Sustainable Stufflust?

If you want to feel like King Canute, try telling people to consume less. You’ll be up to your ears in waves of derision in less time than it takes them to sign a credit card slip. So what lies behind the constant wish to have more - and just what would it take to make consumerism less of a curse? Martin Wright shops around for suggestions. Sustainable consumption: it’s this year’s buzzword, trotted out for everything from how to improve the resource productivity of the latest mobile (or car, or cheap holiday) to ambitious ventures in applied social anthropology designed to reduce our manic lust for the latest mobile (or car or cheap holiday). The Jo’burg Summit will be spattered with references to it; everyone from the OECD to the UN has programmes on it; everyone else has opinions about it.

And no surprise. Because it’s a truth pretty much universally acknowledged that our appetite for more and more stuff is deeply bad, for us, and for the planet. It’s gobbling up resources at a fearsome pace, transforming natural capital into hazardous waste with devastating efficiency, and leaving a backwash of envy and scarcity in its train. We’re dying of consumption, just without the romantic connotations of Jane Austen’s day. Dying singly and as a species. How chillingly apt it is that maturity-onset diabetes is in danger of growing out of control, because if we carry on like this, then, literally and figuratively, we’re stuffed. So why don’t we just ease up? After all, it’s not as though we actually need it all, is it? Strip away our vanities to our basic human needs and we’re left with food, shelter and the opportunity to reproduce. And (allowing for the occasional glitch), satisfying such needs has never, in the grand scheme of things, been that big a deal. It’s not even a normal day at the office; it barely takes us to elevenses.

But, of course, it’s not the material needs that are the problem. It’s the non-material ones: identity, a sense of belonging, even lurve. So what’s consuming got to do with those? Well, rather a lot it would seem. As Joseph Murphy, research fellow at the Open University and author of Exploring Sustainable Consumption, puts it, there appears to be “a basic human need to use material goods for social purposes”.

Indeed, some go so far as to suggest that this helps explain the sudden surge in agriculture, 10,000 years or so back. It wasn’t (just) that there were so many of us that the simple joys of the hunter-gatherer life couldn’t cut the mustard any more. It was because we actively sought a surplus to requirements. To trade with, show off with, buy power and favours, give ourselves meaning and, yes, status: a place to stand. And those that did particularly well at this, of course, were well placed to pass on their genes down the line.

At home with the Beckhams

So it’s evolution, innit? The archaeological/anthropological jury might still be very much out on this one, but for anyone who has watched the voracity with which teenagers embark on some serious hunting and gathering way in excess of material needs, it’s a hell of a persuasive argument. Born to shop.

‘Buy Nothing Day’?

Get real.

Whoa, tiger! That’s quite a jump: maybe the search for status is indeed hard wired in us - shipped with the operating system, as it were. And maybe material goods are a highly effective way of expressing it...but to imagine that we can only do so through rampant stufflust is to - well, to display a pathetic paucity of the imagination. What about the status that goes with a job superbly well done? If it’s acquisition we’re after, what about acquiring a reputation as a nice bloke; one who looks after himself and others, Merc or (presumably) no Merc? Because, in the words of Laurie Michaelis, of the Oxford Commission for Sustainable Consumption, “it’s about belonging, not being better than. That’s what people are really hungry for.” He quotes a wodge of studies showing that “once basic material needs are met, what really makes people happy are decent relationships; an interesting job. Financial security is important, so that they don’t have to worry. But having more stuff isn’t.”

Tim Jackson, who’s researching the social psychology of sustainable consumption at Surrey University, agrees, but adds a qualification. “Relative wellbeing is more important than absolute wellbeing. So high levels of inequality are a problem.” In other words, if you look around you and see others with much more, you start to feel uneasy. You’re not a member of the same club: you don’t belong. This leads, rather inconveniently for New Labour, to the conclusion that dramatic reductions in levels of inequality would make most people happier as they are - and hence less prone to over-consume. Ah, we can dream...

Tricky, isn’t it? Trickier still if you look at just what ‘belonging’ means in a globalising world. “When local communities disintegrate and people are thrown into new surroundings”, says Murphy, “there’s more pressure to use material goods to help forge your new identity.” And when the chumminess of television means that the Beckhams have in a weird way become part of your home community...well, there’s a lot of ratcheting up to do to make sure you belong to that particular club. (Which is, possibly, why every parent’s worst choice admonition - “I never had a mobile phone / holiday in Majorca / designer pencil case when I was your age” - rings such a pathetic note.)

