We can’t consume our way out of overconsumption!

We must all simply find ways to consume less, much less of everything.
I have been lucky for the last 2 years. I have no commute and don’t drive. My wife walks to work and I walk everywhere unless we are going on one of our trips around the UK. For that we take our 10 year old diesel van powered by recycled vegetable oil based biodiesel. Buying a new vehicle to save carbon emissions is like giving an alcoholic a smaller shot glass. He’ll just pour more self destruction. You need to take away the liquor. The emissions involved in mining the metals, creating the plastics and other materials involved in making a new more efficient car, not to mention shipping all that stuff and the final product will take years to offset by the use of that vehicle. People with long commutes need to look at ways to change their lives to accomodate shorter or even better no commute. Do it now before peak oil forces it later and you will be happier. Folks here are complaining as gas reaches £5/gallon, close to $10 a gallon, but always with the caveat, “What are you gonna do, you have to have it” What will it take to convince them that they can change? How do they become Enviro-mental? Research indicates that gloom and doom and scarcity language won’t work. It must be approached as a positive life enhancing option.

“It may very well be true that our future existence will be much more materially constrained than it is now, the way to ’soft land’ there is to give it a positive spin.” (De Young 2001)

My character tends the opposite direction. I have recently found it revelatory to consider recycling as a failure. Americans, myself among them, have thought for years that recycling would do the trick, among other things. Recycling is an indication of a design flaw.

“technological devices and products we use are in themselves potent sources of behavioural control…… Discrete physical properties of technologies and consumer products influence the ways in which they are used.” (Crabb 1992)

These properties have been named affordances.(Norman 198 For instance, items that should be recycled are actually designed to be thrown away, increasing recycling opportunities does not address the inherent design flaw. Recycling is a failure to reuse which is a failure to reduce. Shouldn’t we encourage consumers to reduce first? Shouldn’t we direct our efforts toward the cessation of the manufacturing of

“countless gadgets and products that have no defensible place in a rational energy efficient society”? (Crabb 1992)

This would address not only the use of resources involved in the personal use of products but in the creation of the products themselves. It is easy to suggest this but how to put it in to practice?

My policy when I need a consumer good is to first try to do without it, borrow it, or make it myself, if that fails then to source it on freecycle, if that fails to buy it used. For instance, when we need a lampshade in the house I make it out of old plastic protein powder containers. They are durable and come with the product contained.

Change, big change, is thundering down the glacier aimed right at our lifestyles. We can begin the process in advance and thus lessen the crushing consequences of high speed impact or simply stare into the headlights.