Most of us have heard about the Population Bomb – the thesis that a
growing human population will wreak environmental havoc, such as mass
starvation. But many think that the real ticking time bomb in our
future is not so much a Population Bomb but instead what may be
called the Consumption Bomb. The Consumption Bomb is sometimes
defined as the threat to our planetary health caused by ever larger
numbers of people adopting Western patterns of consumption, causing
catastrophic levels of pollution, global warming, and resource
depletion.
The following graph compares growth in population and growth in
consumption during the period from 1995 to 2005. The blue bars
represent increases in population. The orange bars represent growth
in consumption.
This graph makes clear: growth in consumption is increasing much more
dramatically than growth in population.
Our main environmental problem is not necessarily that the world's
population is too high. Our main environmental problem is that the
world is consuming too much. Overconsumption is causing the world's
carbon dioxide levels to rise to dangerous levels. To support our
extravagant consumption levels, we are depleting our limited supplies
of fossil fuels, reducing the fertility of our soil, raising the
acidity of the oceans, overusing our limited aquifers of water, and
engaging in deforestation that reduces the trees we need to soak up
the ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide caused by our wasteful
lifestyles.
Now some will look at the above graph and think: so it's all the
fault of those Chinese and Indians that have done things such as
ditching their bicycles for cars. But it's not just growth in
consumption we should consider, but also which countries are
consuming the most now.
Below is a graph showing carbon dioxide usage in tons per capita per
year. This is more or less equivalent to a graph showing consumption
levels per country.
From this graph we can see that the lion's share of consumption is
being done by people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and
Saudi Arabia. Even though consumption has been rising in China and
India, the per capita consumption in those countries is still less
than a third of what it is in the United States.
So we should therefore discard the previous definition of the
Consumption Bomb, which was phrased to put the focus on recent
adopters of the Western lifestyle. We should instead define the
Consumption Bomb simply as the threat to our planetary health caused
by high-consumption lifestyles, wherever they may be followed. With
this definition we realize that it is not some nouveau riche
Chinese who are the main drivers of the Consumption Bomb – it
is mainly the citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia, and
Saudi Arabia (along with, to a lesser extent, the citizens of ten or
fifteen smaller nations).
One of the main catalysts of overconsumption is consumerism.
Consumerism is almost a kind of secular religion that is preached to
us from birth in a thousand ways, by evangelists such as the pitchmen
of Madison Avenue. We are conditioned by television to judge the
worthiness of a man by the size or the shininess of his car, or the
number of square meters in his house, or how far he traveled for his
vacation, rather than what is in the man's heart or mind.
Consumerism compels us, in the words of one writer, to borrow money
we don't have, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we
don't like.
How can you help reduce the devastating ecological blast effects of
the Consumption Bomb? Simply consume less. Here are a few things you
can do:
- Eat less meat. According to one study, if a family of four gave up eating steak for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of taking their car off the road for three months.
- Drive less, and take public transportation. Stop driving to some place you don't need to go to just to get some photo for a Facebook status update.
- Stop using Facebook to celebrate frivolous overconsumption. Don't buy some thing you don't need because it would make a nice picture for you to post on Facebook, and don't go to some fancy hotel so you can post a Facebook update to impress your friends. And stop pressing the Like button when you see other people posting photos that document their own frivolous overconsumption. You are only encouraging such people to engage in excessive consumption.
- Live in the smallest apartment or house you can comfortably live in. When the housing bubble burst, many a family was ruined because it didn't follow this rule.
- Drop the slogan Bigger is Better, and adopt the slogan Small is Beautiful. Small cars and small homes are beautiful, as are bicycles. Big cars and big homes are (with some exceptions) relics of the past that we should not be building any more.
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