Stop Shopping … or the Planet Will Go Pop

[Guest guest]

Stop Shopping … or the Planet Will Go Pop

by David Smith

Published on Sunday, April 8, 2007

 

`Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the

planet,' begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser

and all-round environmental guru.'Fascism. Communism. Democracy.

Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive

attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has

created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the

very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even

religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is

consumerism.' According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the

government on sustainability, we have become a generation of

shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which

persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be.

Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is

also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview

with The Observer, that merely switching to `ethical' shopping is not

enough.

 

We must shop less.

 

From pictures of Coleen McLoughlin weighed down with designer bags to

branding endorsements by the likes of David Beckham, the image of

consumerism as a universal aspiration is ubiquitous. Last week 3,000

people stormed Primark's new flagship store on London's Oxford Street

before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and

earning the description by BBC2's Newsnight of `a plague of locusts'.

There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the

so-called `Froogles', individuals who use the internet to seek a

simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people

to kick the retail habit. Porritt, chairman of the government's

Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is

central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural

resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in

climate change. In a film for Channel Five, he points out that

Britons throw away their own body weight in rubbish every seven

weeks, with 100 million tonnes of waste pouring into the country's

12,000 landfill sites every year. If all six billion people in the

world were to consume at the same level, we would need two new Earths

to supply all the energy, soil, water and raw materials required. `I

think capitalism is patently unable to go on growing the size of the

consumer economy for any more people in the world today because

levels of consumption are already undermining life support systems on

which we depend - so if we do it for any more people, the planet will

go pop,' Porritt told The Observer. `So in a way we don't have a

choice about this: we've got to rethink the basic premise behind

capitalism to make it deliver the goods. In the long run, when you

really look at what happens on a planet with nine billion people and

really serious constraints on the amount of carbon dioxide and other

greenhouse gases that we can emit, it's almost inevitable we will

learn to have more elegant, satisfying lives, consuming less. I can't

see any way out of that in the long run.'

 

Porritt, co-founder of Forum For The Future, Britain's leading

sustainable development charity, believes that consumerism has taken

over our lives almost unnoticed. `Shopping has become a recreational

activity,' he continued. `There's a lot of evidence that people

really do see shopping now as an amenity pastime. We're well beyond

the time where shopping was just a way of transacting what you needed

in life. It's now all about identity and status and recreation and

companionship, even about meaning in people's lives. There's always

been a " keeping up with the Joneses " type thing, but it's now almost

universalised and there is a sense of buying to be more like

something or to get the image of somebody, particularly with clothes

or branded goods, where there's very much that sense of, " If I buy

something with this name on it, maybe a little bit of the magic of

that name will rub off on me and I'll be a better person " , whereas we

all know you're exactly the same person just waiting to go out and

make your next branded purchase.' Porritt's film cites China as an

example of how booming economic growth has produced an explosion of

consumerism with mixed results: millions have risen out of poverty,

but the consequences for the environment are severe. He

added: `There's always been a more privileged part of society which

was into buying more than they needed in order to demonstrate how

wealthy and influential they were, but the benefits of mass

consumption have now been spread so wide that we've got anywhere

between 1.5 and two billion people on the planet today who can use

their purchasing power like that. The total spend on advertising is

just so enormous now that it's little wonder people are seduced into

this idea that their personal happiness results from spending in the

way they're being encouraged to do.' There are some pockets of

resistance. `Froogles' include New Yorker Judith Levine who,

realising that she had spent $1,000 (£500) in the run-up to Christmas

in 2004, decided to buy nothing but necessities for the next year,

chronicling the experience in her book, Not Buying It: My Year

Without Shopping.

 

A group called The Compact, made up of 10 friends in San Francisco,

gained members around the world: their mission, to take a `12-month

flight from the consumer grid' and boycott all non-essential

products. Every year, in November, Buy Nothing Day encourages people

to 'shop less - live more', and last year there were multiple events

in Manchester and Oxford and at least six other British cities.

