The action or fact of consuming something to excess. In later use also: excessive use of natural resources, esp. in industrial processes. – Oxford English Dictionary
Consumption itself is at the issue of our climatic and environmental dystopia. The consumer culture tells us all that we can have everything and everything without consequence. We cannot have – less fossil fuel usage, less carbon, less water use, less waste, less population pressures and less habitat destruction when our worldview is based on more.
Environmental consumption tells us we can have our cake and eat it by adopting sustainable consumption patterns. Prescribed innovations such as low carbon technologies and renewable energy sources are merely a way of rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Consumerism is consuming the planet.
People will have to change their behavior and learn to survive at a much lower standard of living as there is no technology that will fix everything and allow us to continue the carbon party–just without the carbon. The Jevon paradox comes into play when we make further innovations on lowering our footprints as efficiency improvements lead to increases in consumption.
Electric cars are marketing magic. You can continue driving as much as you want and help to save the planet at the same time. This fits perfectly with the mistaken belief that a transition away from oil will be relatively easy and painless.
“Don’t we know deep down that our comfortable lives come at the expense of others forced to live in comparative misery?”
– Kohei Saito
To heal the planet we must first heal ourselves
The only way to find contentment in this reality is to be in the now and avoid past and future thoughts. A zen road is the path away from wreck and ruin.
You are a fragment of humanity, one consciousness amongst billions.
If you cannot find happiness from within yourself then you won’t find it anywhere else.
“If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.”
—Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
The world is adopting the western hedonistic consumerist worldview which on the plus side lowers the birth rates as richer nations have fewer children as they chase money and experiences over a family centric worldview.
A bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures.
