Consumption is the act of using something up (Princen 2002a) it can be observed and measured and is potentially able to be manipulated through financial and other policy measures. Consumerism, on the other hand, is an attitude to life in which self-worth, meaning and personal satisfaction are all defined in relation to owning and
accumulating commodities (Smith 1998). While all humans are consumers, it is over- consumption – ‘the level or quality of consumption that undermines a species’ own life-support system and for which individuals and collectives have choices in their consuming patterns’ (Princen 2002a, p. 33) – which is the subject of concern due to its environmental implications. And it is consumerism – the engine which drives over- consumption – and also the economic, political and social forces behind consumerism that are the keys to considering individuals’ contribution to climate change and its mitigation.
Princen, Maniates & Conca (2002a) identify a groundswell of concern among ordinary people in the West about consumerism, the ‘crass elevation of material acquisition to the status of a dominant social paradigm’ (p. 3). A related concern is ‘commoditisation’: the preferential development of things ‘with qualities that facilitate buying and selling – ‘as the answer to each and every type of human want and need’, ignoring other approaches to ‘provisioning’ (Manno 2002, p. 70). These concerns are broader than environmental, embracing ‘community, work, meaning, freedom and the overall quality of life’ (Princen, Maniates & Conca 2002a, p. 3). (See also Wachtel 1983; Maniates 2002a; Hamilton 2003; Layard 2005). At the same time, other writers
comment on the disconnection between people’s concerns about climate change (or other environmental issues) and their unwillingness to change their own lives to contribute to mitigation (for example Witherspoon 1996; Kilbourne, Beckmann & Thelen 2002; Kollmuss & Agyeman 2002; Agyeman & Evans 2006; Nash & Lewis 2006).
The problems with over-consumption, primarily in the West but increasingly in pockets of the developing world, are manifold. In brief, they are environmental – humans are using up more of the earth’s materials than it is able to replace, leading to massive problems, the most pressing of which, for humans as well as the rest of nature, is climate change (Lowe 2005; Monbiot 2006; Helm 2009) – and social: mass deprivation (under-consumption) continues for the world’s poorest people while those in the rich West live lives of ever-increasing consumption of commodities
(Smith & Pangsapa 2008). The concepts of the ‘ecological footprint’15 and more
recently the ‘carbon footprint’ (Taylor 2008) have been used to explain how people in the West consume far more resources, and are responsible for the emission of far more GHG, than those in developing countries. Australia’s ecological footprint as at 2005 was 7.8 global hectares (gha) per person, while the average was 2.7 gha (WWF, GFN & ZSL 2008). Even in the West, however, higher incomes and consumption over the past fifty years have not led to contentment – far from it: mental illness as well as a range of ‘lifestyle’ physical conditions, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, are at record levels (Hamilton 2003; McKibben 2007).
This thesis considers the citizen’s role in both contributing to and attempting to mitigate climate change through consumption, in the context of the larger
economic, political and social forces at work, and attempts to find a way through the theoretical maze in which the individual’s role regarding climate change is entangled. Looking behind the simplistic appeal to individuals to ‘do their bit’ reveals a whole body of theoretical inquiry about individualism, ‘individualisation’ and the efficacy or otherwise of individual action in the absence of broader political and social action. Before discussing the role of the individual, a broader examination of issues concerning the role of consumption in modern Western societies is undertaken, to establish the context for individual action, or inaction. The international policy response to over-consumption is discussed in section 3.4.
The analysis of consumption and consumerism in this chapter is influenced by Princen, Maniates and Conca’s (2002a) theoretical framework for a new perspective on consumption, which consists of three main principles:
1. The social embeddedness of consumption: The recognition that
consumers’ choices are not isolated acts of rational decision-making, but are shaped by social context, including media images, and structural features that ‘make it convenient, rewarding, even necessary, to increase consumption’ (p. 14). There is a rich literature on the intertwining of consumption with many other aspects of modern life, discussed further in section 3.3.5.
2. Chains of material provisioning and resource use: Consumption
decisions are heavily influenced by the exercise of a whole string of choices, and
15 Wackernagel, M and Rees, W 1996, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, New Society Publishers, British Columbia, cited in Dobson (2003). Basing policy or political positions on the difference in emissions between countries, of course, masks the differences in emissions within countries, which are often due to social and economic inequality (Conca 2000). It is likely, however, that looking at the level of individuals or households, most people in Australia would make a larger contribution to climate change than most people in, for example, one of the Pacific Islands prone to inundation due to rising sea level.
power, along the chain from primary resource extraction to ultimate disposal of a product. Consumers are increasingly distanced from the social and ecological factors that make production possible: the severing of feedback, for example the immense social and environmental impacts of decisions hidden from the ultimate consumer of tropical products such as bananas and coffee (Tucker 2002); and the mountain of waste, much of it toxic, that is discarded annually by producers, and by consumers who have no idea what happens to it (Clapp 2002). The commodity chain enables examination of the nodes at which power is exercised: as production is increasingly carried out globally by unrelated entities it is control over the ‘means of consumption’ – branding and marketing – which is important rather than the means of production (Conca 2002; Hamilton 2003; Klein 2001). To Princen (2002b) ‘…commercial patterns that separate consumers from the consequences of their behaviour are likely to weight consumption decisions toward narrowly self-interested consumption and away from long-term, intergenerational, and non-human concerns’ (p. 116).
3. Viewing production as consumption: reveals the costs of production on
the environment, people and societies. The standard response to environmental problems – technical solutions – does not question the logic of production. Viewing production as consumption turns this around, that is, ‘to construe economic activity as consuming, as depleting value, as risking ecological overshoot, as stressing social capacity’ (p. 17).