to ban logging in the late 1990s to control flooding, for example, caused timber imports to soar when China’s booming construction industry sought new sources of cheap lumber. The result was predictable. Exporters like Indonesia saw deforestation rates soar: from 2000 to 2005, the outer islands experienced the world’s highest rates of forest loss. Most of the short-term ecological costs—flooding, soil erosion, forest fires—are confined to relatively remote places like Kalimantan or Sulawesi. But the ecological shadow from China’s consumption of tropical timber will one day sweep back over China: tropical deforestation adds up to one-fifth of the human-induced carbon emissions now causing climate change.
Although international laws and national policies are preventing some of the shadow effects of trade, overall, as organizations like the World Bank and World Trade Organization pressure developing countries to open markets and to welcome foreign investment, it’s becoming easier, not harder, to displace the ecological costs of producing, using, and disposing of consumer goods. Far more needs to be done to ensure that when states and firms engage in international trade, they don’t dump used goods, like cars or computers, into poor places without the capacity either to recycle them or to enforce reasonable environmental standards. During phasedowns of dangerous products, more also needs to be done to prevent states and corporations from using trade to compensate for falling sales at home by expanding sales in markets with weaker environmental rules.
At the same time, international institutions and national governments need to do more to monitor and guide the process of replacing consumer goods through trade. Although trade can accelerate changeovers in developing countries, it can also end up replacing a small problem with an even bigger one when the total impact of newer products outpaces the gains from replacing the older ones.
The auto industry is a good example of the potential dangers of replacing an older product with more and more of a “safer” newer one. Statistics show that, thanks to better technologies and controls—seat belts, infant seats, shatterproof glass, antilock brakes, paved roads, traffic lights, speed traps, drunk-driver checkpoints—riding in a car today is becoming less and less dangerous in wealthy countries. The list of advances is getting longer with each passing year. Yet the simultaneous increase in the number of automobiles—traveling farther over every “pavable” square inch of the planet—means the overall impact on human safety is now a global crisis. Traffic collisions from the more than 800 million passenger cars and commercial vehicles, which every year injure between 20 and 50 million people and kill more than 1 million, are now the biggest cause of violent injury and death globally. And these numbers are continuing to rise as the number of “improved” cars heads toward the 1 billion mark. Indeed, experts now predict that annual traffic deaths will reach 2 million by 2020.
The history of tailpipe emissions is similar. Thanks to technologies like catalytic converters and hybrid engines and government regulations like California’s Smog Check Program, many vehicles now emit less green-house gases per mile traveled. The air quality in many California cities is better as a result of such advances. Thus far, however, the sum of all of these advances has produced only incremental decreases in environ-mental impacts—nothing approaching the dramatic decreases that could be achieved by replacing gasoline engines with, say, hydrogen fuel cells, which emit only water and heat. And, in 2005, the American Lung Association still ranked the Long Beach and Riverside traffic corridor of Los Angeles as having the most polluted air of any city in the United States. Rising pollution from traffic in cities like Shanghai, Mexico City, and Delhi over the last few decades, moreover, counters any incremental gains in London or Vancouver or Los Angeles. Rising numbers of gas-guzzling SUVs and increasing numbers of used car exports to developing countries further strain the global environment. The global trend in tailpipe emissions parallels that for traffic safety: new technologies and regulations are reducing the tailpipe emissions per car in wealthier countries, yet automobile emissions worldwide—and especially in poorer countries—are rising, with particularly harmful effects on poorer people.
It’s essential, then, to guide the replacement of products with greater care and precaution. The global effort to replace CFC refrigerators shows the potential for trade—coupled with sound international agreements, cooperative multinational companies, reasonable international financing, and consistent state policies—to accelerate environmentally friendly change worldwide. This effort also shows how, as part of the process of replacing consumer goods, further environmental gains are possible (in this instance, many of the new refrigerators use less energy).
Many other opportunities exist for similar processes of change to occur. Take one seemingly minor example, the incandescent lightbulb. Though a great advance for the late nineteenth century, incandescent lightbulbs are still highly inefficient: less than 10 percent of the power they use produces visible light. By contrast, compact fluorescent light-bulbs use as little as one-quarter of the power to produce the same amount of light—and they last up to ten times longer. According to the International Energy Agency, switching to fluorescent lights could decrease worldwide use of electricity by 18 percent. Progress toward replacing incandescent lightbulbs has been slow, however, in part, because they’re cheaper than fluorescent ones. Incandescent lightbulbs still account for 67 percent of lightbulb sales—though only 4 percent of light output—worldwide.5 On the other hand, there are some signs of greater progress. In 2007, the Australian government announced it would phase out incandescent lightbulbs, with the goal of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million metric tons by 2012—and house-hold power bills by up to 66 percent. New Zealand and Belgium are considering similar phaseouts, as are California and New Jersey.
