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OCR for page 73
4
Examining the Driving Forces
INTRODUCTION
Any informed effort to address the environmental impacts of con-
sumption must begin with an understanding of what causes, or drives,
environmentally important consumption activities. Economics has made
major contributions to understanding consumption by considering prices,
budgetary constraints on choice, the costs of information about alterna-
tive actions, the ability to externalize costs, and so forth. It has also
emphasized the fact that consumption and production are elements of a
dynamic system in which all the elements respond together to external
events, so that the environmental impacts of consumption are intimately
tied to those of production. These economic insights are essential for
understanding the dynamics of consumption.
Understanding environmentally significant consumption also re-
quires the use of concepts not normally included in economic analyses.
For example, economics normally treats preferences as exogenous to
analyses, presuming that during the time frame of interest, preferences
are constant. This assumption may not be reasonable when the analysis
concerns human responses to long-delayed environmental changes such
as in climate or the ozone layer, because the responses may occur over a
period of several decades. In conducting such analyses, it is important to
examine the possibility of change in preferences for at least two reasons.
One is that preferences often change on time scales of a human generation
or longer: it has been argued, for instance, that cohorts raised in an
73
OCR for page 74
74
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
environment of affluence have different values and personal and policy
preferences from cohorts raised with scarcity (Inglehart, 1990~. Another
reason to treat preferences as endogenous in environmental research is
that information about impending environmental threats may be the sort
of stimulus that causes people to reconsider their preferences. Thus, for
studies of consumption and the environment, it may be important to
consider processes such as preference construction and cultural change
that may mediate the effects of standard economic variables.
This chapter presents five brief reports from the workshop that exam-
ine driving forces of consumption other than those usually addressed in
economic analyses or that consider the relationships between economic
forces and other factors. As in Chapter 3, the reports raise some intrigu-
ing questions for research and, through their bibliographies, direct read-
ers to broader related literatures.
Loren Lutzenhiser's research examines residential energy use in
northern California. The analysis includes several physical and economic
explanatory variables typically used in this field, such as climate, dwell-
ing size and type, appliance ownership, and household size and income.
It also includes some factors not usually included in energy analysis, such
as race, ethnicity, and cultural assimilation among relatively recent immi-
grant populations. Lutzenhiser finds that after taking climate, housing
characteristics, household technology, and income into account, Hispanic
and Asian households use less energy than whites, that African-Ameri-
cans use more, and that the immigrant populations studied move toward
the white American pattern as a function of acculturation, reflected by the
language spoken in the household. The findings help address the ques-
tion of how adoption of an American lifestyle alters household energy use
and, through it, affects the environment. They suggest that immigrants
may adopt patterns of energy use that are typically American over a
generation or two.
The report by Thomas Dietz and Eugene Rosa uses a multivariate
analytic approach to examine the effects of two driving forces on an indi-
cator of environmental impact and reveal variations that can be attributed
to other forces. They analyze national-level data on carbon dioxide emis-
sions and estimate the effects of levels of population and affluence. They
find a nearly linear effect of population and an effect of affluence (GNP
per capita) that reaches a maximum at about U.S. $10,000 and then begins
to decline. When the effects of population and affluence are estimated by
regression, the residual variations cover more than a 20-fold range, prob-
ably attributable to national differences in technology, institutions, and
other factors. Further study of the residual variation is one approach to
clarifying the importance of driving forces other than population size and
economic activity.
OCR for page 75
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
75
Eugene Rosa's analysis distinguishes measures of gross economic ac-
tivity from other indicators of material well-being, analyzes the relation-
ships among these other measures, and considers how they relate to an
indicator of environmental change. He identifies four distinct composite
indicators of nonfinancial material well-being and finds that all the afflu-
ent economies studied continued to change montonically on these indica-
tors through 1985, even though in some of them the oil-market events of
the 1970s altered the direction of the trend in carbon emissions per capita.
