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1
Consumption as a Problem for
Environmental Science
Paul C. Stern, Thomas Dietz, Vernon W. Ruttan
Robert H. Socolow, and fames L. Sweeney
For over two decades, the same frustrating exchange has been re-
peated countless times in international policy circles. A government offi-
cial or scientist from a wealthy country would make the following argu-
ment:
The world is threatened with environmental disaster because of the de-
pletion of natural resources (or climate change, or the loss of biodiver-
sity), and it cannot continue for long to support its rapidly growing
human population. To preserve the environment for future generations,
we need to move quickly to control global population growth, and we
must concentrate the effort on the world's poorer countries, where the
vast majority of the population growth is occurring.
Government officials and scientists from low-income countries would
typically respond this way:
If the world is facing environmental disaster, it is not the fault of the
poor, who use few resources. The fault must lie with the world's
wealthy countries, where people consume the great bulk of the world's
natural resources and energy and cause the great bulk of its environ-
mental degradation. We need to curtail overconsumption in the rich
countries, which use far more than their fair share, both in order to
preserve the environment and to allow the poorest people on earth to
achieve an acceptable standard of living.
Both parties to this stylized debate agree about the importance of
acting to reverse environmental degradation in the world and of finding
1
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
development paths that preserve environmental quality. They also agree
that knowing what action to take requires an understanding of the causes
of environmental degradation. They disagree, of course, on what is the
correct understanding.
The disagreement is noteworthy in two respects: the "either-or" fram-
ing of the problem (either environmental threats result from overpopula-
tion by the poor or overconsumption by the rich), and the limited role
played in the discussions by scientific analysis of human-environment
interactions. In contrast to the major international efforts that have been
mounted to understand the biogeochemical processes that account for
global climate change, acid deposition, ozone depletion, loss of
biodiversity, and other environmental threats, relatively little scientific
attention has been given to understanding the economic, social, cultural,
and institutional processes that set such anthropogenic environmental
changes in motion. It is well known, for instance, that world population
growth is concentrated in the poorer countries and that consumption of
key resources such as oil is concentrated in the richer countries. Too
often, however, analysis of the environmental impacts of human activity
has not gone much farther than this, and the policy debate has suffered as
a result. Governments and citizens around the world need far more
detailed knowledge to effectively anticipate and cope with environmental
threats. Specifically, they need empirical analysis in two areas: the par-
ticular human choices and actions most responsible for adverse changes
in the biophysical environment and the potential for addressing the
threats by affecting those choices and actions. This is not to say that
knowledge alone is sufficient for effective coping. Knowledge is neces-
sary, but it is also necessary to reconcile interpretations of knowledge, to
forge agreements on how to act in spite of uncertainty and conflicting
values and interests, to command resources, and so forth.
Scientists have long recognized that the magnitude of anthropogenic
environmental changes depends on both human population size and on
what this population does. This relationship was conceptualized in the
early 1970s as follows:
I = P x A x T.
in which I represents environmental impact, P represents population, A
the economic output per capita is usually interpreted as a measure of
affluence, and T the environmental impact per unit of economic out-
put is sometimes interpreted as a characteristic of technology (Ehrlich
and Holdren, 1971; Commoner, 1972; Holdren and Ehrlich, 1974~.
As stated, this equation is a tautology: environmental impact equals
population times (economic output per unit population) times (environ
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CONSUMPTION AS A PROBLEM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
3
mental impact per unit economic output). However, the equation does
suggest that one should consider at least three factors in analyzing an-
thropogenic environmental changes: the population, some measure of
activity per person, and some measure of the average impact of each unit
of activity on the environment. This so-called IPAT identity has been
used as a basis for analysis, but it must be treated with care. While it must
hold mathematically, one cannot simply use the equation for prediction
because these three factors do not develop independently of one another.
For example, as per capita economic output increases in a society, that
society may strive to reduce environmental impacts and succeed in de-
creasing the environmental impact per unit of economic activity. Simi-
larly, increasing population may alter the economic output per capita.
The interdependencies of P. A, and T can seriously limit the usefulness of
the equation, especially for analyses over long time periods. The IPAT
formulation has also been controversial because of the way its terms have
been interpreted. For instance, the interpretation of T as "technology"
has been criticized for drawing attention away from the roles of social and
economic institutions in environmental degradation. For a recent discus-
sion of these issues, see Dietz and Rosa, 1994.
With these caveats in mind, treating environmentally relevant human
activity as a mathematical product is intuitively appealing because it re-
duces the analytic problem to two factors: numbers of people (popula-
tion), and the impact of the average person on the environment (some-
times referred to as the impact of consumption). Population is by far the
easier of the two concepts to study. Its units of measurement are obvious
and there is an established scientific discipline, demography, that studies
human population dynamics. Consumption, by contrast, has neither well-
defined and accepted units of measurement nor a scientific community
devoted to studying its dynamics. As noted in Chapter 2, it even lacks a
shared definition that is useful for studying environmental effects.
