National Geographic and GlobeScan, just released a groundbreaking international study, that takes a comprehensive look at consumers’ progress towards environmentally sustainable consumption. What is especially valuable about the study, is the fact that it does not just look at attitudes, but also actual behaviors and material lifestyles actoss 14 countries. One could spend days digesting the results of the Consumer Choice and the Environment study. If you are going to pick one research study, this is the one.
The above rankings are not flattering for the U.S. and should give decision makers a lot of food for thought. Key drivers in terms of consumers’ beliefs, give us some clues into why such disparities between the different countries, as well as ideas for possible remedial strategies:
Future environmental campaigns and policies should take these results into consideration and focus on supporting helpful beliefs, while also decreasing unhelpful beliefs.
The following summary findings show that so called developed countries have a lot to learn from developing countries regarding many aspects of sustainability, such as environmental awareness and practices, food consumption, transportation patterns, housing choices, and community involvement:
- Consumers feel empowered as individuals and are willing to make changes in their consumption habits.
- Consumers in developing countries feel more responsible for environmental problems than those in developed countries.
- Environmental problems are hitting home in large developing countries.
- Consumer choice in these countries is more limited than elsewhere, however, as people in less developed countries report lower levels of availability of green household products and foods.
- Current material lifestyles in emerging markets are environmentally more sustainable than those of wealthy countries as overall per capita consumption is lower – for now.
- The current pace of economic development in emerging markets and its implications for sustainability are reflected in the survey results. Citizens in large developing countries express a thirst for increased consumption, and many believe that people in all countries should have the same standard of living as those in the wealthiest countries do today. People in the developing world, however, are more willing to make environmentally friendly choices given the opportunity.
- The survey results identify global gaps in transportation patterns. Consumers in North America, Australia, and Western Europe are much more likely than others to own at least one car or truck, and they also drive alone in a car or truck much more frequently than others – most Chinese surveyed say they never do. Instead, consumers in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia frequently use public transportation, whereas North American, Australian, and European respondents rarely do so; American respondents are especially unlikely to use public transportation. The global outlook for sustainable transportation is challenging as the transportation gap between rich and poor countries is beginning to narrow.
- Consumer demand for organic and local foods is strong. The food consumption profiles of Japanese and Americans are the least sustainable of those surveyed.
- Consumer knowledge of environmental issues can be improved.
Perhaps we will begin to see and hear the word ECOLOGY in the mass media as much as the word ECONOMY. Then we can expect to see the word SUSTAINABILITY as much as the words ENDLESS ECONOMIC GROWTH.
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/JapanTimes/2008/04/22/6279398/print/
Japan Times
Is growth driving us to oblivion?
By STEPHEN HESSE | Apr 22, 2008 | 1491 words
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Thanks for the great post, Marguerite.
Wow! Not a good report card for the U.S.
I’ll try to read the report when I can fit it in. It sounds great.
The ways in which our paradigms, beliefs, values, and attitudes relate to genuine sustainability are vitally important and, as the report suggests, vary substantially by culture and situation. One of the main thrusts of my “other” (though very related) work involves the deep relationship between what we “ought” to do (i.e., the broad subject of morality itself) and the very notion of sustainability. Put another way, this work should help inform the way we think about the responsibility and ethics of making the changes necessary to achieve sustainability.
This week has been good.
Well, I’d really like some collective intelligence at this moment because this is an awful lot of data.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind, in my view, is that high environmental concern doesn’t have to come from a high developed consciousness. It can simply come from very high exposure to environmental problems. You really don’t want to live in one of China’s big cities right now.
Same is true for poverty. It’s one thing you’re concerned about poverty because you want everyone to have a decent life. It’s wholly different if you’re concerned because you’re afraid the poor might rob or kill you, or you just can’t stand all those filthy people on the streets.
Regarding consumption and transportation habits, again, it’s different if you don’t consume much because you can’t, or that you don’t consume much because you don’t want to.
I still believe that the true revolution will come from the upper upper class, affluent Americans and Europeans who live in an almost perfect world, could afford to make poor people in other countries ruin the environment for their own benefit (i.e. buying lots of stuff made by others), but eventually decide they don’t want to. That will be a turn around in values: A concern for things which don’t effect you personally.
I think those values can only develop in places that have been prosperous and safe for a long time.
