6. Sustainability and Global Consumption

Lead Papers

Vassily A. Agaphonoff, Dr. Ahsan Uddin Ahmed,William M. Alexander, Mark Anielski, Elena BIVOL, Danny Cassimon, Jim Christiansen, Dr. Parzival Copes, Stevan Dedijer, George L. De Feis, Dr. John C. Dernbach, Dr. ir. J.Dewulf and J. Mulder and H.J. van der Kooi and J. de Swaan Arons,Professor Gerard D’Souza and Ramkumar Bendapudi, David S. Evans and C. Coulthard and I. Henderson and P. Jones, Dr. Hans W. Gottinger, Dr. Yuriy Grynyuk, Dr. Tee L. Guidotti, Xiaohui Hao, Shahidul Haque, MD. Hasibur Rahman and ,Hasida Yasmin, Raghbendra Jha and K.V. Bhanu Murthy, ANITA KON, Isabelle Lambiel, Tonu Lausmaa, Ming Lei, David S. Liebl, Dr. Sue L.T. McGregor, Faysal Abdel-Gadir Mohamed and Nimat Abdel-Karim Ahmed, Dr. Yew-Kwang Ng,S.G. Patil* and L.B. Hugar* and M.S. Veerapur* and J. Yerriswamy* and T. Cross† and A.C. vanLoon† and G.W. vanLoon†, Roland Prelaz-Droux, Alfredo Quarto, E.Mohan Reddy , Dirgha N. Tiwari (Dr. Eng.),Professor Helene Savard

Perceiving and understanding the human population in its role as a consumer is very important because consumers collectively spend two thirds of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They buy and influence the purchase of an increasingly wide array of products. Despite the fact that we are making consumer decisions in an emerging global community, people are still being taught how to be "good consumers", when actually the word consume means, "to destroy, use or expend". The enormous productive capacities and market forces of the planet have been committed to satisfying human needs and desires with little overall regard to the short-term or long-term future of life on the planet, or life in other nations or in future generations.

There are many different types of consumers and they all need to be taken into account separately: teen, young adult, elderly, low income, disabled, illiterate, and ethnic. Each type of consumers need to be understood from the point of view of a global perspective; a global perspective that challenges materialism and promotes ecological responsibility, humanitarianism, well-being, consumer ethics and The Global Community concepts. These concepts were developed to sustain Earth and they include world conditions, global problems and issues, global citizenship, stewardship, a moral and a spiritual community, universal values, and global interconnections.

Oil demand by transportation accounts for 39 per cent of world commercial energy needs. Consumption in developing countries has risen much faster over decade than in the industrialized countries due to their high rate of population growth, fast urban development, increased motorization and industrialization.

In the OECD countries, a decline in world prices does not usually stimulate consumption because taxes on oil products account for most of the price to end-users.

In multilateral trade, developing countries have three major concerns:

• The Uruguay Round has not done much to improve market access for their exports of goods and services.

• World Trade Organization(WTO) rules were found unbalanced in many important development related areas including the protection of intellectual property rights and use of industrial subsidies.

• Inadequate or inexistent human and financial resources have rendered impossible the use of opportunities offered by WTO to developing countries.

Developing countries find no interest to enter into negotiations with wealthier trading partners. The increasing gap between rich and poor nations will make it even unlikely of successful multilateral trade negotiations.

An indicator measures the percentage of products and services whose purchase price, paid by the consumer, reflects the full cost of the resources used in producing a product (including its eventual disposal or recycling) or in providing a service. By including all costs in the price of products and services encourages careful purchasing decisions and more efficient use of resources, and it provides an incentive for consumers to be more careful in their consumption patterns. 

An indicator measures the percentage of recyclable products actually recycled (used oil, paper, glass, aluminum, etc.). 

An indicator measures the number of people participating in recycling and other waste reduction activities. Personal commitment and action are vital to achieving sustainable development. Measuring participation in recycling programs provide information on the success of education and the efficiency of community-based programs.

