Early in the age of affluence that followed World War II, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed,
“Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and
use of Eoods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption...We need things
consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”
Americans have responded to Lebow’s call, and much of the world has followed. Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values.
Opinion surveys in the world’s two largest economies-Japan and the United States-show consumerist definitions of
success becoming ever more prevalent.
Overconsumption by the world’s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps
population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate. Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too.
The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.
Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world, of plenty is somehow hollow-that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things. Of course, the opposite of overconsumption-poverty-is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin American, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.
If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support? When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction?
