I want to start this post by recognising an important fact. We all consume. And we always will. The act of consumption is merely the act of using something, and we will always need to use things to fulfil fundamental human needs.
There is a very important difference, though, between consumption and Consumerism. If consumption is the act, Consumerism is the social system which exists when that act becomes defining of a society. And it’s Consumerism that causes the problems. Consumerism takes the act of consumption and turns it into the defining act of our role as social beings, rather than one expression of that role. We all consume, but in a healthy society, we should also participate to an equally significant extent in social groups and relationships that are beyond consumption. We should produce, and we should be citizens.
But in a Consumerist society, these other roles fade into the background. And this is dangerous, because with our roles as producers and as citizens (among others, perhaps) go balance and perspective in our societies. As Consumers, we become the centre of the universe. We have an inflated sense of our own importance. We have no real responsibility to anyone other than ourselves – we must look after our own interests first and foremost, and so become Savvy Consumers.
With Consumerism, we lose our connection with where the products and services we consume come from, because we lose any real understanding that things have to be produced somewhere, by someone. But why should we question how a £4 radio or a £1 Christmas tree is produced? Why should we engage in the debate about organic food, when the FSA tells us the nutritional value is no different? The limit of our responsibility is to do the best for ourselves, by getting the quality we want at the best possible price; and to do this as often as possible in order to feed our insatiable economy.
With Consumerism, we no longer have real responsibility as citizens, because we become merely the Consumers of the political parties. Our role in representative democracy as it stands in this country today is merely to be marketed to, and if we are sufficiently wooed, to choose the best value for ourselves as individuals. We have no responsibility even to vote, and many – even most of us – do not.
With the possible exception of the United States, we in the UK are the most fundamentally (perhaps even fundamentalist) Consumerist state in the world. Look at the rhetoric of Bush and Blair in the aftermath of 9/11, directly equating consumption with the fulfilment of civic duty, the maintenance of our way of life. Look at our language; how often do you hear people described as consumers, relative to any other role? And now we have a Young Consumer of the Year Award for our children to aspire to. They work towards it in school hours. Increasingly, to be a good consumer is the future for which our schools prepare our children. Is this really what we want?
And what is the role of the advertising industry in all this?
To my mind, the advertising agencies are the unwitting priests of this new, emergent religion. We give the short, sharp, but intensely frequent sermons which help maintain the dominance of Consumerism. Lesson 1 when you start at a creative agency is that the average person sees 3000 commercial messages a day; we all know this statistic, told to us to help us understand the challenge of ‘cut through’. But look at that statistic in a different light, as the number of times we preach to our faithful every day. Compare this frequency with the Koutoubia in Marrakech, which calls the city’s Muslims to prayer a mere 5 times per day.
Now ask yourself: what the hell are we doing?
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For me there is an important difference between the attitude that we bring to the act of consumption. Without reducing this into a debate about rhetoric, consumption without conservation of resources is what we need to avoid. We will still consume in an economy based on conserving but that consumption will be balanced and conserve resources.
For example I consumed about 10 small strawberries this morning. They were the first crop that I had grown in a greenhouse (don’t ask). They were delicious but small. I think this act of consumption is also an act of conservation. I am keeping plants alive, sequestering carbon from the environment, providing resources for an ecosystem from bacteria to bees and when the plants and straw have passed their usefulness they will be composted and returned to the ground to help make potatoes or carrots next year. By consuming I am also conserving.
The alternative, of course, is to tootle off to Tesco and buy Spanish strawberries which are bigger, mostly less tasty, probably cheaper, certainly less hassle, come in plastic packaging which won’t break down for 250 years and will have travelled a 1000 miles. This consumption doesn’t conserve much of anything.
Raising awareness and our consciousness about simple acts of consumption is important if we are to move, as you say, from consumerism to something different.
First day on this site – and I’m intrigued. I have a couple of comments, which stem from my work with communities trying to create social norms of pro-environmental behaviours across all areas of carbon emissions. My background is marketing, not environmentalism.
In our experience in our city-based project, consumption is a deeply tricky customer; people can create safe emotional distance when talking about societal ‘over-consumption’ – and by doing so, disapprove of it; but bring it up close and look at our own acts of consumption – wow – that’s quite a different challenge; to our way of life, to our ‘rights’, to our habits, to our local economy…we will pull in any set of beliefs to endorse our acts of individual consumption. Why? Because we like to consume, generally, – and as has been pointed out, we also have to. What we need to consume however, should increase our well-being (and I would argue that being in credit, or working all hours of the day in meaningless employment, in order to consume does not increase our wellbeing). Our consumption should arguably also be impact-neutral on ‘others’ – including the general ‘environment’. Monbiot has an interesting (and having practised it, true, I think) theory, that reducing the frequency of our consumption can lead us to savour each consumptive act more deeply – which in itself increases our sense of well-being and is less all round negatively impactful. I digress….