Dr. Tee L. Guidotti explained that Sustainable development is a widely-discussed alternative to currently unsustainable economic development patterns. It is all the more attractive because it may be cast in terms compatible with the market economy. However, there must be a social dimension to the concept, a vision, for it to become a viable alternative to unrestrained economic growth. The Earth is no longer a self-regulating planetary system. Its future will depend on human action and the continuation of natural ecosystems will be achieved because people want them to be preserved. Acceptance of sustainable development by society may depend on cultural values and even spiritual notions about the relationship of humankind to the Earth. This is why the otherwise quasi-religious concepts often expressed in the environmental movement, such as the Gaia hypothesis, have value as metaphor even if they do not necessarily express literal fact. Sustainable development is often described in terms that suggest a static, less technology-dependent, and culturally more homogeous regionalized society. However, sustainable development cannot be stagnation. People will not accept a view of sustainable development that recreates a technologically more advanced version of a basic peasant society, especially if they have only recently developed economically. For societies to accept sustainable development and to continue to grow within, the new way of living must accept cultural diversity, encourage individual expression, allow social change, offer opportunity, and examine values. There must be ways to permit opportunity and growth without ecological compromise. Achieving sustainable development may therefore be linked with policies emphasizing community, the value of information, originality in ideas, and the arts.

There is no doubt that the issue of global ecological changes is one of the most potent in the movement toward ecological sustainability and economic reconstruction. It may even represent the next great challenge to the adaptability of the market economy. However, sustainable development needs to be thought through beyond its ecological and economic dimensions. It needs, in short, a vision.

Sustainable development is a concept critical to understanding proposals for solutions to the problem of large-scale ecological degradation and resource depletion in the context of personal freedom and the adaptability of markets. Briefly, the concept, as elaborated in the Brundtland report, involves establishing an economic structure that ideally consumes only as much as the natural environment produces and emits only as much as the natural environment can absorb. This is accomplished by reducing consumption and the scale of economic development, recycling materials, and reusing as much product as possible. This economic structure is sustainable in the sense that it can be sustained from one generation to another. It would differ from traditional peasant societies, which have been the only sustainable economic systems in the past to support large populations through many centuries, in being much more efficient in the use of resources, innovative, and based to a large extent on information management. There is a cultural dimension to moving toward this type of society, however. To accommodate and manage a sustainable economic system, the social structure would also have to change. Large-scale urban centres would be nonsustainable; traditional values that promote stability may be more supportive of sustainability than cosmopolitan, urban, entrepreneurial values. There is a question of whether the environmental heterogeneity and social pluralism of modern urban society, which many people feel tends to promote creativity (and also conflict) could be accommodated in such a system. It is often assumed that most communities under such a regime would be small, resource-efficient, and directly linked (either economically or through information on the state of its base) to a resource base in a way that would maintain some control over the exploitation of resources, a reversal of current demographic patterns.

Once the implications of sustainable development are traced through their social ramifications, it becomes clear that nothing less than a thorough restructuring of society would accommodate a sustainable economic structure. Issues of equity and community control over these resources and decision-making with respect to their distribution obviously arise. The concept of sustainable development is closely linked, in the minds of many, with that of community empowerment and a host of related issues related to social justice and cultural expression. There are other, less direct links that take the form of doctrines of ethical stewardship of resources, sharing the bounty of the Earth with all mankind, perceptions of the Earth as a veritable being or "Gaia" analogous to a mother to us all and not to be injured, making the world better for future generations, and many others.

An Alternative View

The Earth is no longer a self-correcting natural system. The planet now requires human intervention to stabilize its most basic functions and to reconstruct the degraded systems on which life ultimately depends. Even the remaining wild areas of the world, unexploited by humankind, are in almost every case preserved by human action, in the form of reserves or juridical restraint on allowable activities.

The Earth is no longer, if it ever was, a self-regulating planetary system returning to balance by the actions of its intrinsic processes of control. Rather, human activity has destabilized the planet to the point that the romantic "Gaia hypothesis", if it were ever true, now belongs to the past. It could be said that the Earth has always been a dynamic system, ever-changing in the evolution of life and the response to physical forces in the solar system, but over relatively short periods of its history, on the order of millions of years, it has sustained itself within a relatively fixed pattern of climate and life zones. What is different today is that the pace of change, even in the shortest of planetary time frames, has been accelerated by human activity, intentional intervention for the benefit of one dominant species. The planet cannot regulate itself reliably in the face of such rapid change. For better or for worse, human beings have so altered the planetary structure that they must now take even greater control of the situation to prevent further destabilization. This means assuming responsibility for restoring, not just preserving, ecosystems and other lost elements of the planetary fabric.

