consumerism pollutes the planet essay

“The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences.”

Perhaps the most glaring lie told is that the consumer society brings freedom and choice. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York say in their book The Ecological Rift :

“The entire marketing system, in which trillions of dollars are spent persuading individuals to buy commodities for which they have no need, and no initial desire … is not a system for expanding choice but for controlling it in the interest of promoting ever-greater sales at higher profits.”

Mainstream environment groups run campaigns to convince people to limit household consumption, recycle more and cut down on waste. Others talk of “greening” consumer values and want to channel consumer spending toward green products.

Some radical ecologists also focus most attention on consumer choices. In a recent interview with Green Left Weekly , Ted Trainer said consumer “demand for affluence is a key driver of today’s global problems”. He said this meant “the main problem group is not the corporations or the capitalist class … The problem group, the key to transition, is people in general.”

But as monstrous as the consumer economy has become, consumer spending is still not the biggest environmental problem — not by a long shot. Most waste and pollution is caused by industrial, military and commercial processes, over which consumers have no control. For example, in her 2009 book The Story of Stuff , Annie Leonard said household waste makes up only about 2.5% of the US total — 97.5% of solid waste comes from business and government operations, not consumers.

Limiting personal consumption is a good idea where possible. But it hardly scratches the surface of the ecological problem, which lies in how our stuff is made and distributed.

That statistical fiction, “the average consumer”, does not reveal much either. It’s true that average personal consumption has risen in the West. But the average figure conceals the extent to which the ultra-rich are super-consumers and super-producers.

In 2005, Citigroup analysts decided the wealth gap in Western economies is so large they are best called “plutonomies” — economies powered by, controlled by and reliant for growth on a small, rich elite.

Trainer is a critic of capitalist growth and consumerism. But his focus on “people in general” as the source of environmental problems takes growth and consumption out of this social context. In a 1989 article in The Progressive , US radical ecologist Murray Bookchin said this kind of approach tends to “distort and privatize the problem.”

Bookchin said:

“It is inaccurate and unfair to coerce people into believing that they are personally responsible for present-day ecological dangers because they consume too much or proliferate too readily.”

It’s not much help to call on more people to choose simpler lifestyles because, “ironically, many ordinary people and their families cannot afford to live ‘simply’” in the present society.

Bookchin agreed that capitalist growth was “eating away the biosphere at a pace unprecedented in human history”. But he also said:

“Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing ‘consumerism’ while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power.”

But if appeals for people to consume less or live simply fall short, it’s also dubious that consumerism can be neatly overcome by a shift to a non-capitalist economy, where the profit motive no longer drives production and investment.

In his 1979 book The Self-Managing Environment , Australian ecologist Alan Roberts said overthrowing capitalism is crucial, but is still not enough to fully tackle consumerism. The ecological disaster that was the Soviet Union, for example, shows that “the mere existence of planned, nationalised industry cannot prevent the gallop towards a destructive consumerism”.

Roberts’ point was that “consumerism is not just a particular organisation of the economy, but a way of life.” By this he meant that consumer culture — or the values of consumerism — “are reproduced by the life experience of people in almost every social sphere they inhabit, not just on the job, in their neighbourhood or in political life.”

So the problem of consumerism is not just about advertising and corporate power in the marketplace, as important as these things are. Consumerism endures because it is also a kind of compensation for an alienated existence. Consumerism thrives when most people — the producers, the workers — are powerless in politics and society.

Roberts summed up his argument in this way:

“Ecological values are those linked with consumption, but they are in fact substantially derived from the way in which people experience life as producers. It is that exploited, alienated and relatively powerless period, the working day, which reduces them to settling for commodity satisfaction in their ‘free time’. “The bargain just struck — the deprivation of goods related to human community and creative effort, in exchange for commodities or the promise of them — extends its influence throughout all levels and institutions, marking out the shape of the ‘consumer society’. It is this society which threatens the environment with its unlimited appetite — unlimited precisely because its objects are so unsatisfying.”