This book results from a workshop that brought together specialists
from a variety of fields to discuss research on environmentally significant
"consumption" and its causes, with special focus on the United States and
other wealthy countries. Participants discussed research that aimed to
improve knowledge of consumption phenomena and thus to strengthen
the knowledge basis for policy planning. This volume, like the workshop,
attempts only a small step toward useful knowledge. It does not attempt
to offer practical conclusions about how to alter consumption patterns or
to definitively map the intellectual domain. In fact, as noted below, there
are several active and relevant areas of research that are not discussed
here. The volume does, however, demonstrate that environmentally sig-
nificant consumption requires careful scientific analysis, and it tries to
convey to the reader some of the excitement of taking a scientific ap
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4
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
proach to the issue by noting the potential of some relatively untraveled
but promising paths to new understanding. It points out some ways to
pursue these research directions, and we hope it will stimulate action by
researchers and research sponsors.
FOUR CLASSES OF EMPIRICAL QUESTIONS
The broad topic, "what each person does to the environment," di-
vides fairly readily into four major classes of empirical questions, each of
them researchable and each critical for understanding and controlling the
environmental impacts of consumption.
1. Which human activities are the significant environmental disrupters?
How environmentally significant is each activity, and in what ways is it destruc-
tive? What have been the trends of these activities over time, and how may
technological change and other forces affect those trends in the future?
Some human activities are well known to be environmentally disrup-
tive. Fossil energy consumption, the most obvious example, is a major
contributor to global climate change, urban air pollution, and acid depo-
sition. Mining and processing of metals, especially toxic heavy metals,
pollutes water and threatens human health and ecological systems. Agri-
cultural practices such as fertilization, irrigation, and the use of pesticides
pollute water and alter the nitrogen and fresh water cycles. Many other
human activities also have environmental significance. The first ques-
tions about the environmental impacts of human activities concern which
of these activities are important enough in terms of their environmental
consequences to deserve serious and immediate attention and what kinds
of impact each has.
These questions have great practical importance. If the concern is to
limit certain destructive environmental impacts of what people do, deci-
sion makers need to know enough to set priorities among possible target
activities, to understand the tradeoffs involved in targeting one set of
activities rather than another, and to consider the potential environmen-
tal impacts of the activities that might replace those the policy makers
seek to control. These decision makers need to know which human ac-
tivities are significantly disturbing environmental systems and which ac-
tivities are likely to do so in the future. To respond to such conditions and
possibilities, they need more detailed knowledge. For example, decision
makers who want to protect an aquatic ecosystem need to know whether
it would be more effective to reduce fertilization so that less nitrogen
leaches off nearby farmland or to promote better soil conservation prac-
tices to control the amount and timing of runoff. Those who want to
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CONSUMPTION AS A PROBLEM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
5
reduce the environmental impact of the automobile industry need to con-
sider the tradeoffs involved in building vehicles of less steel and more
plastic. Lighter cars use less fuel and require less mining and smelting,
but the life cycle of plastics has its own, possibly offsetting, environmen-
tal effects. Decision makers also need to consider the secondary effects of
possible policies. A decision to make all new cars lighter might induce
some consumers to purchase light trucks instead of cars, thus undermin-
ing the intended result. Addressing these questions requires, among other
kinds of understanding, knowledge of the environmental effects of each
kind of human activity that policy may affect. There are considerable
bodies of relevant research on the environmental consequences of par-
ticular human activities, on natural resource accounting, and on the incor-
poration of environmental factors into national income accounts. These
issues are not, however, the focus of this volume.
2. Who are the key actors responsible for the environmentally disruptive
activities? Which of their actions are the important ones?
To limit the environmental impact of any human activity, it is essen-
tial to understand which types of individuals or organizations account for
most of the activity and how the activity of interest fits into their overall
purposes.
A single environmental problem may result from different actors do-
ing different kinds of things. For example, urban air pollution consists
partly of ozone, much of which is a by-product of emissions from motor
vehicles operated by individuals. But air pollution also consists partly of
sulfur oxides, for which individual action bears little responsibility. Sul-
fur oxides come largely from coal combustion, which in the United States
is mainly an activity of large industrial organizations, especially electric
utility companies. Thus, controlling air pollution may require the imple-
mentation of very different policies, each suited to a particular class of
actor and kind of activity.
