Environmentally Significant Consumption Research Directions (1997) / Chapter Skim
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2 TOWARD A WORKING DEFINITION OF CONSUMPTION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND POLICY
2 TOWARD A WORKING DEFINITION OF CONSUMPTION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND POLICY
Pages 12-25
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From page 12... ...
The directive stated that the United States and other developed countries must maintain an awareness of their disproportionate impacts on the global environment through consumption patterns that are at several times the level of developing countries. To effectively achieve the goal of marshalling an international response to population growth trends, it said that the United States must also demonstrate leadership by example in addressing the implications of these consumption patterns, with an aim toward reducing the negative global environmental impacts of consumption of goods and services in the United States.
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From page 13... ...
Treating the subject scientifically, however, requires a more precise definition of "consumption" that is acceptable across disciplines and is useful for analyzing the environmental impacts of human choices and actions. I discuss some specialized disciplinary meanings of consumption, the inadequate definition implicit in much recent discourse on the subject, and finally a working definition that I tentatively propose for use in environmental research and policy.
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From page 14... ...
All three processes have environmentally significant impacts, and production and distribution may be more environmentally disruptive than consumption. Certainly, production processes such as mining and agricultural tillage are responsible for significant pollution problems, and also significantly degrade natural resources (in more precise economic terms, they make resources increasingly costly to transform for productive purposes)
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From page 15... ...
In some American subcultures, one can increase status by building an all-solar house that conspicuously consumes money (for architectural design, solar panels, and so forth) but that may reduce environmental impact if it decreases fossil and nuclear energy consumption enough to compensate for the additional materials in the house.
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From page 16... ...
consumption and the environment: dumps filled with disposable products, plastics, and consumer packaging waste; freeways clogged with traffic that pollutes the air but barely moves; automobiles and appliances junked when they might have been repaired; tracts of large, single-family homes with few occupants, but centrally air conditioned and with heated or cooled swimming pools; advertisements for products that no one seemed to want a few years ago but that soon everyone will "need"; air-conditioned shopping malls surrounded by acres of asphalt; and trash-lined streets and highways. In some of these images, consumers appear as acquiring and disposing of things they want but do not necessarily need; in others, they are running on a treadmill, sacrificing time with their families and friends to work increasingly long hours for money to buy things they feel they need but do not really want.
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From page 17... ...
Assumption 3: The driving forces of anthropogenic environmental change, other than population growth, are economic growth and a set of forces acting on consumer "preferences." This assumption underlines the importance of research on the causes of growth in consumers' incomes. It also directs attention to such forces as individuals' values and worldviews as they concern material goods, social norms and interpersonal influences regarding material possessions, the socialization of materialist values or "consumer culture," and market-related forces affecting consumer behavior, including pricing and advertising of materials- and energy-intensive products.
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From page 18... ...
The first assumption, that most consumption is directly caused by individuals and households, is simply incorrect for the United States and other affluent countries. The vast majority of energy use, releases of water and air pollutants, and many other environmentally destructive activities in the United States results directly from organizational behavior rather than individual behavior -- specifically, from the acts of corporations and governments (Gardner and Stern, 1996; Allen, Chapter 3)
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From page 19... ...
There are effective policy strategies that do not directly target individuals and that, often by focusing on technology and institutions, accomplish desired goals more effectively and in more acceptable ways. For example, improving emissions control technology in automobiles, a policy directed mainly at manufacturers, did more to reduce urban air pollution than any politically practicable policy directed at households could have done.
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From page 20... ...
, resulting in a net environmental improvement. Also, resource depletion with its increasing economic and environmental costs may spur the development and adoption of more environmentally benign substitutes (e.g., passive solar building design)
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From page 21... ...
. Waste clean-up is undertaken to reduce the environmental impact of other economic activity, and some activities of economic producers can even reduce net consumption in the environmental sense.
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From page 22... ...
• Changes in household composition and patterns of life. Recent sociodemographic trends such as decreasing household size, the aging of populations, and increasing labor force participation among women of childbearing ages may have significant environmental implications.
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From page 23... ...
Many of these choices and activities are those of wealthy individuals and households, as the narrower definition of consumption presumes. But the broader definition may lead researchers in productive directions that might be missed if research looks mainly at "consumers." The broad definition may also be unsatisfying to some because it fails to point to policy goals for "reducing the negative global environmental impact of consumption of goods and services," that is, for achieving one of the central objectives of sustainable development.
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From page 24... ...
The definition directs research attention to human choices and actions that change biophysical systems but leaves open the question of which changes in which systems are most to be avoided. The definition emphasizes that environmental changes are more or less important depending on what people value.
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From page 25... ...
TOWARD A WORKING DEFINITION OF CONSUMPTION 25 Schor, J 1991 The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.
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