Such changes, even small ones like replacing inefficient lightbulbs, will not be effective without financing (for example, to ensure safe disposal of the mercury in burned-out fluorescent lightbulbs). More far-reaching ones, such as conserving energy and resources with green architecture, will require far greater investments. Governments, firms, and consumers in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, and the United States will need to help pay the transitional costs of these changes and do far more to balance the financial flows between the First and Third Worlds.
Bilateral and multilateral aid helps environmental management in developing countries in many ways. It funds state programs to meet environmental commitments under international treaties, and it supports corporate efforts to integrate environmental technologies into harvesting and manufacturing processes. It finances environmental research and education and provides technical assistance for government environmental agencies. It also funds nonprofit environmental organizations working within communities as well as those partnering with firms and state agencies. And it helps consumers replace harmful goods with less harmful ones.
International aid can also strengthen the capacity of weak states to block ecological shadows, enhancing, for example, the ability to monitor and enforce environmental laws. It can provide essential support for collaborative efforts to protect ecosystems beyond the control of one sovereign state, whether the high seas, the stratosphere, or Antarctica, from the ecological costs of consumption. It can enhance, too, efforts to follow a precautionary principle for environmental decision-making within developing countries. It can accelerate efforts to replace consumer products harming the global environment with environmentally friendly ones by enhancing the capacity of governments, firms, and consumers in countries like China and India to meet international environmental commitments, as in the case of CFCs.
At the same time, however, international aid can leave people and ecosystems even more prone to absorbing the ecological costs of rising global consumption. Grants and technical assistance tied to trade and investment interests can do more to guarantee cheap goods for consumers within donor states than better living conditions within developing countries. Loans as “aid” are an even bigger problem. Interest rates and terms on these loans are generally better than a commercial bank would offer. Still, for many decades now, most borrowers have been struggling to repay the interest on, let alone the principal of, these loans, and, with economies (and currencies) in boom-and-bust cycles, almost all have ended up borrowing even more to survive. One consequence is an escalating external debt across the developing world—now more than 30 times higher than in 1970, with “aid” recipients paying donors over $100 billion just in interest.
Over the last half century, many of these states have been ramping up natural resource exports to earn enough foreign exchange to service this debt. At the same time, organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), in an effort to stimulate foreign exchange earnings, have been requiring governments to remove controls on trade and capital flows as a lending condition. The resulting “structural adjustments” have shifted priorities even more toward exporting natural resources and low-end manufacturing—creating economies of tin, timber, and T-shirts. These adjustments have also left many developing countries more open to firms dumping waste and used goods from high-consuming countries. Some economies do stabilize—and even grow—following these adjustments. But, too often, they leave themselves open to the ecological shadows of high-consuming “donor” states, turning rice paddies into shrimp ponds and towns into smog factories.
International donors need to distribute grants and technical assistance that serve the interests of people and ecosystems in developing states more than the financial interests at home. And they need to transfer far more funds into developing states to assist with efforts to protect the global environment. Although the Global Environment Facility, with over $7 billion in grants from 1991 to 2008, is a reasonable beginning, high-consuming states should be transferring hundreds, not tens, of billions, and not out of goodwill, but to mitigate and compensate for the shadows of their rising consumption. Debt relief needs to be far reaching, able to break the cycle of poor countries servicing rising debts by exporting more and more goods to consumers in donor states, goods kept cheap and plentiful by exploiting people and drawing down the globe’s natural capital.
Sweeping reforms to the world order, then, are necessary to accelerate and deepen efforts to balance consumption. The globalization of environmentalism is improving management on some measures, significantly decreasing the per unit impacts of some consumer goods for some consumers. But it’s failing to prevent the globalization of investment, trade, and financing—powered by multinational corporations and strong states—from displacing a disproportionate share of the ecological costs of rising consumption into the most fragile ecosystems, onto the poorest people, and into distant times. Concentrating ecological impacts on the most vulnerable is not only unjust for billions of people; it is also far more likely to tip societies and ecosystems into uncontrollable decline and collapse.
Any chance of transforming the environmental consequences of global consumption will require far greater efforts than a book scratching at the surface of how and why ecological shadows form, shift, and fade. That said, I believe a reasonable starting point is to pursue more balanced consumption—personal and structural—so that less of the costs and more of the benefits of producing, using, and disposing of consumer goods are shifted to the world’s poorest people and most vulnerable ecosystems. We must all become more responsible consumers. Our environmental standards must be higher, our technologies better and less wasteful, our eco-markets bigger, our progress toward environmental targets faster. But all this, by itself, will not be enough. To reform the structures causing deep imbalances in consumption, international agreements and organizations will need to do a far better job in guiding economic globalization and in restraining the self-interest of sovereign states and multinational corporations. To achieve more equitable patterns of global consumption, governments and producers alike must hew to an exacting precautionary principle, under which multinational corporations follow consistent standards across jurisdictions, the prices of traded goods reflect more of the environmental and social costs, and more international aid compensates for the effects of consuming so much of the natural capital of the developing world. Only then can we begin to navigate toward a brighter future.