Solar objects of desire

So we end up in a situation where we’re increasingly trying to meet non-material needs through the marketplace. But is that really so much of a problem? At present, yes, sure, because we’re consuming unsustainably. But what about all those massive eco-efficiency gains we’re reading about? Those dramatic improvements in resource productivity: Factor 10, Factor 50... The vehicles that are 100 times less polluting than their 1972 equivalents. Not to mention the promise of replacing the ownership of polluting products (cars) with ‘cleaner’ services (car share clubs and mobility packages). “You could conceive of a world”, concedes Michaelis, “where people still have that drive to consume, but where it’s directed at sustainable products and services. Of course”, he adds, “you’d need a shift in status symbols, but you can imagine photovoltaic panels becoming objects of desire” - much as has happened to organic food, and may in future be the case with the silent vrrooom of the fuel-cell car.

So is that it, then? Sit back, relax and sustainably shop?

Needless to say...not as such. First, efficiency revolutions are nothing new. During the 20th century alone, some products and technologies achieved resource productivity gains of between factor 10 and 100 - but in many cases even such dramatic improvements were outstripped by increased consumption overall. (It’s not much help improving gizmo efficiency by a factor of 10 if 11 times as many gizmos are being sold.) Even with all the improvements of the last few decades we are, at the very least, running to stand still. And so far, all the promises that the IT revolution would give us a weightless economy enabling us to live on ‘thin air’ have proved to be...so much thin air. As Joseph Murphy puts it: “You can speculate on the possibility of major technical shifts, but the scale of the challenge is enormous. It’s a promise that’s been held out for ages, but it’s not been proven yet. It’s hard to believe that technology alone can crack it.”

Secondly, a focus on achieving wellbeing through private consumption almost inevitably detracts from public welfare. More private money spent to put more 4X4s on the road - even hydrogen-powered ones - means more congestion and (in all probability) worse public transport. In short, more choice for some people, as Roger Levett has pointed out [‘What Quality? Whose Lives?’ - GF28] often means less choice for other (usually poorer) ones.

And there’s another reason to be sceptical: all this consuming isn’t doing the trick - too many of those non-material needs are remaining resolutely unmet. “The economy’s grown by over 100% in the last 50 years”, says Murphy, “but the net sum of human happiness most certainly hasn’t.” Such an elusive quality is hard to quantify, of course, but there’s some survey evidence demonstrating, if anything, a net decrease in contentment over the last three decades or so. (Yes, these things can, up to a point, be measured...). Ironically, it’s during this time that advertisers have employed increasingly sophisticated techniques to persuade us that consuming can indeed bring us virtually the whole kit and caboodle of human wellbeing. So we’re left with a situation where the product might do what it says on the tin; but it’s spectacularly failing to fulfil the larger, if vacuous, promise implied in the ad - or even the name. (Boots has gone so far as to launch a website under the title ‘wellbeing.com’, confident that “wellbeing is an exciting growth market”, ripe for capture. Sure, it offers a decent smattering of health and fitness advice, but at the time of writing its most prominent offer on the home page is ‘3 for 2 Garnier bodytonic contour firming gel’... My case rests.)

Pseudo-satisfaction

Small wonder that ‘downshifting’ struck such a chord a few years back. Up went the cry: let’s dump the pseudo-satisfiers of the marketplace (as Max-Neef called them), because they don’t do the job anyway, and they trash the planet into the bargain... Let’s live more simply and be happier too, whoopee! Only...for rather many of those who pursued it, the first step in the downshift somehow seemed to consist of the purchase of a £250,000 farmhouse in the Welsh borders. How many (apart from the occasional vicar) choose to downshift to an ex-local authority flat on the outskirts of Wolverhampton? (And how many downshift from ex-local authority flats on the outskirts of anywhere...?)

So where do we start to unravel it all? There are no neat policy packages waiting to be brought off the shelf - not least because so much of public policy remains trapped in the never-never land of neo-classical economics, where isolated individuals make a series of rational choices to maximise their welfare: hence it fails to factor in what’s really driving consumerism. So, for example, a focus on providing information (this car is more fuel-efficient than that one, this longlife light bulb will save you money) ignores what actually motivates the consumer to choose one product over another.

This isn’t to belittle the scope for carefully-targeted but still sweeping fiscal changes, from carbon taxes onwards; ones which favour products and services that minimise environmental impact and penalise those that don’t. But focusing exclusively on those won’t in itself crack the problem, runs the argument, since (at least unless ratcheted up to politically inconceviable heights) tweaking taxes won’t overcome more ingrained drives to buy.