It’s true that indigenous tribes in poor countries hold those values too, but that’s not really relevant to our problems because they don’t have the power (i.e. money) to destroy the environment like Americans and Europeans do.
Meryn, you have just described the basal cell of this affluent cancer here: the very poor have little means to pollute, therefore are not so influential in the sustainability evolution.
The very rich can indeed begin to move fashion toward a morally sustainable form of living.
But it is the so-called lower classes and middle-class who pollute the world over. As any upwardly mobile worker can tell you, the feeling of entitlement trumps the guilt that nags the new consumer. They think they deserve the excess material or food or vehicle. The planet is bloated in the middle with all this new purchase power.
As affluent countries are scaling down due to credit crunch, developing countries are gearing up to catch up. That is a whole lot of productivity and waste rushing to overwhelm our nostrils and sink down our best ideals.
Marguerite, Meryn, greenadine, and others . . .
I agree that there’s alot of overconsumption going on, but I also wanted to add a different thought: Part of the problem is the specific type of energy we use to fuel our habits and (over)-consumption. In other words, if we had clean sources of energy, then at least (to a degree) our consumption wouldn’t be pouring so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I point this out because it would be a very large task to “address” human consumption itself (to a degree that would make a big difference in the near-term). But, although still a large task, it might at least be an “easier” task to at least take the steps to shift energy sources, i.e., from hydrocarbons to renewable and clean sources. That would at least help with the global warming problem.
FYI, The Colbert Report tonight was great. Among other things (including a great interaction with an astronaut on the space station), Colbert did a funny analysis of a recent oil advertorial.
Cheers.
It’s true about less CO2 with renewables, Jeff, but it would only change the nature of the problem, not its essence. For example, silicon purification as done in China is very polluting. What use having clean electricity if you can’t drink the water or use it to grow food? You end up with electric light to starve to death by.
So had it not been CO2 and climate change, it would have been something else. The essential problem is that things are produced in a wasteful way. Let’s imagine the invention of a MED – a Magic Energy Device, it costs $10 to make, can fit in a pocket and supply 1GW, requires no resource use and costs nothing to maintain and produces no pollution. If we had this, what would happen? Well, other resource use would zoom up like mad. Enormous gouges would be cut in the Earth looking for gold, iron and so on. Rivers would run black or yellow with pollutants. The world would choke.
What’s needed is to stop producing things in such a wasteful way. The Earth’s life has only been able to survive as it has for several hundred million years because in nature there is no “rubbish” or “waste.” What is toxic waste for one creature is food for another. Animals breathe in O2 and produce CO2, plants breathe in CO2 and produce O2.
So we need a manufacturing and energy-producing cycle which mimics nature. This is no hippie thing, but sound science. Conservation of matter – matter is never created or destroyed (in chemistry and biology). So it has to go somewhere, we may as well use it, or produce it in such a way that something else can use it.
If all we do is change to renewable energy, then in twenty or a hundred or a thousand years we’ll face some similar problem again. We need to stop waste. There is no “away” to throw things to, it always comes back to us.
Jeff, I think we need to lower carbon emissions real quick, so it would be best if things are coming from both sides: reduced consumption and increased investment in renewable energy.
But basic economics tells us: you either consume or invest. People working on producing consumer goods or services can’t be building renewable energy sources. Lower consumption is a corollary to increased investment in green energy, unless you happen to know real stupid investments which should be stopped anyway.
Kyle, have you ever heard of Crade-to-Cradle?
I’ve got some resources on http://del.icio.us/meryn/c2c
The official C2C book just got delivered yesterday at my doorstep.
What’s particularly interesting to C2C for me is that The Netherlands seems to be ahead in it. Just compare the size of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_cradle to http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_cradle . The concept comes from two Americans though.
I’ve just saw this on a blog:
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2008/05/green_fatigue_l.php
This also shows Brazil at the top re global warming concern.
I know a girl who’s from Brazil, I’m going to ask her why the Brazilians are so concerned. I mean, they should be, everyone should be, but people in other countries aren’t.
“it is the so-called lower classes and middle-class who pollute the world over. As any upwardly mobile worker can tell you, the feeling of entitlement trumps the guilt that nags the new consumer.”
So true, Nadine. And we can’t blame them. Like I said, I think our best hope right now are the rich. They must set an example for the upwardly mobile group, both within and outside their own country.