He concludes that the transitions in these countries reflect a shift to more
service-based, postmodern economies, in which both gross domestic
product and nonmonetary indicators of welfare became less tightly
coupled to carbon emissions during that period. Rosa suggests that fur-
ther reductions in resource consumption can be made with only limited
impacts on welfare.
Richard Wilk's report considers the hypothesis that Western styles of
consumption have global environmental effects because people in devel-
oping countries emulate this consumption. Some scholars have inferred
that exposure to Western cultural influence, through such media as ex-
ported films and television programs, drives consumption patterns in
developing countries where per capita income is increasing. Such emula-
tion matters for environmental policy because if increasingly affluent
populations in developing countries mimic affluent Western lifestyles,
there would be very serious global environmental impacts. If they adopt
less resource-intensive and polluting styles of affluence, however, there
might be great environmental benefits. Wilk identifies several indicators
of emulation, notes their serious limitations to date, and presents his ten-
tative reading of the data: that Western-style consumption is not a single
package that consumers everywhere accept but, rather, that people of
increased means in developing countries may pursue a variety of con-
sumption aspirations and lifestyles. Despite Western mass media pen-
etration of developing countries, Wilk finds only weak evidence that
American middle-class consumer aspirations have been uniformly ac-
cepted. The question of whether there is emulation of the most environ-
mentally damaging types of Western-style consumption has barely begun
to be examined.
The report by Willett Kempton and Christopher Payne considers
major social transformations in human history and prehistory as influ-
ences on both consumption (of energy and materials) and quality of life.
They suggest that in the sweep of human history, increases in consump-
tion have been driven by grand transformations of social structures but
that these transformations, at least on some indicators such as health and
leisure time, have not been associated with monotonic increases in quality
of life. This analysis raises the question of whether forms of social organi
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76
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
cation might be adopted that provide an acceptable quality of life at much
lower levels of materials and energy consumption than now exist in the
industrialized world.
These five reports suggest some of the possibilities for investigating
the effects of social and cultural phenomena on environmentally relevant
consumption, either independently of standard economic variables or in
interaction with them. There are, of course, many other such investiga-
tions that could be conducted. In Chapter 5, we discuss some strategies
for setting priorities among the vast range of possible research questions
linking consumption and the environment.
REFERENCE
Inglehart, R.
lsso Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, N.J.
Press.
Princeton University
OCR for page 77
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
77
SOCIAL STRUCTURE, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY:
MODELING THE DRIVING FORCES OF
HOUSEHOLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Loren Lutzenhiser
This paper reviews some alternative conceptions of household en-
ergy consumption and uses an analysis of patterns of energy use in a
California sample to demonstrate the joint influence of social status, eth-
nicity, and material culture in the structuring of energy flows. These
findings suggest that conventional models of consumption obscure the
workings of sociotechnical systems, seriously limiting our ability to un-
derstand the dynamics of energy consumption. Implications for scientific
research and policy modeling, cross-cultural analysis, and environmental
justice are also considered.
SOCIAL CONSUMPTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Despite the current hiatus in public and policy concern about energy,
the environmental impacts of energy use are increasingly clear. In fact,
efforts to empirically examine, theorize, and model the dynamics and
consequences of societal energy use have been pursued for more than 20
years. But understanding energy consumption is a far from straightfor-
ward matter. Although it is fairly obvious that energy flows are pro-
duced and shaped by human action, this consumption only occurs via a
complex of fuel flows, energy-conversion technologies, and loosely
coupled economic marketing/regulatory systems. And, as energy is con-
sumed at many different end-use sites, and under fluctuating environ-
mental conditions, the flow is determined by a fairly complex interplay of
sociocultural, geographic, technological, and institutional factors. Because
we lack an overarching interdisciplinary approach to such human-envi-
ronment interactions (Stern 1993), efforts to understand this system have
too often been narrowly focused resulting in partial views of the system
and its environmental impacts.
