Colloquium paper

Colloquium paper

Before Consumerism consumes us.

Undersatanding Consumerism and its effects in the present context

By Rituparna Sarkar . Apparel Design 2012 . PGDPD Guide - Balaji Rengarajan

Contents 011ntroduction 02Context 03Consumption as a malignant disease 04Somebody else’s problem 05The driving force behind consumption 06Consumption as a symptom of addiction 07Conclusion 08Bibligraphy Before Consumerism consumes us .

Introduction

Context

“Just living is not enough, one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” – Hans Christian Anderson .

The reason for choosing the subject of consumption and consumerism is the fact that surprisingly, a majority of the people do not bother to relate themselves with the issue and choose to ignore a problem that directly challenges their own future existence.

For fifteen years the Worldwatch Institute of Washington has been publishing an issue on the declining condition of the global environment. For the most part the picture is not good.

Much of the deterioration can be traced directly to human activities- urban expansion equates to species loss, industrial manufacturing to air pollution, factory farming to water pollution, chemical agriculture to poisoned soil. Accelerating these environmental impacts are rapidly rising population numbers, increasingly efficient technologies and consumption rates beyond the planet’s capacities.

Through this paper I have tried to take an account and generate awareness regarding the current situation of taking in much more than what we can from this Earth, what drives us to do so and how that is sabotaging the natural flourish of Planet Earth.

To begin with that there are several aspects of consumerism and it is important to understand which direction I was heading to. To give an example , just in the mere definition one can find so many connotations that contradict each other all the time.

From a consumer activist point of view, consumerism is the “ social movement seeking to augment the rights and the power of buyers in relation to sellers “ – Kolter 1972.

While the marketing concept states that, Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts.” Consumerism actually should be, must be and I hope will be the opportunity of marketing. This is what marketing have been waiting for”, Peter Drucker.

In economics, Consumerism refers to the economic policies placing emphasis on the consumption, “the theory that suggests a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial.”

I would like to consider the environmentalist point of view for my paper. They define ,”Consumerism” as a force from the marketplace which is concerned with the selfish and frivolous collecting of products, or economic materialism, which destroys individuality and harms society and environment at large.

Before Consumerism consumes us .

Consumption as a malignant disease “Meanwhile down at the mall there’s a mid-season sale. Everything is discounted- oceans, rivers , oil, gene pools, fig wasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminium factories, phone companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air- all 4.6 billion years of evolution. Its packed, sealed, tagged, valued and available off the rack (no returns). As for justice- I am told its on offer too. You can get the best that money can buy.” -Arundhuti Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to the Empire.

We are only 200,000 years old and we changed a four billion year legacy, in an alarming rate. There is no other habitat left for us to exploit and yet our thirst in unquenced. We are the only species that changed the environment around us to suit our needs.

If one looks at the history of human civilization, from being nomadic tribes hunting for food, we became argiculturists, deriving benifits from the land. With the advent of industrial revolution, things started becoming mechanized and gradually came the era of technology and mass production. Soon the handcrafted goods market started to dissapear and overflown with assembly line cheaper products and we started losing touch with the environment around us. We longer cared where and how things were being made , as long as there were a mutlitude of options at a cheaper price. What we fail to notice, is the price that will cost us our future existence.

Its schocking how in the last 60 years , the population of human beings have tripled and over 2 billion people have moved to cities.

Fertilizers and pesticides have taken over the vegetative lands. The diversity is replaced by standardization. Since 1950 fishing catches have increased 5 folds from 18 to a 100 million metric tons a year.

Meat and poultry constitute a huge part of our diet. The US department of argiculture stated that in 35 million cattle, 160 million pigs and 80 million chicken were killed for consumption (2008), the figures doesnt include the millions that died while being transported.

100 million male chicks were killed because they were male, and cannot be used. The growing meat and poultry industry is a huge threat to the environment as it uses huge amount to fossil fuels for storage, breeding and transportation. Moreover it results in converting huge areas of land into space to store cattle, which results in desertification, not to mention the ill treatment to the animals.

Diminishing water resources is another major threat that has already crept into our reality. One major river out of ten doesn’t flow several months of the year. India risks the most from the lack of water, considering the huge population it must feed. Massive irrigation has drained the water reserves greatly. Over the years, millions of wells have been dug and now are hitting the rock bottom. Water reserves are steadily depleting.

Before Consumerism consumes us .

The water shortages could affect 2 billion people before 2025. On the other hand, places like Las Vegas, which was built out of a desert, are ever thriving, an average person uses 800 to 1000 litres of water per day.

According to Global Issues in 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption; the poorest 20% for just 1.5%.