I don’t really like the inequality in the world and within countries, but if there must be (and I think it will be for some time), rich should be defined as owning lots of green assets. Right now, rich seems to mean spending lots of money.
Would it be fair, reasonable and sensible to consider that every human being is implicated in the human-induced predicament looming ominously in the offing before humanity; however, no individual, group, country or region is to blame for the horrendous make-up and colossal size of the plight soon to be confronted by the family of humanity?
I dunno, Steve. Who cares who’s to blame? Who cares who started it? I only care who’s gonna finish it.
May as well be me, I’ll make a start on finishing the problem. Change begins here and now.
Kiashu (#6), I agree with you that the broader problem is, well, broader, and that we need to achieve healthy sustainability in more than one way. I’m not suggesting that we don’t work on solving our larger human (over)-consumptive attitude problem. I’m just observing that we also should (I think) sequence things a bit. For example, if we forget about the global warming and energy problems in a full-blown attempt to become perfectly sustainable in all respects, by the time we reach that more difficult goal, we will probably have built way too many conventional coal-burning power plants, pretty much failing on the climate front.
Fortunately, people are diverse and can lead the charges to address these matters at different levels. While some are trying to catalyze the energy shift, others can be more focused on informing and shifting consumer paradigms and appetites. So, we needn’t think in terms of one OR the other. In fact, if we try to force the choice between one OR the other, as first priority, it may be that the debate (what should humanity work on first?) delays important work on both fronts.
This said, I agree that we need to learn to live in a healthy sustainable way in all important respects.
Cheers.
So many important truths spelled out in this thread! And Nadine, as usual, thanks for interjecting some of your poetic breadth, midstream.
As Meryn mentioned above, there is so much to process from the report. I am not even halfway, reading through all the details. What is exciting, is that it gives us the clues as to which directions to take, from a behavioral perspective. I am planning to write a followup article soon.
Kyle, I share your action oriented perspective. What to do is what preoccupies me at this point. This is why I do not waste my time on refuting deniers.
Jeff, your earlier comment about addressing the renewable energy part of the solution made me think that one critical aspect of addressing any seemingly monumental problem is to partialize it into smaller, more chewable challenges. In a way, it does not matter which part we chose, as long as we start somewhere. This is what’s done with psychotherapy patients in crisis mode, and I believe it applies to the climate crisis as well.
Steve, I am sure Gary would agree with you about the need to interject ecology into our economic model. Part of the solution, as articulated by Gary in some earlier discussions, is to revise our economic framework and narrative.
“Who cares who’s to blame? Who cares who started it? I only care who’s gonna finish it. May as well be me.”
I love this, Kyle. I share this attitude.
Indeed, it’s of no use blaming anyone. The only thing you can control in your life are your own actions, so the only place to look for the solutions to the world’s problems is within yourself. If you blame anyone, you’re putting limits on your own control.
In that sense, if there’s anyone responsible for the worlds problems, it’s me. If you can follow this line of thinking, and share my attitude, you would deny that, and instead claim that you’re the only one responsible.
It would be great if many people in the world took up on full responsibility for the world’s problems like that. Everything would be better then.
For a revised economic narrative, I think we should be looking at Ecological Economics. This is promoted by Herman Daly, Joshua Farley and Robert Costanza, amongst others. They have been featured on Grist, for example.
Meryn, Kyle, the whole issue of not owning up to one’s responsibility, has been played on a national scale by the Bush regime. It infuriates me when I read such discourse as, ‘we are not going to change unless the Chinese make a move also . . .’
Meryn, thanks for your mention of ecological economics. I was familiar with environmental economics, but not its ecological ‘cousin’ . . . I will look into relevant links on Grist.
This comes from Wikipedia:
“Environmental Economics” should not be confused with “Ecological Economics.” The two fields are related, but are in some ways very different. Most environmental economists have been trained as economists. They apply the tools of economics to address environmental problems, many of which are related to so-called market failures–circumstances wherein the “invisible hand” of economics is unreliable. Most ecological economists have been trained as ecologists, but have expanded the scope of their work to consider the impacts of humans and their economic activity on ecological systems and services, and vice-versa. This field takes as its premise that economics is a strict subfield of ecology. Ecological economics is sometimes described as taking a more pluralistic approach to environmental problems and focuses more explicitly on long-term environmental sustainability and issues of scale.
