George Monbiot:
There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing
they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly
button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious”
inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called
Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a
Scratch Off World wall map.
They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second,
embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For
thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that
lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials
whose impacts will ramify for generations.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered
that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1%
remain in use six months after sale(1).
Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned
to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or
perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot
become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no
utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth
Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer
can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote
control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use
them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to
elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.
The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the
impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for
manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into
compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil
fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and
consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide
production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3).
Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese
board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is
pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective
madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we
scarcely notice what has happened to us.
In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by
poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4).
No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in
Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting
it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely
differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing:
trashing the living world through pointless consumption.
This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled
and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries
to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes,
deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending.
But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on
what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those
who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly
useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are
harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our
doors.
Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing
this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit
my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet.
“Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5).
An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son
camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special
features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.
The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom
ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the
US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top
1% of the population(7).
The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply
does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who
already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of
everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.
So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated
consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is
to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral
Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea
of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.
Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a
joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you
care. All it shows is that you don’t.
2. It’s 57%. See http://www.monbiot.com/2010/05/05/carbon-graveyard/
3. See the film Blood in the Mobile. http://bloodinthemobile.org/
7. Emmanuel Saez, 2nd March 2012. Striking it Richer: the Evolution
of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2009 and 2010
estimates). http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf
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