As indicated in ‘be a conscious marketer’ there are things that the industries themselves can do both in terms of the message they produce, and importantly by over-hauling the production process to create new operational models that produce goods and services that are, simply, sustainable. An example: we currently have a societal value based around cars which reads something like this: ‘change your car every 3 years…for a new one’. That, we are told, is the smart, high-value and aspirational thing to do. And car manufacturers base their operation plans on this (throughput of materials and resources) market activity expectation. So how could they change their operations and message, so that it operates within sustainable limits and values, still reaches revenue targets (and triple bottom lines targets demanded by employees?!), still provides employment? For instance, could the ethical marketers and finance people in X car-manufacturer come up with an operational model and message that said (for instance) “We will re-furbish your car every three years; you will be rewarded for minimum wear and tear…. The smart, aspirational, caring and sexy person is the one who gets most years out of his/ her car.” (You’re the comms people – I’m sure you’ll get the message nuances right…)
For people like me, working with communities who consume, those in-situe within the large corporations getting behind these types of conversation, as suggested by Justin Basini, would be deeply exciting. We could see high street clothes shops operating as clothes libraries, electrical items being lease only, repair and re-use being seen as revenue providers. We could continue to work on our over-consumption, but at least know that in the main, we can enjoy our high street and retail park consumption knowing that it has been deeply greened. But it takes inspiration from within these large corporations, to make and communicate these changes, I think.
Of course. Some businesses may just be wholly unsustainable in their product or service offering. That’s where diversification comes in, or even introuducing deliberate human resource inefficiencies and relocalisation models. But that is for another day.
Couple of points I’d make to build on both of these comments…
Both of you raise the idea of a different way of consuming – Justin with his strawberries, and Rachel taking George Monbiot’s notion of “savouring” consumption. I think there’s something really interesting in this, and I’ve heard it perhaps most powerfully formulated by Alastair McIntosh. He talks about the pornography of consumerism, defining pornography as anything that stimulates superficially but fails to engage the heart. A powerful thought. Rachel, I’d recommend you get in touch with him if you’re in Stirling; he led the campaign against the super quarry on Harris, and now lives in Glasgow, but is always very keen on Scottish projects! http://www.alastairmcintosh.com has his contact details.
Rachel also raises the really interesting issue of the difficulty of looking at our own acts of consumption. I’m going to write more about this soon, but in the meantime, I’d really recommend Ro Randall’s paper on Loss and Climate Change (4th down on our Reports page, in the Resources section); and I’d recommend you look her up as well. She runs something called Carbon Conversations, which is a fascinating discussion group project, effectively providing group support for people to go into these very personal issues safely and confidently. She is a highly regarded psychotherapist, and runs training courses for facilitators regularly.
The last thing I want to say, though, is “Yes… and?!” The thing is, both of you seem to discuss this area within the frame that refining our consumption behaviour is the most important thing we can do. I disagree. I think the most important thing is to define and encourage entirely other modes of social participation (using the skills of marketing perhaps); then Consumerism will fade because we are doing something else. My analogy is the race to put a man on the moon as a solution to the Cold War – a lateral, creative solution to Consumerism will not seek to refine consumption behaviours; it will define something else for us to focus on to help us getting away from thinking consumption is so important. I’ll be writing about this soon as well.
Guys, I’m loving your work. I’d love to post a long comment on this, but I’m flat out today
My over-riding comment is that we’ll need to fundamentally change our mindset or even human make-up to avoid consumerism. From times gone by we have gorged, stock-piled and over consumed where we can, with little or no regard for the impact. Broadly the only communities that don’t take this approach are ones that live within a fragile community where abuse leads to destruction. Unless we can physically/ emotionally feel the impact of our actions, we will not stop over consuming. The global melt-down, hasn’t had the impact that one would expect, probably because the World hasn’t ended, it just got a little tougher for people and we used our Global resources and support to help find a solution.
I agree entirely; providing coherent alternatives in terms of vision, value-based messages, aspirations, combined with well communicated and supported access to practical infrastructural activity, on a local level, is key to sustained change – it is the core of my work, which is testing a behaviour change model over 4 years with 35,000 people, based on the barriers brought to the fore by Ipsos MORI / Phil Downing Turning Point or Tipping Point (and I hope you’ll be relieved to know I am very aware of Ro and AM – I believe we all look at each other’s work to try and increase the quality and effectiveness of what we are doing). I’m sure you must also be aware of Tom Crompton’s work – deeply important in terms of value-framing – which helps us get the right messages out, and George Marshall, both whom, I think offer deeply valuable insight to what is going on and how we should move forward.Eulogies aside…
I think what you are referring to though is scale and approach. Top down or bottom up or a mixture of both? To create a meaningful and sustained change, within a relatively short time frame, from bottom-up takes a huge amount of resource (time). It is almost impossible to do this through volunteer effort alone especially when many of the barriers in existence are largely in the gift of business, or government agencies, and further, these have the capacity and often motivation to move the physical, legal, and social goalposts (look at Flybe’s advertising in attack of video-conferencing, it’s now a business offence not to fly!)
