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                       WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE

                        How Much is Enough:
         The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth
                       by Alan Thein Durning

                      worldwatch@igc.apc.org

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       CONSUMER LIFE-STYLE CAUSES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION,
                     DECLINE IN FAMILY VALUES


     High consumption among the affluent fifth of humanity wreaks
more environmental damage worldwide than any other cause except
rapid population growth.  Our cars, suburbs, shopping malls,
throwaway products, and meat and junk-food diet add up to the most
environmentally destructive way of life yet devised.  The consumer
life-style born in America and now emulated by a billion people
worldwide causes the lion's share of ecological ills.  Yet
consumption is usually overlooked in environmental discussions.

     The consumer life-style offers dubious human rewards as well,
according to the study.  Sociological research suggests that,
above the poverty line, additional consumption makes minimal
contributions to personal happiness.

     HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? calls on individuals to shift their
values away from materialism to other sources of fulfillment,
including family and community.   It challenges communities to
restrain advertising and other pro-consumption forces, and
industrial nations to encourage workers to trade wage increases
for more leisure time.

     Of the world's three broad ecological classes, the consumer
class--one billion people mostly in industrial countries--causes
most damage to the global environment.  It has released virtually
all the ozone-depleting CFCs, two-thirds of greenhouse gases and
pollutants that cause acid rain, and similar shares of everything
from pesticide runoff to radioactive waste.

     The spread of consumerism around the globe marks the most
rapid and fundamental change in day-to-day existence the human
species has ever experienced.  Over a few short generations, we in
the affluent fifth of humanity have become car drivers, television
watchers, junk-food eaters, mall shoppers, and throwaway buyers. 
The rest of the world, meanwhile, is watching us on television and
now aspires to our consumer life-style.

     Consumption has taken an ever more central place in personal
values.  Between 1967 and 1990, the share of Americans entering
college who believed it essential to be "very well off
financially" rose from 44 to 74 percent.  Americans go to shopping
centers more often than they go to church.

     Ironically, skyrocketing per-capita consumption has largely
failed to make the people of consumer societies much happier. 
Repeated opinion surveys show, for example, that the share of
Americans reporting they are "very happy" has stayed around one
third since 1957, despite a doubling of personal consumption
expenditures.

     Worse, adopting the consumer life-style may have eroded what
psychologists recognize as two key sources of fulfillment in life-
-social relations and leisure time.  Informal visits between
neighbors, family conversation, and family meals have all
diminished in the U.S. since 1950.

     Working hours in industrial countries, meanwhile, exceed
typical working hours before the Industrial Revolution, and
television viewing absorbs whatever time the introduction of
labor-saving home appliances frees up.

     Americans alone--consuming their own weight in basic raw
materials each day--have used up as large a share of the earth's
minerals since 1940 as did all previous generations in all
countries put together.  The middle-income class, three billion
people mostly in Asia and Latin America, causes far less harm. 
Their diet of grains and local produce, their moderate buildings,
their buses, railroads, and bicycles, and their modest stocks of
durable goods all exemplify a life-style that is environmentally
sound.  Advanced technologies could make that life-style more
comfortable, but its basic outlines define the environmental
ideal.

     The world's billion poor people--most of them in Africa and
South Asia--live on insufficient grain and dirty water.  They
reside in huts and shanties, travel by foot, and their scant
possessions are crafted from materials gathered in the local
environment.  About half are caught in a downward spiral of
ecological and economic impoverishment:  They put rain forests to
the torch and steep slopes to the plow just to stay alive.

     If environmental degradation results when people consume too
much or two little, the question is, How much is enough.  Until
now the unstated goal of international development has been to
lift everyone into the consumer class.  Yet the global environment
cannot support one billion of us living like American consumers,
much less a future population of ten billion.

     If the earth's abundance is to survive for our grandchildren,
we in the consumer society will have to adopt an ethic of
sufficiency and follow a technologically sophisticated version of
the life-style currently practiced lower on the economic ladder. 
That life-style might combine bicycles and a low-meat diet with
laptop computers and fiber optic cables.

     The book examines several trends that promote consumerism: 
expansion of the advertising industry, substitution of shopping
malls for traditional city centers, rapid international spread of
commercial television, continuation of government subsidies to
environmentally harmful industries, and the persistence of the
belief that only ever-increasing consumption can ensure full
employment.

     Only a broad social movement to create a culture of
permanence--a way of life that can endure through countless
generations--can hope to tame such potent forces, according to the
author.

     Ultimately, the linked fates of humanity and the natural
realm depend on us, the consumers.  We can curtail our use of
ecologically destructive things and cultivate the deeper,
nonmaterial sources of fulfillment that bring happiness:  family
and social relationships, meaningful work, and leisure.  Or we can
abrogate our responsibilities and let our life-style ruin the
earth.

     Perhaps Henry David Thoreau had it right when he scribbled in
his notebook beside Walden Pond, "A man is rich in proportion to
the things he can afford to let alone."

                              --END--

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Jay
-- 
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"The market economy is replacing a complex organic
 environment with a simplified inorganic one, literally
 dissembling a biosphere that has supported humanity for
 countless millennia.  In the course of replacing the complex
 ecological relationships, on which all living things depend,
 with more elementary ones, capitalism is restoring the
 biosphere to a stage where it will be able to support only
 simpler forms of life. ... The earth will become incapable of
 supporting humanity itself." [Bookchin 1980:230-1]