To have a rough idea of the imbalance in distribution of resources one must look at cities like Sanghai, New york, Los Angeles Dubai in comparision to Congo, Zimbabwe,Niger and several other improvised African countries. The big cities that claim have acheived the “high living” standards with thousands of skyscrapers, thousands of shopping malls, where everyone owns atleast one car, where its hard to tell the day from the night is definitely connected with millions surviving under inhuman conditions, with severe shortage of basic resources like food and water. Power and authority are usurping and plundering all that can be extracted, all that there is left.

One does not have to look very far, here in India in the name of ‘structural adjustments’ and ‘development’projects there has been mass privatization of land and the original inhabbitants are being pushed out of their land. Mutlinational companies are on the prowl for deals in developing counties which yields them enormous profits.

The world has become much smaller. Most consumer goods travel 1000 of kilometers from the country of production to the country of consumption. Since 1950 the volume of international trade has increased 20 times over. 90 percent of trade goes by sea, 100 billion containers head every year from the major consumer countries of the world.

With faster modes of transport we reached the far corners of this planet and have dug out mineral resources. The invention of oil and petroleum has changed the idea of power play between nations.

Dubai, is an excellent example of how a country without absolutely any natural resources but with the power of oil, has the largest number of skyscrapers , has built artificial islands, has desalinated the sea water in huge plants and is undoubtedly one to richest countries at present.

80 percent of mineral wealth is consumed by 20 percent of the world population. Researchers are convinced that before the end of this century , we would have used up all the mineral reserves.

The human race is acting like a cancer on the planet. It is becoming like a malignant process, much like a tumor that will never stop to spread until it results in complete destruction of the host that it dwells on.

Somebody else’s problem In Douglas Adams’s sci-fi novel, Life, the Universe and Everything (1982),space engineers, faced with the expensive challenge of making a space ship invisible for defensive purposes, decide to go for a new cheaper option, a technology wryly named ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’. The spaceship is not really invisible, but ‘almost’ so, through the device of the observer’s inattention.

Adams’s ship can only be seen with great difficulty out of the corner of one’s eye (Adams,1982, ). All the things that we take for granted, such as the supply of water, electricity and gas to our homes and the weekly rubbish collection, along with the roadways that enable our car-based commute to and from work, we seem to be able to focus only on the ‘consumption phase’ in the lifecycle of any particular domain. Everything else outside the parameters of what we now take for granted becomes ‘somebody else’s problem’, something perhaps ‘they’ should do something about, sooner or later.

We often do not think about what happens to a product when they fail to function or we no longer need them. They almost magically appear and disappear. Most of the time we fail to take heed to how much energy and resources has been used in producing and transporting the product to be made available to us and where it lands up after we dispose it. For most of us- ‘it is not our concern’.

For example, in Germany when one goes to a restaurant and orders sea food, he is never thinking of the journey that the food has made in order to be available at the plate in front of him.

Maybe the fish was pulled out in some coast in Spain or Italy , two days ago and had to be flown hundreds of kilometers on ice to retain the freshness. The same goes for the several rows of exotic fruits and vegetables that one can find in any supermarket, and endless other products. What escapes our notice is the, extraordinary costs, in fuel, emissions and energy, not to mention the environmental impact on the population of the fish in its natural habitat. Extraction and distribution of resources depends on first come first serve basis, with the richest or technologically advanced or most powerful in getting in first , staking a ‘claim’ and taking a ‘share’.

The waste generated from used merchandise is mostly taken far away from us (‘out of sight , out of mind’ ) or even if its right there we choose to very efficiently ignore it, as long as its out of our house and our personal space.

Before Consumerism consumes us .

The environmental costs of over-extraction, over- consumption and excessive pollution and waste like the are never made transparent to us and we are happily pushed towards a culture of “use and enjoy, dispose and forget’.

As stated by Robert Crocker , “The problem is not only one of distancing and the inevitable concealment from view that comes with lengthy supply chains, but the way that our present economic system focuses attention and attributes value only at the ‘owned’ consumption or ‘in use’ phase of any lifecycle, and then only on the specific owner and the ‘job’ in question.

This leads to a crisis of oversight and responsibility: we are accustomed to efficiently managing and focusing upon only what is ‘owned’ by some identifiable person, corporation or nation in its use phase. However, we seem unable to deal with what is there before this ‘resource’ is ‘claimed’ and then ‘owned’ at the beginning of this cycle, or what happens to the consumed material at its end, when it is turned again into what is ‘unowned’ or unwanted. For no one wants to ‘own’ garbage unless it has some special material value, and when this is not identified it returns again to the commons, to what technically has not yet been given value or ‘owned’( Linebaugh, 2010; Strasser, 2000).