Fast fashion (faster phones)

At a relatively mundane level, of course, part of the problem lies in the products themselves. “We’re hooked on short-termism,” says Tim Cooper, founder of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University. “There’s a well-founded belief that most things will become out of date quickly, and the new ones will be much better.” This, of course, applies to everything from fashion and décor to cars and computers. According to Nic Marks, co-ordinator of the Wellbeing Programme at the New Economics Foundation, this is an inevitable part of the deal. “The system needs to create dissatisfaction”, or rather, to ensure that the experience of buying something “gives us a sense of satisfaction that wears off after a time”. Indeed: the entire mobile phone industry virtually stands or falls on persuading consumers to upgrade every year or so.

So despite all the ‘future-proof’ rhetoric, says Cooper, “things aren’t designed to be upgraded...repair costs are rising as the price of durables falls. But it wouldn’t be rocket science to shift the economic equation in favour of repair, and of renewal, not replacement.” At the micro-level, he enthuses about initiatives like CREATE, which try to weave a culture of reuse and refurbishment into local economies by repairing appliances while training up long-term unemployed people in such skills; like Sony’s tentative ventures into selling second-hand kit in its retail outlets; or the slow rise of ‘eco-leasing’ schemes. But it’s all small stuff, he says, compared to the 24 million appliances thrown away every year.

For Tim Jackson, the whole issue of choice offers one interesting approach to the dilemma. “We need a sense that individual freedom of choice has to be part of a social contract to include its impact on other people and the planet.” He cites a scheme on the M25 which encouraged people to stay in lane and cut speed limits according to traffic flows. Result? Average speeds increased, and there was less congestion and fewer accidents - all by reducing the incentive to behave competitively, and encouraging co-operation. “It’s one example - on a micro-scale - of the kinds of ways policymakers can intervene.” In transport, for instance, he says, “we have to ask, ‘what are the human needs that individual mobility is attempting to deliver?’”, and then, presumably, see how we might be able to meet those needs to everyone’s satisfaction more effectively than filling the suburban streets full of SUVs.

This kind of thinking is echoed in some of the work of the Oxford Commission (a university group chaired by former Environment Secretary John Gummer.) Among its many projects is a survey of initiatives which in some way or another reduce consumption while, crucially, meeting some of those thorny non-material needs - such as the wish to belong. In the transport field, for instance, it champions the ‘Walking Bus’ [see GF30, p32] which has pioneered a shift away from the 4x4xschool run culture, car share clubs [GF21, p18], car-free days [GF31, p6], and teleworking [GF35, p7]. It picks out ‘community-supported agriculture’ schemes, farmers’ markets and urban farming [both GF31, p44], along with self-build and co-housing projects, and innovative water conservation techniques from Nepal to Colorado.

Real-life examples such as this, says Michaelis, are essential “to catch people’s imagination in a ‘belonging’ way”. Car sharing fits the bill, too.

Then there’s the little matter of communication. Any messages encouraging more sustainable consumption are presently drowned out by a tidal wave of ads urging us to do the opposite. What chances are there of a shift in cultural values? Could it ever become as unacceptable to consume to excess as it is, for example, to smoke between mouthfuls at dinner - or to drink and then drive? Widely tolerated even a generation ago, such activities are now firmly in the faux-pas league - thanks to governments actively seeking to influence public behaviour through education and the media.

Why me?

“Consumers look for leadership from above,” says Mike Longhurst, senior vice-president at advertising agency McCann Erickson. “When you ask them to do something, they tend to say: ‘why me?’ - why isn’t the government taking the lead?” The latter, says Longhurst, should learn from its successes in areas such as drink-driving, and extend those to messages around sustainable consumption.

The UN Environment Programme’s Industry and Environment section has been beavering away at this for several years, having succeeded in getting sustainable consumption incorporated into the UN’s wider consumer protection guidelines. In theory, they’ve now been adopted by over 50 governments, ranging from the obvious (Sweden), to the mildly surprising (Fiji, Sri Lanka) to, well, to those blatant examples of recklessly unconstrained consumerism, Burundi and Chad... In practice, there’s relatively little as yet to show for it all beyond eco-labelling and recycling programmes and a mixed bag of public education schemes. And while some unlikely candidates such as Vanuatu and Nicaragua have joined usual suspects Belgium and Denmark in the top rank of governments making some kind of effort on everything from tax tweaks to information campaigns, some of the world’s heaviest consumers (including America and Britain) have yet to show much sign of engagement.

