For decades, news of floating plastic islands in the Pacific, of overloaded landfills and of the world’s dwindling freshwater and arable land has been reported. They have served since the ’70s, with the help of your friendly neighborhood ecologists, to forecast the impending doom of the planet. Yet the last 40 years have not been for naught. We saved San Francisco Bay from clogging down to a puny brown river; we replanted our forests and cast more recycling bins.
But the core problem of the last two centuries, the problem that put smog over every major city and reached into the Amazon with a buzz saw arm, still persists. We over consume as a species, and not only that: we consume unevenly. The eternal string of statistics paints a picture: that of some inevitably poor third-worlder, an Ethiopian, a Bangladeshi, a Vietnamese woman with a reused plastic water gallon jug and a rich first-worlder, an American, an English, an Australian woman with water filtration. You can look at it in other ways too. More cars built within the last 10 years are liable to show up in Los Angeles than Dakar or Havana.
It may be said that the issues of blanket overconsumption and the specific tendencies of certain places to eat up more resources are separate. However, the fact that certain areas consume more than others is at the heart of blanket overconsumption. Just as it took only one Krakatau to drop world temperatures, it only takes a few Shanghais and New Yorks to claim vast swaths of farmland, lumber and ore. In fact, the idea that so few super wealthy locations are competing for most of the resources doesn’t limit the issue but expands it. Less people are making decisions about what should go where and, finding that there is little resistance to what they can demand, they use significantly more resources than others.
Overconsumption is entrenched in the idea of big cities and, by extension, in the idea of successful countries. When we criticize China for being the world’s up and coming premier polluter, we set a double standard in two principle ways. First, in a historical sense, we criticize them for being what was, up until the last 20 years, the only way any nation could be successful. In recent memory, everyone was required to an industrial powerhouse or to become the victim of one. China, having been the stoolie of many western nations, and then Russia, decided that it should build up its own industries and has done a bang-up job in getting there.
The expense, as we all have come to know, is an environmentally ruined countryside and little towns made out of toxic electronic waste. But, hey, it’s what we all did once upon a time. Second, in a very present sense, we criticize them for growth and do so only because we like growing too. At the heart of it, western nations enjoy cornering the market on greed. Under religious and secular veils, we have gotten very good at taking someone else’s silicon and defecating a computer or, as the case once was, someone else’s iron for a shiny new navy with bigger guns.
To complicate the problem even more, powerful countries and the big cities within them are not only exploiters of resources but also exploiters of industry. As long as there is a clear hierarchy between producer and exploiter, overconsumption stays a reality. Like many things in life, it can be compared to Jenga. Sure, there are some moveable, replaceable parts, but there are still multiple, integral parts.
So, the question arises: “How do we lose the game with our tower of overconsumption?” We limit the options by which people can over consume. We take products off the market for being harmful or for where they come from or how they are made. However, an abundance of reasonably inoffensive merchandise still creates an abundance of reasonably offensive waste. Equalizing income brackets is important here and already part of our modern grievances. We probably wouldn’t have as much over consumption if the buying power of a populace were limited. Spreading out high-income areas geographically could also stem come of the buying power of areas. The essential problem is not that there are too many rich people but that there are too many rich people attracting industries to produce and be bought from on multiple levels.
The result is a large amount of refuse that finds its way back into the environment. On a global level, we could also do well to break down the hierarchy of nations that produce or provide resources and those that use them. This means for one that we make accords to equalize the buying power of nations, not by limiting the buying power of rich nations but by eliminating any legal hurdles that keep poor nations subordinate. Working with poorer nations thereafter to help them build their economies as partners more so than competitors could assist the disparity. Pushing ourselves closer and closer to the cliff, we need to examine every