Meryn, I said I was responsible, I didn’t say I was solely responsible.
I see this in commercial kitchens, I’m sure it happens in all workplaces. A chef’s carrying a tray of something, and a kitchenhand collides with them. Food is spilled on the ground. The two begin arguing about whose fault the spilling was, and who should have to clean it up.
They actually take longer to argue about who should clean it up than would take to clean it up. Many times I’ve just knelt down and cleaned it up while they stood above me arguing about whose fault it was. Other times when I was in charge in the kitchen I chose whoever was most indignant and angry about it and made him do the cleaning – he needed the lesson in humility.
I’m not in charge of the world’s production processes, so I just have to do it myself.
Jeff, you’ve got a false dichotomy there. It’s not either deal with climate change or deal with other forms of pollution. The two are tied together. I mean, you are not going to get some gold mining company which is concerned about climate change and so powers all their mining by solar energy, but which puts arsenic (a common byproduct/waste of gold mining) into the groundwater with callous indifference. It’s like expecting a coltan mine in the eastern Congo to be careful about its pollutants while still using slave labour. Nor will anyone care about rising floodwaters drowning Bangladeshis if they don’t care about things like the Bhopal gas disaster.
Climate change, other environmental issues, and human rights, these are all tied together, as I’ve written before. We do not find that there exist countries where human rights are trampled upon, but which are sound environmentally; nor do we find that there are countries which respect human rights, but are indifferent to the environment. Rapists are not known for being concerned about their greenhouse gas emissions, nor are charitable and humane people known for dumping toxic waste.
That does not mean that we’ll do nothing until we have everything perfect. To put something in place, it need only be an improvement on what we have now. I would begin with a few principles, such as,
(1) use renewable resources without depleting them
(2) use nonrenewable resources in a way that allows them to be reused
(3) there should be no waste, only products
(4) my prosperity should not be at the price of another’s poverty
if on those four principles any particular technology or method is better than what we have now, I’d happily have it put into place. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just better.
Which isn’t very bloody hard, really.
“Meryn, I said I was responsible, I didn’t say I was solely responsible.”
Kyle, that is a better description for the situation then the one I gave. Like I said, I hope that everyone would take on full responsibility.
Your story illustrates the idea of taking on responsibility very well.
I also agree with you that the big issues we face can be best approached all together, because they’re closely related. This is not limited to human rights and inequality, but also extends to physiological health, mental health, and crime.
But I think Jeff is on the same line with us since he has studied the subject of morality thoroughly. I haven’t read Jeff book, but I think he could find himself in the few principles you’ve named here.
Bleak future may await our children
http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/letters/story/14447.html
Humankind inhabits a tiny celestial orb that is miraculously set among of sea of stars. As far as we know, life as we know it exists nowhere else in the universe. Perhaps we of the human family have the responsibility of assuring the security for the future of life in our planetary home.
April 22 was Earth Day. Our many Earth Day celebrations focus attention on the pressing need for human beings to protect and preserve the finite resources of Earth and its frangible ecosystems. If we fail to achieve this goal, then an unimaginably bleak future awaits our children.
If 6-plus billion human beings live on Earth now and 9-plus billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then we simply cannot keep doing what we are doing now because the Earth has limited resources. Without adequate resources and ecosystem system services of Earth, life as we know it and human institutions would collapse.
Some portion of the world’s human population conspicuously over-consumes the resources of our planetary home. Other people, in charge of huge multinational conglomerations, are doing business in a way that recklessly dissipates natural resources. Still others in the human family are overpopulating the planet. The leviathan-like scale and rapid growth of global human consumption, production and propagation activities are putting the Earth, life as we know it, and the human community in grave, clear and present danger.
Since Chapel Hillians live in the overdeveloped world, we are among the people who are ravenously over-consuming Earth’s resources. We could choose to consume less. People in the developing could choose to limit overproduction of unnecessary things and contain industrial pollution. People in the underdeveloped world could limit their number of offspring. Perhaps these are ways the family of humanity begins to respond ably to the human-induced global challenges that loom so ominously.
– Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill
“If 6-plus billion human beings live on Earth now and 9-plus billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then we simply cannot keep doing what we are doing now because the Earth has limited resources.”
The IPCC-reviewed scenarios tell us that we must have greenhouse gas emissions at less than 15% of today’s by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. The US and Australia with 5% of the world’s population together produce 24% of the world’s greenhouse gases.
