Customer Reviews

Confronting Consumption

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This award-winning book ("The Best Book in Global Environmental Affairs" according to the International Studies Association) offers an accessible and engaging analysis of the 800 pound gorilla in the living room that environmentalists find difficult to talk about with force: overconsumption. The early portion of the book documents the problem; the middle chunk offers a set of mental lenses for making sense of our quandry; and the final chapters offer real-life stories of actors and movements (the voluntary simplicity movement, for example, and the home power and local currency movements too) challenging the upward escalating trajectory of the consumption of "stuff."

What's especially helpful about the book -- in addition to its "something for everyone" flavor -- is that it moves beyond simplistic prescriptions to "squash advertising" or "buy recycled products." Indeed, it is rather skeptical of these measures, which it tends to view as diversionary activities meant to take our eye off the underlying forces at war with the planet. Instead, it offers strategies for coming together collectively to challenge broader powers and structures that make it so difficult for people worried about the future of the planet to live more with less.

Obviously you need to consume in order to survive and consume more in order to live comfortably. But in this country at least, it is almost impossible not to overconsume. Our president encourages us to spend more. Our vice president sneers that some "virtuous" people would have us conserve energy rather than use as much as we want to, at any cost. TV and other media bombard us with messages to eat more and buy more. Our financial advisors tell us to buy the biggest house we can afford. When was the last time anyone suggested saving money rather than "investing" it?

Confronting Consumption tackles the problem from several angles. I'm afraid the larger global arguments Princen and his fellow editors and academics make are lost on me when they write of "commoditization" and "conceptualizing the consumption problem." But in the final section they get down to ground level and talk about voluntary simplicity, Adbusters, and alternate methods of home power (off the grid).

An especially interesting observation appears in Michael Maniates's essay about the voluntary simplicity movement. He attended a voluntary simplicity day at a university. Thousands of people showed up, many more than the organizers expected. They wanted to know about cutting living expenses, downshifting, and job-sharing. They were not at all interested in the Sierra Club presentation or other "save the planet" groups. It isn't that people aspiring to live simply don't want to help save the planet. They just want to do it in a more manageable way, one person, one family at a time.

Unfortunately, that won't undo the ecological, financial, and human damage already caused by overconsumption. For that, we will need leaders who at the very least acknowledge that overconsumption is a problem, not a virtue.