Cultures of Consumption/Consuming Cultures

Cultures of Consumption/Consuming Cultures

The modern/westernized/industrial/post-industrial way of life is not sustainable. Even the crunchiest of the green folk who ride their bikes to work and buy their food from the farmer’s market are leading a gluttonous unsustainable lifestyle. How? The cost of living (in terms of natural resources) in this modern world is simply too high to last long. As India and China also follow the industrial model of development, and their per capita rates of consumption of natural resources rise we are in for some serious scarcities and price increases in commodities such as wheat, petroleum, fish, and even water. We are currently in a race to develop efficient technology that can sustain our way of life before scarcity of natural resources and abundance of natural disasters makes it impossible to continue.
The above may be a gross generalization, but I think it gets at an important trend. As I noted in my previous post, The United States’ 5% of the world population consumes 30% of its resources, and as other societies (especially the billion-member ones) “develop” towards our standard of living and consumption-we’re all in for some tight times unless the pace of technology fueled by this mass consumption can outstrip the dual threats of increased consumption by an increased population of mass consumers. If modern science can pull this off then Hooray! The whole world can eat and live like Americans, and once a few economic and political kinks are worked out, the current goals of global development will be achieved. But if not…
Before I go any further I feel the need to clarify some things. My first post essentially attempted to question the widely-held belief that the middle-class Euro-American way of life is what the world should aspire to. I was not saying that it’s fun to be poor in the Third World. I’ve been poor in urban Africa and its no joyride. However, my relatives in the village who were significantly “poorer” and “underdeveloped” than my family had a much higher quality of life (in my and their opinion). So the first post was mainly about exposing and questioning the way we think about poverty and development. In this post I hope to give (and hope I have already given) a few reasons why (barring amazing scientific innovation) progressing along the commonly-held paradigm of development would not be a good idea.

One goal of development that is currently gaining a lot of currency is sustainability. Like all seals of discourse “sustainability” has been used and misused in a number of different ways. For this post I’ll say that sustainable ways of life are those that can continue indefinitely within the constraints of their natural environments. I say ways of life, and not way of life for 2 reasons:
1)there is no one sustainable way of life
and 2) all ways of life influence each other, as globalization is showing us.

One example of point 2, is the so-called “genocide” of indigenous people described by Wade Davis and numerous other anthropologists. The United States and Europe do not have within their borders the natural resources to maintain current levels of consumption and so they must look elsewhere for these resources, goods, and now, services. These resource extraction operations often destroy or deplete the natural environments of people leading seemingly sustainable ways of life (Shell in Niger delta, Forestry operations in Southeast Asia, Fisheries in Lake Victoria, and the sugar plantations of the Carribbean). This disruption of natural environment makes the traditional ways of life of the people inhabiting these regions impossible forcing them to migrate or assimilate (often at the lowest levels) into the modern society that made theirs extinct. Now I’m not saying that I’m against trade at all, but I don’t think that “fair trade” in any sense of the term is possible given our current consumption rates.
Our current culture of consumption has to consume other cultures to survive. One interesting side-effect of this is the creation of the global culture market: members of endangered cultures commodify their culture, making World Music CD’s, giving tours for foreigners, opeining ethnic restaurants, teaching dance classes, etc. Our culture of consumption turns cultures into commodities to be consumed. But I digress…
The natural resource demands of current Euro-American lifestyles necessitate the removal of resources necessary for other ways of life to sustain themselves. The reason I privilege many so-called “indigenous” and “primitive” ways of life is that, to me, they appear to be sustainable. That is, they do not have to consume other ways of life in order to survive (however, this is not true of all “indigenous” or “primitive” cultures by any means). So if sustainability is to be one of the goals of development, perhaps we should look to learn from existing sustainable cultures instead of trying to “develop” them into our non-sustainable image.

Sustainable ways of life seem to be based on a cyclical model of interaction with natural resources much like the water cycles and food chains we learned about in primary school. To me this implies a resituation of man as a part of nature, rather than apart from nature (as European Enlightenment philosophers and their intellectual descendents often implicitly posit). The proponents of the GAIA hypothesis were merely restating what every 5-year-old in a sustainable culture knows, “We are in a give and take relationship with the Earth.”