Meanwhile, websites such as Freecycle.org enable users to exchange

unwanted goods and preventing them going to waste. February saw the

launch of Buy (Less), whose website parodies RED, the global

fundraising campaign led by U2 singer Bono which tells consumers that

when they buy RED branded products -which include clothes, a credit

card and mobile phone - a slice of the money will be used to fight

Aids in Africa. Buy (Less) Crap challenges the concept, urging its

visitors to `join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is

a reasonable response to human suffering'. It provides weblinks to

several charities so that people can make direct donations

instead. `I've always been very nervous about this implied assumption

that the more you put on your credit card, the more your charities

will benefit, which is a bit perverse, but is what happens when

you're using credit cards of that kind,' Porritt said. `I think it

clutters up the awareness we need to encourage in people now that

there's an awful lot of unnecessary consumption, conspicuous

consumption, irresponsible consumption, and we're just got to get

used to cracking down on that in our own lives and really thinking

through the implications of all that.' Red officials argue that their

campaign is not about buying more but about buying differently. They

say that is about buying an `ethical' version of a product rather

than a `non-ethical' one. But Porritt argues that there is not only a

need to shop differently, but to shop less. `I don't to

this view that all we need to do is consume a little more

thoughtfully, a little bit less damagingly. When I look at the amount

of consumption that almost instantly turns into waste, with huge

amounts bought for no particularly good purpose and then discarded or

thrown away, I do find it inexcusable. When some people are buying

food they're not buying for a particular meal, they're not thinking

it through very carefully, they're almost buying speculatively as

if, " Well, we might eat that this week, if we don't we'll chuck it

away. " I find that extraordinary. I'm not being a miserable,

parsimonious, old tightwad, it's just why would you buy stuff that's

not needed?'

 

He denies that he is advocating a return to the austerity and

rationing last seen during and just after the Second World War,

although he describes low air fares as `ludicrous' and warns a

sacrifice will have to be made to reduce carbon emissions. `I know

for sure that if we ever had a golden age, as far as most people are

concerned, it's been over the last 50 years. That's the period of the

greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people, so I don't

have any nostalgia for past eras where life was simpler but more

primitive. I don't talk about going back to anything, I talk about

using technology a great deal more intelligently and efficiently to

continue to give us a very high quality of life with a fraction of

the environmental cost. `We need " sustainability literacy " , enabling

people to see what the costs of living in a certain way really look

like. We're blind to a lot of that. When people take holidays in far-

flung places they very rarely think about the impact of hundreds of

thousands of tourists descending on some destination somewhere in the

world. We've just got to get wiser to what happens when we enjoy the

perks of this life.' His sentiments were echoed by the conservation

group Friends of the Earth. Tony Juniper, its director, said: `Our

consumer culture is completely out of the step with the capacity of

the planet. If we're going to have a world that is in a fit state to

live in by the end of the century, we're going to have to drastically

reduce the amount of material demand. `We need a legal framework for

economic activity, but in the end this is about culture, and culture

shapes politics. At the moment the culture is being shaped in an

unsustainable direction by the advertising industry. It's perfectly

possible to present an alternative, but no one has the budget:

Friends of the Earth has a few thousand pounds, whereas millions are

spent to promote a single car. 'Trevor Datson, a spokesman for Tesco,

Britain's biggest retailer, insisted it shares many of Porritt's

values. `There's no question there's too much waste in society, and

we'd agree with Jonathon there. The thrust of Tesco's moves on the

environment is helping customers choose a greener lifestyle. Our

carrier bag scheme is designed to incentivise rather than castigate:

we've saved 350 million plastic bags since last July by offering club

card points for people who re-use bags. It's the power of making

people feel good about green choices rather than having to live like

a monk.'

 

Mountains of waste

 

· 3.3 million tonnes of food are binned every year in the UK

 

· People get a new mobile on average every 18 months

 

· Last Christmas, more than 6 million PCs were left on standby in

empty offices

 

· 1.5 million computers are thrown away every year, of which 99 per

cent work perfectly

 

Buying into a low-cost lifestyle

 

`Froogles' started life as a broad American movement of

environmentally motivated types who wanted to reduce drastically

their consumerism. They use the internet to exchange goods for free.

Buy (Less) is an organisation that encourages individuals to donate

money to charities and inspire less consumption.

 

www.buylesscrap.org

Justin Rowlatt, a reporter on BBC TV's Newsnight, became Ethical Man

when he led a green lifestyle for a year. He installed energy-

efficient lightbulbs, avoided animal product foods and gave up his

car to switch to public transport.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6413195.stm

Buy Nothing Day started in 1993 and became an international event

celebrated in 55 countries. Its aim is to make consumers think about

how buying goods impacts on the environment and poverty.

 

www.buynothingday.co.uk

In December 2005 a group of professional friends in San Francisco got

together and called themselves The Compact, aiming to go `beyond

recycling' by reducing clutter and waste.

 

www.sfcompact.blogspot.com

A New York City couple, Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin, are

spending a year experimenting with a new lifestyle they call No

Impact. They only eat organic food produced within 400km of

Manhattan, producing no rubbish, and using no paper (including toilet

paper) or carbon-emitting transport.