Conversely, the manifestations of ecological problems are all fundamentally interrelated and inseparable from societal values:

1. Global ecological changes (global warming, ozone depletion, acid deposition, resource depletion), as a consequence of overutilization of resources and overproduction of product and byproduct;

2. Population growth, migration, and refugee flight, increasing local and global pressures with an amplified effect where technology is most extractive and inefficient (polluting);

3. Economic development, energy demand, and generational expectations for standard of living which drive the economic system to provide more materially at the expense of resources and environmental stability;

4. Poverty, the culture of dependency, and the redistribution of resources, feeding the inequities that drive demand and make short-term expediency easier than long-term resource conservation;

5. Urbanization, the concentration of resources and economic activity, and the impact of human settlements on a large scale, which may have the effect of regionally concentrating the adverse effects of human activity but may also provide opportunities for more efficient resource utilization;

6. Cultural views of the world and the degree to which world-view dictates the vision of what is and is not possible politically and what actions are more or less likely to succeed in environmental reconstruction and management.

The material culture of society, expressed in economics, and ethical systems are inextricably intertwined in issues of equity and respect for the natural earth. Because treating the environment respectfully is an effective strategy for sustaining the yield of renewable resources, it is not surprising that most indigenous cultures incorporate religious or philosophical beliefs to the effect that the Earth is a provider, a sentient being, and an ancestor. To act in ways that do no harm to the planet is a highly adaptive and desirable code of behaviour when a relatively static population depends on a sustained yield of food and fibre. In the absence of an articulated theory of resources and material distribution, a traditional society incorporates these adaptive biocentric ways of thinking into religious belief systems, including the concept of Earth (or Gaea, Gaia, or Erde) as nurturing Mother. In such a society, sustainable development would mean (if it were meaningful as a separate thematic strand in the culture) sustaining the Earth as well as all its creatures, including its human communities.

A society based on growth, however, separates from this value in the optimistic belief that technological ingenuity and artificial constraints (such as pricing) can protect resources from becoming ultimately inaccessible for human use; since the values are recast in humanistic and anthropocentric terms, utility for humankind becomes the dominant reason for conserving resources. In this view, sustainable development is mostly about sustaining yield indefinitely and conserving resources systematically for future exploitation.

There is at present a conflict within society over which worldview will prevail. The "human utility" or "best use" view is much more compatible with the presently dominant growth-oriented economically motivated society. Even the notion of resource conservation fits well into this context because it can be translated into serving future markets. The "biocentric" or "highest use" worldview is paradoxically much more traditional but discordant with present dominant values; one strategy for replacing the dominant values is to appeal to traditional wisdom, intuitive understanding, and quasi-religious symbolism. The present-day environmental movement borrows heavily on these traditional values in an effort to recreate a biocentric ethic as the dominant worldview. The biocentric worldview is an essential tenet of the vanguard of the environmental movement, the proponents of "deep ecology". An example is the promotion of the "Gaia hypothesis". Besides having merit as a literal construct the hypothesis is useful as a means of personalizing responsibility for environmental damage. One cannot "hurt" an inanimate object, although it can be damaged for use for a given purpose; one can "hurt" a living being, even of planetary dimensions.

It is not clear that the biocentric worldview will completely replace the dominant anthropocentric worldview in the move toward some form of sustainable development. There is the obvious problem of inertia involved in changing all social institutions more or less simultaneously. There is also the nagging problem that alternative, stable and biocentric social orders do not necessarily appear very attractive to most of the world's citizens, particularly those only now emerging from traditional village societies. For all of its enormous disadvantages, contemporary urban culture has great advantages in terms of social and material efficiency, individual opportunity, cultural expression, and ingenuity. A return to historic Western models means to some a return to the Middle Ages and earlier (an impression heightened by the Druidic references in much of the literature of "deep ecology"), with the risk of social stagnation as a price for material stability and ecological responsibility. To societies only now emerging from predominantly peasant and village systems of social organization, the prospect of a return must seem almost chilling. To date, deep ecology has been more successful in articulating a vision of harmonious coexistence with nature on a vastly reduced scale of society than in articulating an alternative vision of a dynamic society in which intellectual and information growth replaces material and economic growth. Perhaps this will come in due time.

Implications for Society and Sustainable Development

To be fair, it is not clear that in the future contemporary urban society will maintain the historic level of opportunity and cultural expression associated with urban culture, either. Umberto Eco speaks convincingly of a return to the Middle Ages in a different sense, in concepts of progress, in attitude and cultural forms. The standardization of commerce and architecture, reductions in employment opportunities, and the obliteration of regional differences from popular culture that would accompany a retrogressive form of sustainable development may be seen by many as resulting in a much more homogenous, simplified, and impoverished form of urban life. What is more likely to occur is a synthesis, in the form of an adoption of sustainable development as a general economic basis, with some social tolerance of limited short-term ecological destruction as long as reconstruction is generally restoring the quality of the environment overall. In other words, if the world seems to be well on its way to restoring equilibrium, most people will probably accept limitations on opportunity in their individual lives and would at the same time tolerate limited environmental exploitation (such as mining) if considerable ends (a significant enhancement in human utility) appeared to justify modest means (limited impact followed by reclamation but nonetheless inevitably some adverse effects). Whether this synthesis is stable or transitional depends in part on whether it is seen by people as an improvement or regression in social terms and whether technology can mitigate environmental impacts to an acceptable degree.

