The following column, by me,  appears in the January 8, 2009 Wisconsin State Journal:

The present economic crisis poses a dilemma for me.

I’m an environmentalist. And I know that a great deal of the blame for the environmental crisis has to be placed squarely on our culture’s addiction to material goods.

We buy more stuff than we need, we throw out stuff that is perfectly good to replace it with other stuff, and in the process we’re trashing the planet, using up scarce energy resources, and pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, forever changing the future for our children and grandchildren.

People like me should be celebrating the current economic slowdown.

General Motors has announced a reduction in the number of new cars it will build in the first part of next year of some 250,000 units.

Thousands of houses aren’t being built — and all the “stuff” that would be going into those houses, from wiring to new appliances, isn’t being manufactured.

Stores in every mall and shopping center are loaded with merchandise they can hardly give away, and so factories around the world are no longer making the stuff the stores would be ordering to fill the empty shelves back up.

It is as if everyone in the country was suddenly listening to our mantra – “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” The economist’s nightmare is the environmentalist’s dream.

The problem is that I don’t know any environmentalists who wanted to see things happen this way. We are not just environmentalists, we are also humanitarians.

For most of us, the reason we care about the environment is because we care about people. This includes me.

I care about people and I know that every car that isn’t built, every hotel project cancelled, every appliance that remains unmanufactured and every unsold item on those store shelves represents jobs for real people — for my friends, my neighbors, my family members. No stuff means no jobs, and that means people who are hungry or worse.

And this is the dilemma: Our economic system depends on overconsumption to provide livelihoods for people, but is rapidly destroying the planet. When we destroy the planet we destroy ourselves. But if we bring the system to a screeching halt — as is happening right now — a lot of people get hurt.

It didn’t have to be this way. We have known that our system cannot keep on going as it is. We could have taken steps, beginning decades ago, to develop a new economy that would use less energy, would depend on less material “stuff,” would use that “stuff” the way nature does — endlessly recycling and providing abundance and prosperity along the way. Unfortunately we didn’t. And now we are reaping the consequences.

Jared Diamond warns us at the end of his book “Collapse” that the kinds of problems our system is creating will all be solved. The only question is whether they will be solved by us — rationally, in ways of our choosing –or for us, when systems collapse.

I would vote for “by us.” Wouldn’t you?

Your thoughts?

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• By Cris Bisch, January 15, 2009 @ 1:56 pm

  I vote for “by us”, Ed. We need to collaborate on a solution, but we also need to individually curtail our over-consumption and reduce our want for more and more stuff. I love Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” video, because she has brilliantly made plain how our current system from production to consumption works [http://tinyurl.com/ywzbqt]. I recently posted a review [http://tinyurl.com/7jdmcv], “The Campaign to End Consumer Christianity”, with a link to a Christian organization that has spearheaded a grassroots movement to encourage a halt to Christian consumerism. They ask us to think deeply about how consumerism is embedded in our lives. This is the first step towards a viable “big picture” solution.

Other Links to this Post

1. Addiction to Material Goods - SustainLane — February 13, 2009 @ 9:21 pm