ANALYSIS
Consumption and environment: some conceptual issues
Thomas Princen *
Workshop on Consumption and En6ironment,School of Natural Resources and En6ironment,The Uni6ersity of Michigan, Ann Arbor,MI48109-1115,USA
Received 20 July 1998; received in revised form 1 February 1999; accepted 4 February 1999
Abstract
Consumption ranks with population and technology as a major driver of environmental change and yet researchers and policymakers have paid it scant attention. When the topic is addressed, its conceptual foundations are either taken as self-evident or are conflated with production, overall economic activity, materialism, maldistribution, population or technology. The risk is to adopt the latest buzzword in the environmental debate, stretch the concept to encompass all conceivable concerns, and forfeit any advantage — for analysis or for behavior change — that may accrue to a new perspective on environmental problems. Consumption must be distinguished conceptually from other approaches to environmental problems. One approach is to work within the consumption – production dichotomy, examining not just purchasing but product use and non-purchase decisions. A second approach, one that challenges the prevailing dichotomy and its propensity to relegate consumption to a black box, is to treat all resource use as consuming, that is, ‘using up’, and ask what risks are entailed. Consumption can then be seen as material provisioning where risks increase with increasing distance from the resource; as background, misconsumption, or overconsumption depending on the social concern raised; or as a chain of decisions that compel the behaviors of restraint and resistance among ‘producers’. Pursuing the consumption and environment topic engenders resistance among a wide range of actors for reasons that are personal, analytic, and policy related. Nevertheless, the topic appears to have the potential of helping analysts and others transcend conventional approaches to excess throughput. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Consumption; Environment; Policy
www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon
1. Introduction
On a per capita basis, humans, especially those in the Northern industrialized countries and those
in capital cities of the Southern countries, are consuming more resources than the planet can regenerate, and filling waste sinks at a more rapid rate than the planet can assimilate. Documenta-tion for this premise is abundant (e.g. World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987; Turner et al., 1990; OCED, 1995; Postel et
* Tel.: +1-734-647-9227; fax:+1-734-936-2195.
E-mail address:[email protected] (T. Princen)
al., 1996; The Royal Society of London and the United States National Academy of Sciences, 1997; World Resources Institute, 1998). The fact that, for example, energy in some countries is used more efficiently than 20 years ago and that populations have stabilized in some places does not negate the premise. Aggregate consumption of energy continues to increase, suggesting that con-sumption as a research topic, let alone a target of public and private policy, is critical. Consumption or, more precisely, overconsumption, ranks with population and technology as a major driver of global environmental change. Consequently, in this article I take overconsumption as given.1
If consumption is so important from both a research and policy perspective, what is remark-able is the scant attention paid it by researchers and policymakers.2This neglect can be attributed
either to simple ignorance and the fact that im-pacts are diffuse or distanced and thus not dis-cernible to individuals or countries. Or the neglect can be attributed to several prevailing beliefs. One is that the world has seen several centuries of ever-increasing wealth, attributed in large part to human ingenuity. This belief suggests that, be-cause such ingenuity has no limits, there is no reason why the increase in wealth should have limits. Technologies have solved problems in ways totally unimaginable in the past. As new problems arise and the demand for solutions increase, new technologies will emerge, as they always have.
A second common belief is that, while work may be onerous, consumption is pleasurable. Consumption is good and more is always better.
This belief has a significant, yet rather recent, history (Leach, 1993, pp. 231 – 244). For the great bulk of human experience, the problem of greatest concern was underproduction. When that was largely eliminated with rapid industrialization in the 19th century, the problem shifted. In the US there was a widespread fear that demand was insufficient to absorb the productive capacity of the country. At risk were the idling of heavily capitalized industrial plants and equipment with large debt loads, millions of jobs, and the great-ness of the US as a world power. In short, the problem had become o6erproduction and, its
corollary,underconsumption. Economists, business people, religious leaders and policy makers worked together to stimulate consumption. By developing new concepts (e.g. utility, insatiability) and by emphasizing some aspects of human be-havior (e.g. the need for acceptance and status through material accumulation) they stimulated consumption in part by construing material con-sumption as the primary source of satisfaction where more is always better. And in part, they did so by construing consumption as a patriotic duty, a refrain that is still heard in the US, especially around holiday shopping time when sales are down.3
A comprehensive research agenda on consump-tion and environment must address these beliefs and concepts. It must show how they may have been perfectly sensible, indeed, civic and patriotic,
when overproduction and underconsumption
were pervasive problems and when natural re-source abundance could be reasonably assumed. A research agenda on overconsumption, there-fore, must describe the biophysical trends and categorize contemporary beliefs and practices that perpetuate those trends. But it must also askwhat
1I also take underconsumption as a given. That is, at least
a billion people have too little food, clothing, and shelter. But in this paper I address the overconsumption of the billion or so who consume far more than their basic needs and, it is reasonable to assume, contribute directly or indirectly to the underconsumption of the impoverished billion. For documen-tation of one such pattern of connected over- and undercon-sumption, see Mitchell (1996).