The social sciences have produced a fairly rich body of work on the
role of energy and energy technology in society (e.g., see Cottrell, 1955;
Mazur and Rosa, 1974; White, 1975; Adams, 1975; Buttel, 1979; Duncan,
1978; Olsen, 1991; Humphrey and Buttel, 1982; see Rosa et al., 1988, and
Lutzenhiser, 1994, for reviews). A large literature also focuses on the
connections between social status and consumption in general (Veblen,
1899; Weber, 1978; Lynes, 1955; Packard, 1959; Douglas and Isherwood,
1979; Mason, 1981; Mukerji, 1983; Fussell, 1983; Bourdieu, 1984; Forty,
OCR for page 78
78
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
1986; Miller, 1987; McCracken, 1988; Otnes, 1988; Saunders, 1990; Warde,
1990; Burrows and Marsh, 1992), including the construction of status via
the stylized consumption of food, clothing, music, language, automo-
biles, housing, and appliances (Ewen, 1976, 1988; Cowan, 1989;
Featherstone, 1990, 1991; Gartman, 1991~. We know much less about how
technology-shaping processes work in the institutional environment-
e.g., how devices and machines come to have the energetic and stylistic
features that they do, and how producers and consumers interact in the
negotiation of design (Bilker et al., 1989; Bijker and Law, 1992~. And, with
a few exceptions (e.g., Uusitalo, 1983), little attention has been paid until
quite recently to the linkages between culture, consumption, and the natu-
ral environment [see Durning, 1992; Brown, 1989; Schnaiberg's (1991)
critique of Brown; Lutzenhiser and Hackett, 1993~.
The interdisciplinary literature concerned directly with the consump-
tion of energy suggests, however, that social structure and cultural prac-
tice are indeed central to the structuring of energy consumption
(Lutzenhiser, 1992a; Lutzenhiser and Hackett, 1993), for significant en-
ergy use differences are observed between income groups (Newman and
Day, 1975; Lacy, 1985; Skumatz, 1988), across life cycle stages (Frey and
LaBay, 1983), and among ethnic subcultures (Kohno, 1984; Throgmorton
and Bernard, 1986; Hackett and Lutzenhiser, 1991~. Conservation behav-
ior is also quite socially variable (Heberlein and Warriner, 1982; Dillman
et al., 1983; Stern et al., 1986; Schwartz and True, 1990; Hackett and
Lutzenhiser, l991~. Unfortunately, many of these studies have overlooked
important housing and technology differences between social groups-
"technical" variables that influence consumption.
Conventional energy policy models do little better, however, often
glossing over the sociocultural aspects of energy use and choosing in-
stead to treat "stocks" of buildings and equipment as the molar elements
of a thoroughly technical analysis. Although the weaknesses in such
approaches are well known (Stern, 1984, 1986; Stern and Aronson, 1984;
Archer et al., 1984; Cramer et al., 1985; Baumgartner and Midtunn, 1987;
Lutzenhiser,1992b, 1993, 1994), these models continue to dominate policy
discourse and the generation of energy system inputs for environmental
systems modeling.
This disconnect between approaches focused exclusively on either
the "social" or the "technical" aspects of energy consumption can, in fact,
be overcome through a fairly straightforward synthesis. The following
empirical case shows that consumption can, at once, be seen as shaped by
the social allocation of buildings and equipment with energetic character-
istics and by the cultural expression of energy-using behaviors.
OCR for page 79
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
A SOCIOTECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF
HOUSEHOLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION
79
The data used in the analysis are from a major survey of housing,
energy use, and household technology in northern California (California
Energy Commission, 1986~. Rather than consumption being homo-
genous as many of the simplest conventional models assume these
data show considerable variation in energy consumption across sample
households (Figure 4-1), with distinct differences in consumption by sub-
groups defined on the basis of both "social" (e.g., life cycle stage, wealth,
ethnicity) and " technical " (e.g., age, type, and size of housing and appli-
ances) characteristics (Table 4-1~. Because the social and technical aspects
of consumption are correlated in these sorts of data, a series of multivari-
ate models were estimated, one of which is reported in Table 4-2. This
sociotechnical model offers a good fit to the data and suggests that both
the behavior of social groups and their material conditions contribute to
the structuring of consumption in a variety of ways. A second-stage
analysis using regression estimates and subgroup characteristics shows
that various combinations of behavior, housing, and technology are re-
sponsible for shaping consumption quite differently across social groups
(Table 4-3~. Rates of input energy waste and carbon dioxide pollution
Households
500
400
300
200
100
0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175
mBtu
. , .
