Tuesday, April 28, 2009
During these past couple of weeks, we’ve learned about a host of new environmental improvements: alternative energies, new technologies and green products. We were shown all the different things that we, the consumers, can invest in or purchase to reduce our impact on the environment.
The truth of the matter, however, is that these innovations all take for granted our current level of consumption; and the current level of consumption is not sustainable. By focusing on what we should buy, we avoid asking whether we are buying too much.
Our economy, and those who seek profit within it, is leading us over the cliff of Earth’s carrying capacity. Instead of thinking about how to extract more profit from consumers, the great creativity of the human mind would be better put toward developing new power structures where people, not profit, are put first.
We used to assume that we had an endless supply of natural resources and an unending waste-basket capacity on Earth. Now, however, we are beginning to recognize that we indeed live in a world of finite resources. Oil and metal supplies are stressed. Drinking water and arable land are scarce. We’ll never produce energy clean enough, a car efficient enough or a Clorox that’s green enough to maintain our extravagant level of consumption.
The disconnect between our levels of consumption and the world’s limited resources can be seen on campus. Last week, Lauren Keith, Wichita junior, writing as a guest columnist expressed her dismay about how environmentalists have become stuck in a rut of consumption by tapping into a growing consumer movement.
But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that reducing consumption is not profitable. Thus, the invisible hand cannot point us in the right direction. The underlying forces that perpetuate our ecological problems are our capitalistic economic system and our culture of individualism. By channeling the money into the hands of the few and inducing high levels of consumption, we have laid the groundwork for most of the environmental degradation that we see today.
To move forward, we have to break from the status quo and put our creativity toward developing new systems of organization, which democratize our resources and put the modes of production and planning in the hands of the majority instead of the minority. Focusing on the underlying causes of our environmental problems, and not which “green” products to buy, is what environmentalism is really about.
— Kenny is a Leavenworth senior in civil and environmental engineering.
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Comments
Kenny: Consumption causes harm, whether buying green or not
Vladislav,
You're probably right, I mean it makes perfect sense to use the relative poverty caused by communism in the latter part of the 20th century to prove how communal land ownership and democratization of resources doesn't work. It's a far better cases study than are the thousands of years of human history when people used communal lands and property throughout the earth, causing minimal impact on their environment. Of course it makes far less sense than the capitalist economic system that has brought us to the brink of complete inhalation due to the environmental degradation caused by a "free" market, and profit seeking. Please tell us again how a system that predicates itself on endless growth and ultimately endless consumption will sustain us longer and better than the system that served all of the people before us, who by the way were actually allowed to pass on a habitable planet to their children and grandchildren. It's not enough that capitalism has lead to unbridled consumption; it has also infiltrated the ideologies of a nation full of people who will defend it despite the fact that it is the very system that is leading to our downfall.
Sorry if this is offensive, I really didn't mean it as a personal attack.
Kenny: Consumption causes harm, whether buying green or not
I don't see that happening Kenny boy. That would require leadership, and leadership is an anathema to democracy and vice versa. No way our government could grow the balls to stop consumption, the lifeblood of our existence. The only way the environment could be saved would be if a huge pandemic wiped out a large chunk of the world's population
Kenny: Consumption causes harm, whether buying green or not
I love John Kenny...plain and simple the man tells it like it is.
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