Thus, if 95% of the world’s population disappeared overnight, leaving only the US and Australia, or if 320 million people lived on the Earth as Americans and Australians do, we’d get catastrophic climate change.
Not even 320 million people can live as Americans and Australians do without causing great damage. So the problem is not that it’s 6 billion or 9 billion people on the planet, but that anyone at all lives like Americans and Australians.
Population: It’s not how big it is, it’s what you do with it. It’s amazing the wild arguments we Westerners will make to avoid the inconvenient sacrifice of not polluting so much.
Very good, Kyle. You’ve got things in perspective.
Kyle, in the absence of a strictly carbon neutral life for all, the environmental damage will still be proportional to the number of people on Earth, and according to your calculation even if we all dropped down to minimal footprint lifestyle – I mean India or Africa standards – we’d be in trouble. Am I right?
Based on the scenarios reviewed in the most recent IPCC report, the entire world could have a one tonne CO2 lifestyle without making climate change worse than it is today. Everyone can have a tonne or so of emissions.
The key thing is that you can have a pretty affluent life – like the example 1 tonner – with relatively little waste and pollution, and a pretty miserable impoverished life – like a Haitian or rural Brazilian – with lots of waste and pollution.
The Westerner buying local and vegetarian food, using biking and public transport, getting electricity from wind or solar, buying only second-hand consumer goods, or new ones made locally to last – this person is going to be responsible for at most a few tonnes of CO2. The African or South American doing slash and burn agriculture, burning a hectare of rainforest every three years to do subsistence farming on, this person is going to be responsible for twenty or thirty tonnes of CO2. Which would you say is affluent?
So there’s waste and then there’s affluence. They’re different things. That’s why “India or Africa standards” aren’t a good comparison.
We in the West need to stop with our burgers and SUVs, and the Third World needs to stop with its deforestation. The thing is that we in the West have alternatives; in the Third World they have no alternatives. I can choose whether to drive or take the bus to work; they cannot choose whether to eat this year.
For example, Haiti’s famine came about not because of high world food prices – they used to produce all their own food, but they also cooked the food using charcoal, and cut down their forests for charcoal, and also fresh land. This cutting down of the forests for fresh agricultural land destroyed the agricultural land they did have, since nothing held the rain, the topsoil washed away and so on. But what else could they do? They had to cook, and had to have land to grow things. Over in the Dominican Republic the dictator made sure everyone had access to natural gas for cooking – thus, DR has 30% forest, and Haiti has 1% and the people are eating mud.
And that’s the difference between the West and the Third World. We can make these choices – they often don’t have the means to make these choices. Their governments do, but their people often don’t. Nothing prevented any of the many Haitian governments from supplying natural gas, they just didn’t do it. Once their government had failed them, what could the people do? They had no choice.
So what’s needed is for us in the West to make the choices to reduce our impact, and then provide much of the tools and money required so that people in the Third World can make the same choices.
Thanks Kyle. Great analysis!
Are we seeing evidence of what has been named elsewhere a “nature deficit disorder”?
Are we witnessing the way great wealth and power are dedicated to the Fantasy of the ‘JEWEL’(known to all as “the global political economy”) and to the Denial of Earth’s Limitations, including its frangible ecosystem services and its vanishing biodiversity?
Virtual mountains of scientific evidence indicate that a contradiction exists between the finite physical reality of the world we inhabit and the cornucopian fantasy widely espoused by so many economic powerbrokers and politicians assuring us Earth is a sort of maternal presence, like an ever-expressive teat at which the human species can suckle from now onward.
Perhaps the contradiction between fantasy and reality is better posed in the form of a question about oil deposits.
Is oil a depletable natural resource with limited availability for human consumption in space-time or is oil one resource of a planet that magically and indefinitely can supply energy sources for human benefit without regard to Earth’s make-up and relatively small size?
Steven, there is definitely a huge amount of denial going on amongst most people. It may be interesting to link with the theory of climate grief discussed here in another post.
[...] your face, but the truth is, they don’t really think much of green. One only needs to look at people’s actions to know. [...]
[...] ceased to be so hung up on people changing their behaviors. No, rather, I am aiming for much lower. Attitudes will do. Because I believe most of us cannot go at it alone, and need instead the support and [...]