200 225 250 275 300 325 350 375 400
FIGURE 4-1 Annual Household Energy Consumption. Data from California
Energy Commission (1986~.
OCR for page 80
80
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
TABLE 4-1 Physical and Social Variation in Energy Consumption,
Northern California Households
Mean
consumption Cases
(mBtu) SD n (%)
Entire sample 129 (68)4127100
Building size (sq it)
<400 69 (43)1604
400-599 71 (51)3118
600-999 83 (40)87721
1,000-1,499 123 (49)121629
1,500-1,999 150 (52)88321
2,000-2,699 182 (63)48612
2,700-3,499 214 (91)1393
> 3,500 250 (149)551
Housing type
Single family detached 156 (65)235757
Multi-family 86 (48)177043
Year dwelling built
1979-84 112 (63)65116
1970-78 128 (69)90922
1960-69 138 (70)77119
1950-59 134 (64)73018
1940-49 124 (63)3769
pre-1940 116 (72)69017
Number of persons in household
1 78 (45)79621
2 127 (63)145439
3 144 (63)63017
4 160 (67)51114
5 165 (66)1975
> 6 175 (94)1183
Annual income (1986 dollars)
< $10,000 93 (48)63515
$10,000-19,999 106 (55)77119
$20,000-29,999 118 (58)77219
$30,000-39,999 131 (60)66616
$40,000-49,999 139 (62)45311
$50,000-75,000 157 (71)54613
> $75,000 187 (105)2847
OCR for page 81
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
TABLE 4-1 Continued
81
Mean
consumption
(mBtu) SD n
Cases
(%)
Race/ethnicity and language
spoken at home
White 130 (70) 3349 83
Black 119 (62) 154 4
Hispanic 117 (54) 143 4
Hispanic (Spanish) 95 (48) 124 3
Asian 110 (66) 138 3
Asian (other) 106 (54) 130 3
NOTE: SD = Standard deviation.
were also found to be socially variable (Table 4-4~. When conventional
approaches focus on "typical" households and amorphous stocks of hous-
ing, they fail to take these sorts of social variations in consumption into
account.
UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL NATURE OF
MATERIALS SYSTEMS
A fundamental reorientation of theory is needed. The material envi-
ronment can usefully be seen as an evolving social system in which social
status (accomplished through status-graded buildings, equipment, and
behavior) is a primary determinate of energy consumption, waste, and
pollution. In a system of status-graded lifestyles, volumes of energy flow
provide rough measures of social standing the poor being excluded from
all but modest forms of consumption, the middle classes sustained by
consumption centered largely in housing and technologies, and the
wealthy empowered in a variety of ways by high levels of energy flow.
Rather than the amorphous housing stock assumed in energy analysis,
occupied structures actually compose an ordered artificial environment,
elaborated over time, its present form reflecting the realities of topogra-
phy and climate; historical access to materials; the costs of land, labor, and
energy availability (a mirror of past political economy); as well as past
technical knowledge and cultural preference.