It is also important to know which of the things an actor does are
environmentally important. For instance, if one wants to consider op-
tions for reducing water consumption among residences in a municipal-
ity, it is useful to know how much of that use is for watering lawns, filling
pools, washing cars, bathing, washing, cooking, and other purposes, be-
cause households may treat some of these uses as more essential than
others or find some of them relatively easier to postpone. If a large pro-
portion of water is used to do things that can be easily postponed, a time
restriction may be an effective intervention; if a large proportion is for
uses considered nonessential, a price incentive may be highly effective.
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
3. What forces cause or explain environmentally disruptive actions ?
Human activities that alter the environment respond to a mixture of
social, economic, technological, political, and psychological forces. The
example of energy use in residences illustrates the general situation. En-
ergy use depends on multiple factors within households, including the
number of people in the household and on whether any of them spend
their days at home, which affect the demand for heating, cooling, and the
services that appliances provide. It depends on household income, which
affects the size of a dwelling and therefore its energy demand, and also
affects the household's ability to invest in energy-efficient home technol-
ogy, which can have a countervailing effect. The use of energy also de-
pends on the age and sex of the occupants, which affect the desired ambi-
ent temperature. And it depends on household members' desires for
appliances; their attitudes, beliefs, and values concerning energy use, fru-
gality, and various other matters; and even their cultural backgrounds. In
addition, energy use depends on household technology and its relation to
the physical environment: the appliances being used and their designs,
the home's construction, its exposure to wind and weather, and its sur-
rounding micro- and macroclimates.
Household energy use is influenced by many additional factors as
well, which create the context for key choices and actions in the house-
hold. An obvious one is the price of energy, which is affected, in turn, by
public policies of energy taxation and utility regulation, the competitive-
ness of energy industries, advances in the technology of energy produc-
tion and distribution, and perhaps the history of national energy produc-
tion in the United States a long history of energy self-sufficiency may
help explain the strength of the political forces that have for two decades
stymied efforts to raise oil prices to help meet environmental objectives.
Energy use is also affected in indirect but important ways by the standard
practices of the home construction and appliance manufacturing indus-
tries, by local building codes, and by the practices of home mortgage
lenders, which may or may not offer financial benefits to the buyers of
energy-efficient homes that cost less to maintain. Consumption is af-
fected by tax incentives for home ownership because incentives make
larger homes more affordable, and these homes use more energy. And
energy use may also be affected by policies intended to influence it di-
rectly, such as regulations governing appliance manufacture and the in-
formation and financial incentives that governments and energy suppli-
ers have sometimes offered to households to induce them to invest in
energy efficiency.
This long but incomplete list suggests several things: that an environ-
mentally significant consumption activity like household energy use is
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CONSUMPTION AS A PROBLEM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
multiply determined; that the influences are of many kinds, both direct
and indirect; that the many influences are interdependent, acting in
combinations rather than additively; that it will take many disciplines
working together to understand how they drive the phenomenon; and
that the influences act on different time scales, with some, like the de-
mand for heating and cooling, capable of changing in minutes, hours, and
days, while others, like those affecting building construction, have effects
that last for decades. In these respects, energy use is much like other
environmentally relevant human activities and choices (National Research
Council, 1992: Chapter 3~. Each of these choices and activities responds to
multiple influences, yet for each, the causes are amenable to scientific
study.
4. How can environmentally disruptive human activities be changed ?
From a policy perspective, this question provides a sufficient motive
for asking all the previous ones: if decision makers must contemplate
changing environmentally disruptive activities, they need to understand
the nature and causes of those activities. Knowing how to change envi-
ronmentally significant activity, however, requires more than an under-
standing of the causes. Those who would be influence agents need
enough knowledge about how these activities might be changed to select
effective options. Some knowledge already exists about the effects of
particular kinds of intervention from studies of the diffusion of techno-
logical innovation (for reviews of this literature see, e.g., Rogers, 1995;
Ruttan, 1996~; the effects of environmental regulation, monetary induce-
ments and penalties, and other incentive-based interventions (e.g., Baumol
and Oates, 1988; Cropper and Oates, 1992; Geller et al., 1982; Nichols,
1984; Tietenberg, 1985~; the effectiveness of information in promoting
proenvironmental behavior change (e.g., Katzev and Johnson, 1987;
Gardner and Stern, 1996~; the role of social movements in environmental
change (e.g., Brulle, 1996; Dunlap and Mertig, 1992~; and institutional
strategies for environmental management (e.g., Ostrom, 1990; North,
1994~. Much more work needs to be done, however, to develop these
insights further, to compare the effectiveness of different types of inter-
ventions against each other, and to understand the potential synergisms
that may arise from combining different types within a single, coordi-
nated intervention (e.g., Gardner and Stern, 1996:Chapter 7~.