To really tackle the consumer society and to stop it from reemerging, today’s powerless consumers need to win real control over their lives and labour. Roberts said a new system based on grassroots democracy — worker and community self-management — is the best ecological alternative.

This view of consumerism and how to tackle it also raises strategic issues for environmentalists today.

Roberts said it means environmentalists have a stake in “every struggle in an industrial society, whatever the immediate issue.”

How these struggles develop is key. Are they powered by grassroots activists or led by unaccountable functionaries? Do they try to build mass movements for change or do they focus mostly on lobbying politicians?

These are important ecological questions because it is by taking part in such struggles that people can begin to throw off their imposed social role as passive consumers.

After all, asks Roberts:

“What sort of self-management, what turn from consumerist values, could be expected of workers who meekly accepted a cut in real wages, or of women who surrendered to others their right to decide on child-bearing?”

This is a very different conclusion to Trainer, who said in his GLW interview that “the essential aim is not to fight against consumer-capitalist society, but to build the alternative to it”.

It is a mistake to separate the fight against present conditions from the building of an alternative way of life. It is through struggle against the injustices of capitalist society that the new values, ideas and institutions of an alternative, ecological society will emerge.

So how is that “ignoring capitalism to death” working out so far, Shane?

Yeah Trainer is a utopian – what we need to do is construct a revolutionary vanguard party and seize state power – then all will be well. Anything less betrays your support for the capitalist system.

Transition Towns is a diverse global movement of 1000s of people thinking about how to build a better society – of course of lot of their thinking is confused and muddy thats the nature of movements of ordinary people who are trying to change things.

Those involved in Leninist politics are a tiny group of people who are sure they have ‘the’ answer even though there has never been a successful revolution in an advanced capitalist country. Utopian indeed.

Trainer’s response presents an absurd disconnect between his analysis and his prescription for action.

He assures us that the first 250 pages of his book clearly identify the capitalist system as being the direct cause of the problems that are likely to destroy us, and he poses “some kind of ‘socialism'” as the answer. But the last two chapters, he tells us, propose a strategy that deliberately avoids confronting the capitalist system and its coercive state, and retreats instead into the rank utopianism of the Transition Towns movement.

With a straight face Trainer tells us we should “ignore capitalism to death” while developing “local communities that don’t operate according to capitalist principles”. Evidently we can wish capitalism away without ever attempting to dispossess it of its massive wealth and power. He calls this “classic anarchist ‘prefiguring'”. I call it a recipe for failure.

David Pepper, in his book Eco-socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice correctly notes:

Anarchistic prefiguring strategies that attempt to marginalise capitalism sound seductive, but experience has shown that they usually result in the marginalising of the countercultural marginalisers themselves, who have ignored or underestimated or refused to confront the material basis of the hegemony of prevailing capitalist ideologies.

Or as Eric Kerl of Chicago put it:

All of these proposals to make a “revolution” without actually challenging the state are radical sounding, but are based on the acceptance of the state — the very institution that possesses the monopoly of coercive means necessary to maintain capitalist social relations.

Ted Trainer has posted a reply to this article. He writes:

“Simon has (inadvertently I’m sure) misinterpreted the basic transition argument I put in The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World. Yes I do say ‘…the main problem group is not the corporations or the capitalist class … The problem group, the key to transition, is people in general.’…but this is not a statement about the state of the world and its problems…it is said in the second last chapter and is to do with transition strategy.”

Read the full text on the Green Left Weekly website.

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The negative effects of consumerism include the depletion of natural resources and pollution of the Earth. The way the consumer society is working is not sustainable. We are currently overusing Earth’s natural resources with more than 70 percent. If everyone on earth lived like the average American we would need 5.2 planets to support us.
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Consumerism, or the consistent choice to collect and eat items and services, has a considerable effect on the environment. The manufacturing, transportation, and disposal of patron items all contribute to pollutants, deforestation, and weather change. One of the primary methods consumerism pollutes the planet is thru the manufacturing of products.
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The desire for a better life often influences consumerism. While everyone needs to consume, unnecessary consumerism is damaging the planet by overflowing the landfills, creating higher greenhouse gasses with pollution, and causing global warming.