The built environment is a physical accretion of the products of
sociotechnical change literally embodying historical social arrangements
(e.g., family size and class structure) in built forms forms to which
present occupants must behaviorally adapt. In treating buildings and
OCR for page 82
82
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
TABLE 4-2 Regression of Annual Energy Consumption on Social,
Housing, Technology, and Environmental Variables
Energy Consumption (mBtu)
b
SE
p
Household characteristics
N of children <18 yr (0-8)7.5 (o.g) a
N of adults (0-11)6.8 (o.g) a
African-American14.4 (4.6) a
Hispanic-English (spoken at home)-2.8 (4.6)
Hispanic-Spanish-12.3 (5.1) b
Asian-English-12.7 (4.9) b
Asian-other-26.7 (5.1) a
<$15,0004 4 (2.2) c
$15,000-34,999-1.4 (2.4)
>$50,00015.0 (2.5) a
Personts) at home during day7.0 (1.8) a
Housing characteristics
Dwelling size (1,000 sq ft)27.6 (1.0) a
Multi-family unit (attached)-17.8 (2.3) a
Built after 1979 (energy building codes)-9.7 (2.6) a
Building energy efficiency scale (1-6)-1.7 (0.6) b
Air conditioning13.3 (2.4) a
Solar water heating-2.3 (4.9)
Household technology
Clothes washer7.9 (3.6) c
Clothes dryer12.5 (3.3) a
Dishwasher10.3 (2.0) a
Frost-free refrigerator9.4 (2.2) a
2+ refrigerators20.2 (2.4) a
Freezer12.4 (2.0) a
Other appliances to 7)d2.4 (0.7) a
Pool, hot tub, or spa36.1 (3.5) a
Environment
CEC1_3.5 t4.0'
CEC2-8.0 (3.0) b
CEC4-0.9 (2.9)
CEC5-3.7 (3.3)
(Intercept)22.0 (5.5)
NOTE: b = slope of regression line, signifying mBtu consumed per unit of the independent
variable; SE = standard error of b; CEC = dummy variable signifying climatic regions; mBtu
= million British thermal units.
ap < .001; bp < .01; cp < .05; dColor TV, computer, stereo, black and white television set,
microwave, video, humidifier.
OCR for page 83
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
83
technologies as the primary "actors" in society-environment relations,
conventional models claim a fictive autonomy for physical objects di-
vorcing them from the social structures and cultural processes within
which they are embedded and from which they necessarily derive. When
used to inform policy, these approaches also import biases masking
important social differences in material conditions and behavior.
IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY ANALYSIS
A number of basic scientific and policy research implications follow
from these findings. A considerable amount of fruitful work might be
done, for example, in examining empirical patterns of consumption and
disaggregating their sources through time across the United States. Link-
ages between energy-use patterns and the patterned consumption of other
goods and services (automobiles, food, entertainment, travel, etc.) might
also be explored. And, the influences of a wider range of lifestyle orienta-
tions than can be captured by simple demographic categories should also
be examined.
Studies of consumption that compare U.S. patterns with those found
elsewhere in the industrialized world would also be useful. These studies
could extend to the consumption of energy "embodied" in goods and
services (a significant fraction of overall consumption). It would also be
valuable to inventory and compare other resource flows (water, food,
paper, metal, plastic, packaging) and waste flows (garbage, sewage, at-
mospheric emissions). And, a good deal of attention is overdue to the
social patterning of transportation and gasoline consumption a signifi-
cant source of energy demand and environmental pollution.
Policy implications also follow from the social variation in consump-
tion, the persistence of some low-energy-use cultural patterns in the midst
of affluence, and the failure of conventional models to capture these varia-
tions. Policy-oriented research might focus on how conventional model-
ing systems operate and persist, and how cultural and institutional fac-
tors might be introduced to energy-policy modeling. Ethnographic work
on cultural differences in consumption could shed light on the roots of
persistence of low consumption levels and might suggest how durable
and long-lived those patterns might be. Studies of "social traps" in hous-
ing and technology both for the poor and the relatively more affluent-
might reveal policy openings and long-term problems with consumption
rooted in settlement patterns and social institutions (e.g. property-owner-
ship conventions, taxation, inheritance, and lending systems). The impli-
cations for equity and community that follow from a more social model of
built environment and energy use are also significant in a more populous,
competitive, and highly engineered future. The growth of consumption
OCR for page 113
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
113
(3) No single academic discipline has adequate tools or data for study-
ing cross-cultural consumer behavior.