Let me give you an example; we spend a lot of carbon in leisure – of which ‘travel’ is a huge component. If we created a community garden (which, by the way, will cut very little emissions in our food consumption) we offer the opportunity to reduce leisure carbon because time will be taken up by weeding, digging etc the local patch. I mentioned in my last post, ‘human resource inefficiencies’ by which I mean – start doing things ourselves on a micro-scale – for instance, growing our own food is very time inefficient! It is what you are suggesting and you are right. In my previous post I’m talking about the stage before – where a local volunteer has to negotiate some land to be donated by their council. It can take months…. This is the top down bit – where solutions can be made more accessible; where offerings can be greened out of recognition…top down intervention essentially cuts down the time delay (and burn out) that comes from setting up and supporting the new green activities that we hope to move society into.
So we need both – local activity for people to get involved with; and a decisive push from corporates to radically align their product/service offerings with a new values base. I think this is captured beautifully by a friend of mine, Jules Peck when he says “I often encourage companies to move to thinking not about pounds and pence but units of wellbeing delivered per unit planet input. This is resonating more and more with companies who are looking for new metrics and more meaningful roles in society. What I tell companies is that they will never become sustainable until they recognise that their role should be to maximise the sum of human flourishing within the bounds of the planets sustainable limits. Also that they need lobby for the changes needed to facilitate that and to support the journey in their customers from consumers to citizens. Some progressive corporates are tuning in to this message now.”
(laugh) was agreeing with Jon, not Mark.
Mark – your point is taken up and analysed by George MArshall in a fascinating lecture he gave about a year ago : http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/research/cpss/events_2009.shtml and whilst some things have moved on, the aspects of human nature that you refer to above are still critical issues to consider…with the view to understanding them so that we can start to create strategies to overcome them. Massive ask I grant you, but I don’t think we ethically have many other options…
In the film, George looks at ‘distancing’ where we feel the outcomes of climate change won’t affect us (so we don’t need to act, cannot act); where no amount of ‘fact’ is going to change our sets of beliefs (because what we are being asked to do is forray outside our social norms, and risk getting rejected by our communities.) It’s 40 minutes – but deeply insightful, and often hilarious stuff.
The point of getting our heads around these issues that George, and many others present, the what and the why, is so that we can move into coherent action to address them, at scale & within a timeframe that is going to meet scientific demands. Going back to my original point, my experience tells me that local projects to transform western societies can go a long way, but they cannot sustain meaningfully over time and at at scale to provide new societal norms if CURRENT corporate offerings and messages don’t pull in-line to provide coherent, consistent, accessible and aspirational alternatives.
Mark – totally disagree that it’s about fundamentally changing human nature; mindset maybe. But my point as I write about Consumerism is that we have engineered ourselves into a mindset that is in fact not human nature at all, but a fairly nasty perversion of it. To be honest, though, Rachel has more than answered this, so I’ll leave it there!
Rachel – seems a minor miracle we haven’t met, since we seem to be talking to most of the same people (inc Tom and Jules). I still think I’m on a slightly different tack to you though – I think there are ways that we could be promoting mass social participation that create a whole new axis to this debate, and help out by taking us away from consumption being such a defining act, relative to citizenship etc. This I think could actually make the activity of corporates far less important in all this. For me, this is probably the most hopeful avenue of thinking, because I just see too much inertia-dressed-as-radicalism in the corporate world to believe that real change is going to come from there… Please keep commenting and coming back to the site though – and let us know if you’d be keen to guest-post on some of your own work?
My comment became too long, so I turned it into the next post: http://www.conservation-economy.org/?p=829. In short, I believe that Consumerism has become the dominant mode by which we experience and interact with the world around us. So I agree with you Justin that it has to be about raising our awareness and consciousness about what and how we consume, and for me that isn’t just limited to products and services, but every aspect of life.
I agree that consumerism is excessive, but I cannot agree that advertising fundamentally promotes this. The question is, “What kind of advertising?” Not all of it is the marketing of consumer goods. Doctors and hospitals advertise. Charity organizations advertise. In fact, this blog even has an advertising component. You promote books in your “resources” section, books that your readers must buy to acquire, and I’m sure you hope they will. (That also proves that not all consumer goods are unnecessary or not worth purchasing.)
Advertising is a tool, and when a tool is misused you don’t blame it but the user. Advertisers — some not all — use advertising to manipulate the public. Others use it simply to inform. The hearts of the advertisers and the consumers, whose greed is what advertisers prey on, are what drive consumerism, not advertising itself.
When do people talk about DEPRECIATION when they talk about growth? How much of GDP just compensates for depreciation. But our brilliant economists do not subtract the depreciation of durable consumer goods when they compute NET DOMESTIC PRODUCT. In fact they hardly ever mention NET Domestic Product. Running a world of almost SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE on defective grade school algebra is SO INTELLIGENT.
http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html
Double-entry accounting is 700 years old and invented in Italy. Accounting was one of the first things corporations did with computers in the 50s and 60s. Now we have computers cheap enough to give to grade school kids. When was the last time you heard an economist suggest that accounting be mandatory in the schools?
http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/ec/working%20papers/2005-03.pdf