Linkages Home | Sustainable Consumption Home | Search | Send Feedback
THE CONFERENCE
The conference was unconventional and highly participatory. To the extent possible, this report highlights the primary insights, questions, and proposals for action that emerged.
Framing the Problem: Ecology, Justice, and Quality of Life
The opening speakers mapped out a framework for the ensuing discussions and work sessions. They summarized three central concerns: 1) the environmental effects of current and projected consumption patterns; 2) the lack of equity in consumption patterns within the United States and between the United States and other nations; and 3) a growing concern that the American Dream has gone badly awry, with many people feeling that priorities are misplaced and that they would like to give more time to community and family and less time to work and amassing possessions.
Donella Meadows of Dartmouth College defined the problem in environmental terms. She said that current levels of material and energy use in the United States and worldwide already exceed sustainable environmental limits. For example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has calculated that worldwide emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (from burning fossil fuels) are already 60 to 80 percent higher than the atmosphere can absorb without change. Likewise, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that the global fish catch is 20 percent higher than can be sustained over the long run (more than that in some fisheries, less in others).
Statistics like these mean not only that consumption and emission levels should go down, Meadows explained. It means that they will go down because the earth cannot support them indefinitely. The choice is whether we bring them down deliberately, through higher efficiency, cleverer technologies, more equitable sharing, and purposeful frugality, or whether they come down because ecological and social systems break down.
Meadows cited three ways to reverse growth of material and energy consumption. One is to increase efficiency, for instance, through longer product lifetimes. A second way is to correct the market system so that prices reflect environmental costs. (Consumption would drop because we could afford to buy much less of highly resource-intensive products.) Finally, people could be supported in their efforts to learn to meet nonmaterial needs such as love, respect, community, and identity through nonmaterial means, instead of through highly marketed and ultimately unsatisfying material substitutes.
Concern about environmental sustainability has been at the heart of the growing debate about consumption patterns in northern, industrial nations. But American consumption patterns result in more than environmental degradation. Increasingly, the United States has a deep fissure between those who can consume excessively and those who bare