(4) The development of consumer culture in developing countries is
following a different trajectory from the historical path of the West.
(5) There is still every reason to think that consumption will increase
as incomes rise, but we cannot yet predict how that increase will be ap-
portioned to various goods or sectors.
(6) Simple emulation remains an empirically weak model for predic-
tion.
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116
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY
DETERMINANTS OF CONSUMPTION
Willett Kempton and Christopher Payne
In the workshop paper summarized here (see Kempton and Payne,
forthcoming, for the complete version), we draw data from a wide range
of human societies to ask: What can cross-cultural comparisons teach us
about the relationship between consumption and quality of life? We
argue that the dependence of quality of life on consumption is not mono-
tonic and is both weaker and more complex than is often assumed.
We begin by addressing two myths that underlie much thinking about
consumption. The first myth is that quality of life generally increases
with higher consumption levels that is, more consumption of goods and
services increases the quality of life. This relationship is believed to hold
across societies and across social strata within any society. Parts of it are
parodied in the tee-shirt slogan "He who dies with the most toys wins."
The second myth is that society evolves and changes to improve the lot of
individuals. If our society previously had one form of government, kin-
ship system, economy, or whatever and another form replaces it, the
societal change improves the quality of life of members of the changed
society. We call these the "most toys" myth and the "social evolution for
individual benefit" myth. They are addressed at several points here.
We begin by considering the types of societies within which biologi-
cally modern humans evolved. These societies are small, organized
around family relationships, and subsist by hunting and gathering. Both
mobility and their social organization limit consumption. Mobile societ-
ies shift residences, whether on a predictable yearly cycle based upon
seasonal cycles of wild crops and game or moving more opportunistically
to follow herds, water, or areas not yet exhausted of plant resources.
Individuals in these societies limit consumption simply via the limit on
inventories you can't possess more than you can carry. Socially, hunting
and gathering societies are organized around family relationships and are
egalitarian.
We also briefly examine a subsequent form of subsistence, swidden
agriculture. This pattern relies on cutting and burning forest, farming the
plot for one or a few years, and abandoning it for decades to lie fallow and
regrow. As societies moved from hunting and gathering to swidden
agriculture, and then to fixed agriculture, changes in social and political
organization accompanied these production and settlement changes.
Among other things, these changes increase status differentiation. With
larger populations in settlements and social differentiation comes the need
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EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
117
for display of status by means of prestige goods. Subsequently in social
evolution, material consumption is driven partially by status competi-
tion. Remarkably, the consumption literature rarely distinguishes con-
sumption for social-status display from sustenance, enjoyment, or other
(sometimes overlapping) motivations for consumption. Social status con-
sumption is a zero-sum game, which drives competing individuals or
groups toward higher consumption ending not with "need satisfaction"
but only with exhaustion of an individual's resources.
Acting alone, each individual competing for status seeks to make the
best of his or her position. But satisfaction of these individual preferences
itself alters the situation that faces others seeking to satisfy similar wants.
A round of transactions to act out personal wants of this kind therefore
leaves each individual with a worse bargain than was reckoned on when
the transaction was undertaken, because the sum of such acts does not
correspondingly improve the position of all individuals taken together.
There is an "adding-up" problem (Hirsch, 1976~.
LEVELS OF CONSUMPTION
Next we address relative levels of consumption across societies. We
compare consumption of the main two throughputs of environmental
interest, mass and energy, and further divide mass throughputs into re-
cycled and nonrecycled categories. Energy use has been thoroughly stud-
ied in a number of indigenous societies. Total mass throughputs of indig-
enous societies have not been studied explicitly, but we can make
estimates from existing ethnographic data. The bulk of the mass used by
indigenous peoples is biodegradable and recycled by biological processes.
Wood, hide, reed or bamboo, foodstuffs, and such, when discarded, de-
grade and feed biological cycles. These societies also create a one-way
(nonrecycled) flow of materials for stone tools, such as chert, flint, and
obsidian. Ceramic vessels can survive 10,000 years before reintegration
into the soil, so we consider them nonrecycled as well.