PURPOSES AND STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
This book, though inspired by policy makers' concerns about how to
reduce "the environmental impacts of U.S. consumption," focuses on
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
building basic knowledge rather than directly on policy questions. Our
concern is with understanding which human activities are of major envi-
ronmental significance, what forces shape those activities, and what their
trends have been and might become in the absence of policy intervention.
This sort of understanding is essential for policy makers because it can
help them define the important policy issues, anticipate needs for inter-
vention, and identify appropriate targets for interventions. It is a large
task to build such understanding, and our modest purpose here is to
encourage progress in that direction. Consequently, we do not advocate
policy strategies for controlling the environmental impacts of consump-
tion or discuss the extensive literature on the effectiveness or social ac-
ceptability of policies that have been proposed or enacted to accomplish
that end.
Much work has already been done on some issues important to un-
derstanding environmentally significant consumption, and we do not at-
tempt to summarize it here. The relevant areas that are already well
developed or currently active include work on the effects of prices and
other economic signals (e.g., Baumol and Oates, 1988; Cropper and Oates,
1992; Nichols, 1984), on trends toward "dematerialization" and "decar-
bonization" in the economy (e.g., Herman et al., 1989; Nakicenovic, 1996;
Wernick et al., 1996), on the potential for shifting materials flows from a
linear pattern to a cyclic one that uses wastes as inputs to production (e.g.,
Allenby and Richards, 1994; Frosch, 1996; Socolow et al., 1994), on the
environmental impacts of international trade (e.g., Runge, 1995; Runge et
al., 1994), and on indicators that might allow systematic comparison of
the environmental impacts of different kinds of human activity (e.g., Fava,
1991; National Research Council, 1994; Lave et al., 1995; Wackernagel and
Rees, 1996~. This book touches on some of these areas but focuses prima-
rily on two other things: it tries to suggest the outlines of a scientific field,
"environmental impacts of consumption," that may someday bring to-
gether these areas of work as well as additional areas within a coherent
intellectual framework; and it presents illustrations of some of the other
kinds of research, not yet well developed, that may eventually make im-
portant contributions to that field.
The book is intended for people who want to improve understanding
of the human activities that constitute environmentally significant con-
sumption: scientists in fields that can build this understanding and the
organizations that might support their scientific work. It shows that, in
addition to the knowledge that is already being developed, there are
many critical questions that have barely begun to be addressed and, ac-
cordingly, that there are major opportunities to build useful knowledge.
We hope it captures some of the excitement of the workshop from which
it came, in which people from many separate intellectual fields began to
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CONSUMPTION AS A PROBLEM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
9
see their common interests, and that it encourages the exchange of ideas
necessary to build the needed understanding.
Scientific endeavors normally begin by adopting a working definition
of the phenomenon to be examined, but the field of consumption and the
environment has not yet made this step. As Paul Stern shows in Chapter
2, consumption is an ambiguous concept. It has precise and distinct mean-
ings in physics, economics, and ecology and somewhat less precise mean-
ings in sociology, but none of these corresponds to the usage in the phrase
"environmental impacts of consumption." Stern discusses two defini-
tions of consumption that might guide research on its environmental im-
pacts and offers one of them as preferable. His analysis suggests the
breadth of the field by noting a variety of open research questions that
require attention from the social and natural sciences.
Chapters 3 and 4 present brief reports, taken from presentations at
the workshop, that suggest some interesting research directions. The
reports in Chapter 3 address issues of measuring and tracking flows of
materials and energy that are affected by human consumption activities;
those in Chapter 4 concern the driving forces of environmentally signifi-
cant consumption. The reports indicate some promising directions for
research; in addition, each one includes numerous citations that can direct
an interested reader farther into the particular domain of study. We see
these reports as suggestive. They do not present a full menu of research
opportunities but only a list of hors d'oeuvres. We hope these reports
whet the appetites of researchers and research sponsors.
Chapter 5 discusses how to set research priorities. It proposes an
importance criterion for agenda setting: that top priority go to research
on aspects of consumption with major environmental effects. This crite-
rion suggests the strategy of identifying the most environmentally dis-
ruptive human activities and then searching to explain them and to ac-
count for how they affect the environment. The chapter examines this
strategy in some detail, noting how some of the reports in Chapters 3 and
4 exemplify its use. The chapter also discusses two other ways to identify
important research topics. One, which focuses on possible policy inter-
ventions, is more useful for policy analysis than for basic understanding
of consumption. The other begins with social phenomena and works
through to their environmental implications. Although this last strategy
can yield useful insights that might not come from a research program
that starts with environmental changes, it places a burden of proof on the
researcher to demonstrate that the environmental effects are important
and not just plausible or theoretical.
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
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198.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
significant consumption