As Princen points out, much of this depends on widely accepted and unquestioned metaphors taken directly from economics and misapplied in the ‘real world’ of human and environmental relationships (Princen, 2010).”

The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch ‘ is a living example of the problem. This patch is made of industrial products and plastics floating in the northern Pacific gyre. The reason why this has come to notice is probably because it became a hazard to shipping and wildlife. Studies show that it is so huge that its visible from space. (Moore, 2003; Coulter , 2009-10; Wikipedia 2011). Since it does belong to any nation, ship owner or industrial producer it has become ‘somebody else’s problem’. But as Moore and others have pointed out, while this continent-sized patch of floating garbage might damage many distant fish and birds directly, its toxins affect us too, entering the food chain and becoming a part of what we eat, perhaps thousands of miles distant, its tell-tale toxins now being identifiable in many commercially caught and consumed fish (Moore, 2003).

The driving force behind consumption A lot of environmentalist’s would think the C-words “consumer” and “consumerism” as downright negative. However the documentary film from the United Kingdom ‘Consumed — Inside the Belly of the Beast’, explains the urge to consume as a part of human evolution and psychology. This documentary draws attention to the idea that It is basic human nature to learn to grow to play out our dreams , ambitions and aspirations and in that respect, in that consumption can be seen as something natural and incredibly normal for a stimulus hungry species.

“Transition towns, recycling, alternative power, enduring design; they are just attacking the symptoms. They are merely allowing us to continue living the way we are. They are buying us time.

They are not embracing the root cause — our psychology.”If we understand the mechanism to the brain then we might understand the way a culture works. In other words, consumption is underpinned by biologically normal tendencies to survive and attract a mate.

Evolution theory suggests that the most important thing that we live for is survival and attracting a mate. Once the basic needs of food, protection from predators and getting rid of parasites or infectious diseases are taken care of, we tend to turn our attention and our obsession to social status and needs of attracting a mate.

Unlike animals we don’t use direct bodily signals like flashing a tail, but we use language, humour and other communication skills to attract attention. All the status seeking and mate seeking effort are now channelized in the economy into the goods and products we buy. The principle way that we are supposed to display our mental traits is through our purchases. Products therefore become a means to exhibit our personality.

Advertising convinces people that above average products can compensate for the deficiencies in us. So people started believing in the myth that if one is not naturally smart , physically attractive , creative or intelligent they can still get along well in the mating market with their fancy products and degrees that they can buy.

It is a delusion that is that people chose to firmly believe in , which might work in the beginning in attracting a spouse but is difficult to sustain over a period of time as they start to gradually lose interest in the superficial layers.

Before Consumerism consumes us .

In fact, in a common Indian scenario, one is conditioned from childhood to study all the time, in order to get grades , which supposedly lead to securing a better job and in turn led to buying more and more merchandise in order to prove their social status.

The corporations in the mid 20th century were looking at the way they could trigger of psychological impulses within us that would cause us to desire new products, that we never thought we would need. The only way that we are different from other life forms is in the way of our consciousness. In 1950’s the golden age of consumerism, the scientists, inventors, designers and corporations competed to meet the desires of the ever hungry people. Marketing culture was everywhere. The desire to acquire prestige is something that has been pushing human evolution ever since history. With the advent of Hollywood and television people got to know how luxuriously the other half of the world lived.

With advancement in the field of science and technology , we have now understood most of the natural phenomenon, we know why it rains , we know why plants grow , we know the reason behind the sun rise and sun set, etc. Yet there still exists a need for mystery , magic and a need to experience new things.

The market is there providing us, that outlet to experience new things all the time.

The marketing revolution is convincing the customers that - “you got be the centre of the your world. You got to be an ardent narcissist. “Researchers see the product as a prop to self-actualize the need to be the personality that the product promotes.

Another trait that reasons our behavioristic traits is the need to grow. As in simple form consumption is nourishment.

Buying a product is often associated with the feeling of security.

One starts to feel that they belong to a certain social group, when they buy a particular brand for example, the obsession with Apple products among the youth is widespread, and most of the time the purchase is made because of peer pressure, because of wanting to be a part of a “cool kids” gang.

Consumption as a symptom of addiction Our lives have never been richer and yet our need for more seems undiminished. The need of more money, more holidays, more work , more choice , more houses , more stuff, more cars are pushing us to the limit. In the process of ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ we end up with addiction, depression and mental health issues as everyday problems. We are losing ourselves in rush struggling to keep up. The high street has become a stressful , competitive place. We are getting very little from it but trying so hard to fit in.

Scholars agree that talking in a very rudimentary sense ,we have reached a stage in evolution, where we have solved most of the basic problems and that there is nothing for us to do.