Table 4-6 shows four types of societies, with estimates for energy,
nonrecycled material, and recycled materials. Note that hunter-gatherers
function at two orders of magnitude less energy and one order of magni-
tude less materials than the United States. Swiddeners (based on
Beckerman, 1976) use about the same level of materials as does the United
States but differ from the United States in that over 99 percent of the
materials are recycled. The supposedly modern concept of "sus-
tainability" has been achieved in most hunting-gathering and swidden
agricultural societies, as evidenced by the fact that many of these societies
can be shown to have run their systems of materials and energy through-
put in the same locations for millennia. These societies modify their
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118
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
TABLE 4-6 A Rough Quantitative Comparison of Energy and Materials
Use Across Diverse Types of Societies
Nonrecycled
Energy Materials Recycled Materials
(kW/ capita) (kg/ capita / day) (kg/ capita / day)
Hunting and gathering 0.11 0.035 3.6
Swidden horticulture 0.25 0.15 50-100
Agriculture in a 1-3 0.5 4-50
developing country
U.S.A. 11 56 2.7
NOTE: The full paper explains how the quantities were calculated or estimated.
environments initially especially swiddeners but then continue in the
same location for very long periods without continuing environmental
degradation. Their long-term durability within the ecosystem is not
matched by durability in contact with the global political economic sys-
tem upon this contact they are quickly absorbed into the nonsustainable
world economy.
HOW CAN ONE COMPARE QUALITY OF LIFE?
Low-consumption societies are not very relevant if the life they live is
"nasty, brutish and short" [Hobbes, 1968~1651~:186~. Comparing quality
of life across societies is fraught with problems, but anthropologists have
developed some measures. To summarize briefly, our paper suggests
potential candidates such as nutrition, health, life-span, work time vs.
leisure time, in- vs. out-migration ("revealed preference" for a given soci-
ety), and relative perceived quality of life by ethnographers.
Of course, this is not a complete list of all the measures we would like
to have. What the above measures have to recommend them is that they
are in available data ethnographic, archaeological, human biological, or
paleoarchaeological records. When objective measures are applied to
compare the quality of life across widely divergent societies, the results
are surprising. We concentrate here on work time and health; other mea-
sures are covered in Kempton and Payne (forthcoming).
RESULTS OF COMPARISON
Regarding health measures, studies of skeletal remains show that
health declined not improved as might be expected after transitions
from hunting-gathering to early agriculture, then from early agriculture
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EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
119
to archaic states. Decreases in health occurred due to the greatly reduced
range of plant species eaten, social stratification resulting in separation of
decision makers from the bulk of the population, and high population
densities leading to infectious disease (Diamond, 1987~. Health did not
improve markedly until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a re-
sult of public health measures in the cities and the advent of modern
antibiotics. Life-span is longer in industrialized societies than in any of
the indigenous societies we discuss.
One component of the "most toys" myth is that the devices we con-
sume reduce our work time i.e., that life is easier today than in earlier
historical periods or in technologically primitive societies. Regarding
earlier historical periods, Juliet Schor has challenged the myth of less
work in the modern era. She takes the comparison back to medieval time
(Schor, 1991), finding a large increase in work time during the industrial
revolution and a decline back to medieval levels during the twentieth
century. We feel that the work-time comparison gets more interesting
when extended to indigenous peoples. Several sources demonstrate that
sustenance requires less work in primitive societies than in our own.
