‘State of the World 2010’ – from Consumerism to Sustainability?

‘How do you manage without a car?!!’ -- an old colleague was pretty straight with the question recently, and in her tone was the exclamation of the (unlikely) possibility of life without oxygen.

‘For short distances we walk, for a bit longer we take a cycle rickshaw/auto rickshaw…for those longer, it’s the metro rail or bus or the taxi,’ my reply was as straight, a bit curt too.

‘Wonder why the two of you are saving so much,’ she mumbled. I ignored.
This city and its people have seldom understood my thoughts…if it did, I could have answered, “For your kids and theirs….!”

Anyhow, it has always been a concern of mine, watching the commercials and the lives of those who adopt the soap opera life style –

Do we need all this to be happy in life?
Do these so called conveniences simplify/complicate our lives?
Over indulgence in the self and material – where will that take humanity?
How will earth and nature respond to man’s overindulgence?

In that context, it was heartening to see a report ‘State of the World 2010’ by Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based organisation, address the issues, outlining a blueprint calling for a comprehensive transformation of our present way of life.

‘Preventing the collapse of human civilisation requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism... and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability,’ the report states.

It vehemently relegates the culture of consumerism that has emerged over the past 50 years, with people increasingly finding meaning and contentment in what they consume.

‘The consumer culture that has taken hold probably first in the U.S. and now in country after country over the past century, so that we can now talk about a global consumerist culture that has become a powerful force around the world,’ Worldwatch president Christopher Flavin says. Consumption has risen sixfold since 1960, the report notes, citing World Bank statistics.

‘Habits that are firmly set – from where people live to what they eat – will all need to be altered and in many cases simplified or minimised... From Earth's perspective, the American or even the European way of life is simply not viable.’

Read that with Flavin’s observation -- ‘In India and China, for instance, the consumer culture of the U.S. and Western Europe is not only being replicated but being replicated on a much vaster scale,’—an almost even spread of onus!

‘We're not stupid, we're not ignorant, we don’t even have bad values,’ report co-author Michael Maniates says. Rather, we are acting under the heavy influence of cultural conventions that influence our behaviour by making things like fast food, air conditioning and suburban living feel increasingly ‘natural’ and more difficult to imagine living without, he adds.

It is to Change these Habits, and the current cultural convention that the report calls for. Individuals need to get back to a basic way of life, it says recommending things like borrowing books and toys from libraries instead of buying them, choosing public transport over the car, and growing food in community gardens and the like.

The report is positive about the possibility, even as we may doubt.

‘This shift is not only possible, it is already beginning to happen,’ says project director Erik Assadourian. ‘With deliberate effort we can replace consumerism with sustainability just as quickly as we traded home-cooked meals for Happy Meals and neighbourhood parks for shopping malls,’ he says, touching upon the tenuousness of what appear to be deep and solid cultural roots.

‘Now I know that cultural assumptions, even well-established ones, can be overturned,’ Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus affirms in his foreword, pointing to his experience in microcredit and overturning the cultural conception that poor people were not creditworthy as evidence that such deep-rooted conceptions can, in fact, be changed.

‘Culture, after all, is for making it easy for people to unleash their potential, not for standing there as a wall to stop them from moving forward. Culture that does not let people grow is a dead culture,’ Yunus concludes.


That’s definitely aimed at transforming conventional ways of thinking…Will the reality of a sustainable society be far?

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Image:
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Sow2010_Cover.jpg