by David Wann
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.
Looking Behind the Screen
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.
Last Rites for a Used-Up American Dream
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 r
esource 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.”
It Happened So Quickly
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 t
eam 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.
The Stories Behind the Stuff: Burgers and T-shirts
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.