In one study of indigenous people, Johnson (1978), compares middle-
class France with the Machiguenga, a horticultural group in the Peruvian
rain forest, another society autonomous from the global economy. The
middle-class French had 10 hours of free time per day, and the Amazo-
nian people had 14 hours of free time per day; free time in each case
included about 8 hours of sleep. Qualitatively, Johnson made parallel
observations about his own time sense while living there: "[In] their
communities . . . I sense a definite decrease in time pressure . . . when I
return home [to the United States] I am conscious of the pressure and
sense of hurry building up to its former level" (1978:53~. Other studies of
time required for subsistence are reported in Sahlins (1972~. Hunting-
gathering societies often require only 3-4 hours of work to provide an
ample and varied diet. In sum, hunter-gatherers and swidden agricultur-
alists work less and have more leisure than citizens of industrialized soci-
eties. Other studies of contemporary indigenous peoples being drawn
into the market economy similarly demonstrate the forces that lead to
incorporation into market-based, higher-consumption lifestyles. The at-
traction at time of entry occurs despite eventual degradation in the incor-
porated peoples' quality of life (e.g., Barlett and Brown 1985; Bodley,
1990~.
To briefly consider urban-industrial society, many authors argue that
many of the historical developments of the past century have been incon-
sistent with a higher quality of life for individuals. Historians like Wiebe
(1967), Hughes (1989), and Marcus and Segal (1989) have traced the rise of
the technological society during the twentieth century and identified its
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
defining focus to be the growth of large-scale organizational systems.
Organizational systems can be defined as operational structures that pro-
vide their members with efficient means of achieving given ends [com-
pare the administrative theories of Simon (1957) and the economic theo-
ries of Galbraith (1967~.
Social critics such as Mumford (1934, 1967, 1970) and Ellul (1964)
have argued that these organizational goals result in isolated, dehuman-
ized individuals, while benefiting the organization itself. Furthermore,
organizational theorists have argued that large-scale organizations pre-
vent individuals from developing fully on a psychological level. Draw-
ing heavily on the work of psychologists such as lung and Marcuse,
Denhardt (1981) has argued that there is a fundamental tension between
the individual and collective psyches. This presents a problem of inte-
grating the individual and collective psyches into a self-actualized whole.
In this view, the development of organizational systems has led to a col-
lective psyche that values certain aspects of the human psyche (rational-
ity, instrumentality, etc.) at the expense of others (emotion, expression,
etc). The repression of these emotive values hampers individual develop-
ment. Because of the structure of organizations, therefore, social and
individual development is inhibited.
The perspectives of these authors suggest that organizations have
become autonomous actors in our society, furthering their own aims
rather than human welfare. When people believe that the efficient pro-
duction of goods is the means for improving their quality of life, this
pursuit makes sense. As people come to recognize the destructive charac-
teristics of the material lifestyle and of the systems that support it, they
see organizations as, in many respects, fulfilling organizational aims to
the detriment of human individuals. The aspects of life that define us as
human expressive, creative, unique are those aspects that are in con-
flict with the needs of organizational structures for efficient operation. It
is, finally, organizational operations that are supported by the myth of
consumption.
CONCLUSION
Obviously, we do not advocate abandoning fixed communities, agri-
culture, and modern technology, a change impossible at current world
population levels. Rather, we wish to list the following observations from
the data outlined here and explored more in the full paper:
(1) Most early societies had consumption levels several orders of
magnitude smaller than industrial societies today. However, some indig-
enous societies had very high levels of per capita materials consumption,
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EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES
121
similar in magnitude to the United States today but with virtually all in
materials promptly recycled by the biosphere.
(2) By objective indicators other than life-span, the quality of life in
some ultra-low-consumption societies seems rather high higher than
the societies they next evolved into, and by many indicators higher than
ours today.
(3) Major social transitions can occur if they provide benefits to deci-
sion-making elites and greater "fitness" at the societal level (e.g., military
advantage or rapid growth and spread of the sociopolitical system).
(4) Increasing the quality of life of the broad masses of individuals is
not a criterion by which organizations survive, nor has it been a force
determining the direction of social evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to fill Neitzel for major conceptual, literature, and
reference suggestions. Steven Beckerman and Thomas Rocek provided
important data. Abigail lahiel, Faith Mitchell, and various participants at
the National Research Council workshop provided helpful comments on
the argument and logic of drafts of this paper. None of these commenta-
tors and contributors are responsible for its content.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
significant consumption
