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Thanks, Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth

Many thanks to Andrew Revkin for posting my crude artistic rendering of his analogy on the challenges of addressing climate change. If his post brought you here, welcome and hello!

I study sustainable development at Columbia, and I also help manage social media for the Earth Institute. Connect with us on Twitter and Facebook for the lastest on EI research, news, events, and opportunities! I’m particularly interested in using digital/social/multimedia to communicate sustainability, with the ultimate goal of generating social & political will to act.

Now that more than 2 people have seen this blog, I’ll try to post with more regularity on sustainable development (and other things) from a student’s perspective.

Our intense and deep need to consume

Economy can be defined, in the most general sense, as the productive allocation of resources in a system. Consumption, along with production and investment, is an inherent part of any economy. Historically, economic growth has been viewed positively with little concern for natural/environmental costs. Tim Jackson explains in Prosperity Without Growth, “growth is a function for prosperity: the continued economic growth is a necessary condition for a lasting prosperity”. However, the rapid growth of developing countries has demonstrated an inextricable relationship between growth and consumption and prompted international scrutiny on consumption.

Jackson presents this dilemma in growth: growth is unsustainable but de-growth is unstable. Consumption and material commodities are important to us, and Jackson suggests that we “imbue material things with social and psychological meaning”. Material consumption has become part of the symbolic language we use to construct our identity and measure progress. Moreover, statistics show that GDP yields diminishing marginal returns on life expectancy and health, but not consumption. Clive Hamilton, author of Requiem for a Species notes that economic growth in consumption societies thrive on discontentment, as “economic growth no longer creates happiness: unhappiness sustains economic growth”.

Let’s look at a widely used formula in evaluating human impact on the environment: I=PAT or Impact = Population X Affluence X Technology. Most of the developed countries developed in an unsustainable fashions, which presents a zero-sum relationship between natural resources and consumption. The current developing countries are developing in a different set of circumstance which necessitates more scrutiny on consumption behavior. Hamilton explains the difficulties in altering consumer behavior, as when we are asked to consume less, “we are being asked to give up our identities – to experience a sort of death” Then the central question becomes: are we ready to “wage war against our own sense of who we are?”