Technology, of course, plays a major role in causing many of these environmental problems. In a sense, especially if agricultural technology is considered, technology was necessary for humankind to achieve unsustainable development. It is popular to speak of problems for which there are no technical solutions and the need for a more fundamental change in society. It is not surprising that there should exist problems with technology, because technology is inherently a systematic balancing of forces and interconversion of energy (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc.) to achieve a desired goal. As such, technological processes are always subject to inefficiencies, since the conversion of energy can never be 100% (indeed in most technological applications it is seldom as high as 40%). There will always be material and energy waste and continual tradeoffs between desirable and undesirable results. Forces that balance one another in one way do not necessarily balance in another desirable way: cars with more power produce more air pollution, increased production efficiency may cause unemployment, and the siting of a pulp and paper plant may not be appropriate ecologically in spite of economic advantages.

At best, technology only offers the range of alternatives, a toolbox of tools available to be used. The final decision which tool to use is a decision of purpose and intention. Technology is neither panacea nor villainy but an instrument. Sustainable development cannot occur without technological innovation unless human society is to devolve back to a tribal or foraging state.

Whatever worldview eventually predominates, or whether a synthesis occurs, it is fundamental to successful environmental reconstruction that the public believe that large-scale changes in the global environment are not inevitable. There must be a will to change. For such change to take place, it is essential that peoples of the world believe that change is possible and likely to succeed. This means that the twin enemies of survival are fatalism and pessimism.

Long-lasting change requires social and cultural change. Through collective action, governments and societies may change the presently destructive course of environmental degradation. The human economic and social systems that depend on environmental exploitation cannot merely be swept aside, but must be replaced by an alternative social order. To succeed, and to be worthy of succeeding, this social order must be humane, effective in responding to social needs, equitable in the distribution of goods, and historically stable. This means answers for the perennial problems of poverty, development, and social justice.

Although there is much to justify a pessimistic view of the world's prospects, we have actually come far in the search for a new way of living. Recent decades have brought a much more detailed view of the environment, rising awareness on the part of people in the developing world, more tolerant values in accepting other cultures, and technological developments that provide tools for constructive application.

Although human beings are responsible for our present unsustainable situation, there can be no solution without accommodating human needs. "Sustainable" must include the sustainment of an evolving and opportunity-rich social environment, preferably heterogenous in character with urban nodes as well as Arcadian hinterland and villages, or it is likely in some future generation to be cast off again as restrictive and stultifying.

The solution ultimately lies in seeing human society as an integral part of the planet and accepting that human communities must be accommodated in a stable world order. This implies a set of social actions that provide alternatives to both wasteful resource exploitation by industrialized societies and the often intensive resource overutilization by impoverished and less developed societies that leads to soil depletion and deforestation. Part of the answer may be sharing technological answers when they come available. Part of the answer may be a global educational and communications system in which societies have access to not only news but insight and explanation for the behaviour of other peoples. Part of the answer may be political evolution away from the nation-state and toward interdependent communities aggregated into stable regional confederations or trading blocs but preserving local traditions and placing value on local communities. A large part of the answer may be in encouraging personal opportunities that are not resource-intensive, putting the energies of the economic system and the people into community development, health promotion, education, the arts, and popular culture.

Ultimately, the economic system must shift from a basis of sustaining development and production to a basis of sustainable development and selective production. This cannot be achieved by a command economy of the type that so recently failed in the communist bloc. It requires that markets and prices be connected to resource availability in a very direct and explicit way. It also requires that the true cost of transportation, agriculture, and the distribution of goods be reflected in pricing and that people have sufficient resources, sufficient education, and sufficient choices to respond to these price changes with reduced demand or the selection of alternatives long before the resource base becomes damaged. The emphasis must not be on partisan political changes but on structural change to make society responsive to these issues and to diffuse responsibility for environmental reconstruction to the lowest possible level. The emphasis also must not be on the recreation of a peasant society with uniform social organization and orthodox values, but on a new and diffused form of aware and cosmopolitan culture, rich in human opportunities and displacing the need for material exploitation.