As cool and sexy as Coke

This doesn’t surprise Tim Cooper. “There’s no political mindset which even thinks of trying to popularise the idea of consuming less. It doesn’t register in political debates - and there’s precious little research going on around it either.” For Laurie Michaelis, though, politicians have a role to play as communicators - and role models. “People underestimate how influential politicians can be - look at the way Margaret Thatcher helped shape British society.”

But if you’re looking for compelling communicators, where better to start than with the ad agencies? That’s the theory behind a brave initiative launched by UNEP-IE, which is working with advertisers in an effort to make sustainable consumption, in the words of UNEP’s Bas de Leeuw, “as cool and sexy as Coca-Cola.” It’s succeeded in bringing together established ‘ethical’ agencies like St Luke’s with mainstream giants such as Saatchi’s and McCann Erickson (with Mike Longhurst as prime mover) to explore what the options might be. These include creating a strong ‘lifestyle’ message, which encourages responsible use of products. De Leeuw points to Kia Car’s ‘Think Before You Drive’ campaign as one example of such ‘responsible marketing’. Murphy suggests this might extend to voluntary codes of conduct, “for example, encouraging advertisers not to be blatantly irresponsible in their messages around car use - not to set out to undermine public transport.”

The problem, though, says Longhurst, is that these messages tend to get ‘stuck’ in the rarefied air of corporate affairs, rarely making it through to the hard noses in the marketing departments. “Nobody’s saying to them, ‘we need to communicate responsible consumption’ - all the focus is on flogging more product.” And he’s not impressed by those companies who put their high-flown principles up on the net, but fail to cascade them down through their ad campaigns. “Who looks at corporate websites, for God’s sake?! You’ve got to thrust this stuff at consumers.” Thrusting what, though, exactly? Not green virtue, says Longhurst: “As soon as you tell people that Product X is good for the environment, they’ll assume it costs more and it won’t work.” A subtler approach is needed, he says, focusing on quality.

Affectionate policy

It’s not just the quality of stuff that matters - but the experience that goes along with it. That’s what counts when it comes to those awkward non-material needs. So why not skip all that burdensome stuff and cut straight to the experiential chase?

Nic Marks would like us to. “People buy things like music in the hope that somehow they’ll share in the creative experience - but it would be much more satisfying to create something themselves.” (Shades of Sony’s ‘Go Create’ catchphrase.) There’s growing evidence, says Marks, that we don’t spend enough time in ‘flow experiences’ - ones where we’re using relatively high-level skills in a challenging situation. You don’t have to be Protestant to recoil from sloth, it seems: too much passivity is bad for us. It doesn’t meet our needs; it doesn’t make us happy. By contrast, claims Marks, those accustomed to being ‘in the flow’ live longer. He quotes a study of a group of nuns whose eldest member was “bright as a button at 93” - mentally alert after a lifetime not watching TV.

Great. Now try selling that to the voters: be happy - make like a nun! “The major political problem”, says Tim Cooper, “is how to attract the electorate with any message other than, ‘we’ll make you richer’.” It’s partly, he says, because alternative robust measurements of quality of life aren’t really available. And the government’s latest stab [see GF34, p13], while providing some useful data on sustainable progress, doesn’t exactly capture the gamut of human experience, or imagination, in the way money does.

So maybe we need some new measurements? That’s the conclusion reached by Nic Marks, who helped devise the ‘Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare’ - an earlier attempt to provide an alternative to the justly-maligned GDP as a useful indicator. He’s now working on an ambitious new ‘national index of wellbeing’, which will combine familiar objective data on everything from the economy to the environment and social cohesion, with distinctly subjective views on levels of affection, creativity, security...things rarely if ever measured (and widely seen as beyond the scope of public policy), but deeply relevant to individual happiness and fulfilment. It may sound woolly, but as a brave attempt to link personal wellbeing with policy development - and what’s the point of policy if it’s not even trying to touch our wellbeing? - it’s groundbreaking.

So where does this all leave us? We’re not going to curb consumerism overnight, but it’s surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that we could ease ourselves away from some of its more destructive aspects. From fiscal incentives and product guidelines to imaginative advertising that picks up on people’s frustrations at its failure to deliver what it promises, there must be scope for a shift away from a world where human wellbeing can reliably be equated with that 3 for 2 offer on Garnier bodytonic contour firming gel. One where, in the words of Amory Lovins, “we learn to get better at meeting non-material needs through non-material means”.

“This is the crux of what society is about now,” says Tim Jackson. “We’re at an absolutely vital point in our history, and this is probably the critical intellectual and social issue of our time. If we’re ever going to get to a more humanitarian society, this is the one nut we have to crack. Either we get through this - or we don’t get through.”

16 July 2002

Martin Wright