We are living to consume. Consumerism is not a conspiracy. It is very much a reflection of the human mind.

British psychologist Oliver James, said that “we have become addicted to having rather than being and confusing our needs with our wants”. He is convinced that consumerism has reached massive proportions which leaves , “people richer but sadder”.

Based on an article in New Yorker magazine , the average American suffers from “feature fatigue”, which means that the products lose their appeal once the package is opened. There is something about the way we consume , that we always end up feeling unsatisfied and worse it leads to creating addiction .

We do not give enough importance or thought in search of “right” answer to our wants and needs, instead make peace with the advertisements that are omnipresent.

Barry Schwartz , a psychologist after conducting a study to determine if , choice is the driving force in freedom and selfdetermination. He claims that a lot of freedom and choice , autonomy or self –determination has negative effects and can become transformed to a kind of tyranny- just opposite to what they are supposed to produce. In his study it showed that people were actually happier with lesser choices.

Conspicuous consumption was first introduced by sociologist and economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen in 1899. It’s the term that describes the tendency of individuals to purchase expensive products as an outward display of wealth and as a means of enhancing their status in society. Veblen used the term to describe the phenomenon of gaining and holding the esteem of others in the society through evidential display of wealth.

Before Consumerism consumes us .

In this way the individual is attempting to prove that they have financial means to afford a particular product.

Russell Belk 1988 often argues that in Third World countries people often are attracted to and indulge in aspects of conspicuous consumption before they have adequate food, clothing and shelter. The factors that determine the level of conspicuous consumption are, firstly the prevailing norms, values , customs, beliefs and laws in a society ; second an individual’s social network or reference group can influence their consumption patterns and thirdly gender has also been found to increase susceptibility to conspicuous consumption.

Conclusion

Bibliography

We have this delusion that we are alright inside. We are very sophisticated in the 21st century , but we may seem, naïve in another hundred years from now. Our grandchildren would probably think why did they do it. Why did they buy a huge house with six rooms for 2 people, why did they own 4 cars for a family of four, why did they use up the resources in such absurd unnecessary ways, as there will definitely be a serious dearth of it.

The problem with executing sustainability is that it is a long term approach, which is in contrast to the short term mindset that we have developed .

We must understand how psychologically we have become unaffected by destruction. We have become disassociated from the world the moment we moved out of relationship with hands on experience of elemental reality (fire, water, air , earth). Our reality are is mostly mechanized, and we don’t so much as to care nor do we feel so much, as to where things are coming from and where they are ending up.

If one goes to the dumping ground, one can find that most of the things lying their especially the electronic waste still functions the way it was intended to, and what has probably broken are - desires, fascination and mystery that one associated with the products. We need products that have a deeper meaning in our lives, which will perhaps make us , to be in love with them for a longer, much longer period of time. The industries need to be far sighted, they need to find profit not in selling cheap throw away rubbish, maybe their profits should depend on services for making the products last longer.

We are trying to fill the insatiable emptiness within us, with stuff. But at the end of the day, these fail to satisfy our needs, we gradually realize that we are the same person just with more stuff. The change that we wanted to happen still has not happened maybe because we have been seeking satisfaction in the wrong direction.

We are probably the most flexible species. We can change how we value and how we shape. Understanding the basic difference between ‘being’ and ’having’ I feel can become a big step towards a changed perspective. ‘Being’ is not necessarily always a state of acceptance, but more of a state of engagement with you and your life and how things are. While, ‘having’ is putting those values and aspirations in existence of things around us. Having is also very unstable and stressful process, because you are investing yourself in everything other than yourself.

Can we grow from just getting along in our lives ?

Books :

Before Consumerism consumes us .

• • • • •

Sustainability by Design – John R Ehrenfeld Consumer behavior – Leon G Schiffman , Leslie Lazar Kanuk Designing for Zero Waste- Steffen Lehmann, Robert Crocker The Human foot print – Anthony N Penna Green Consumerism A-Z guide- Juliana Mansvelt, Paul Robbins

Internet sources: • • • • • • • • • •

http://www.uvm.edu/~skaza/publications/assets/ BCconsumerism.pdf How to Overcome Consumerism ,http://blog. kanelstrand.com/2012/02/step-12-how-to-overcomeconsumerism.html Why Overcoming Consumerism? http://www.verdant. net/society.htm http://www.becomingminimalist.com/consumer-isnt/ Our world, http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/overcomingoverconsumption-/ Materialism & Consumerism ,http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_wBl-qc7KP8 A Public Resource for Responsible Living, http:// overcomingconsumerism.blogspot.in/ HOME , https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU Samsura- The Meat Industry, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=T9XhEEvC9dk The High Price of Materialism, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=oGab38pKscw