2There are some notable exceptions in the last few years,
especially in Europe. See, e.g. the projects at Lancaster Uni-versity ([email protected]) and University of Groningen ([email protected]); also, projects at Indi-ana University ([email protected]) and the University of Michigan ([email protected]).
3Consumption as a duty is also heard among financial
distinguishes a consumption approach to en6iron
-mental problems from other approaches. It must conceptualize the problem, separate consumption from other problems and show how a consump-tion perspective raises new quesconsump-tions — analytic and policy oriented — and, ideally, generates new insights into environmental and related issues. This article deals with the latter — conceptualizing a consumption and environment perspective.
Before proceeding, a methodological note is in order. A research agenda can be set either by adapting an existing framework to a newly iden-tified social problem or it can specify the problem first and then build concepts to fit. I opt primarily for the latter on the assumption that few existing frameworks of social or natural analysis are ori-ented to the problem of excessive material throughput of one species. What is more, as I will show, employing an existing framework risks con-cept stretching, fitting the problem to concon-cepts that were designed for a different purpose. For example, it is tempting to appropriate consumer theory in microeconomics as a basis of a con-sumption and environment agenda. One would begin by defining consumption as the purchasing of goods and services in the marketplace. Envi-ronmental impacts would be assessed and added to production impacts to estimate the total mar-ket failure of a purchased good. When the pur-pose of conventional economic analysis is to explain market behavior and prescribe corrections to enhance efficiencies, this may indeed be use-ful — that is, useuse-ful to the pre-existing objectives of microeconomic analysis. But when the purpose is to explain how consumption affects the envi-ronment, how it relates to ecologically excessive throughput, then marketplace purchasing is only one dimension of consumption. Other dimensions such as product use and non-market acquisition are at least as important and yet will be down played, if not completely ignored.
In this article, then, I distinguish the consump-tion issue from other ‘big issues’ by first arguing that the consumption problem is not the problem of production, overall human or economic activ-ity, equactiv-ity, technology, or population. I then ar-gue that, in pursuing the consumption and environment topic, researchers must choose either
to adopt the production – consumption dichotomy or to build an alternative framework. On the first count, I note several ways to expand existing research agendas. On the second, I posit three means of defining consumption as ‘using up’ ma-terial, energy, and other things of human value. I finish by noting problems in pursuing such re-search, showing why actors in all contexts tend to ignore or dismiss the topic. Along the way, I explore ways of setting boundaries on the agenda. Boundary setting is critical because a consump-tion agenda, like a sustainable development or a population or a peace agenda, can easily be stretched by analysts and practitioners alike to encompass all imaginable concerns. The effect, as these other agendas have experienced, is to dilute the research, to lose focus, and, most egregiously, to simply re-label old problems and old solutions. Also, I should stress that my purpose is not to extensively survey and critique existing literature, nor is it to generate a list of topical issues for consumption applications. Rather, my aim is to reason out some of the fundamental conceptual and boundary questions. My experience in pursu-ing the topic of consumption and the environment is that, to the extent the question is addressed, these fundamentals are commonly skirted.
2. The consumption problem, or, the problem of specifying the consumption problem
On the face of it, the consumption and environ-ment problem is straightforward. Humans are using material and energy at unprecedented levels threatening global climate, biodiversity, soil fertil-ity and a host of other environmental factors. With growing affluence in many parts of the world, the trends are only increasing. At the same time, the consumption problem conjures up im-ages of excess: shopping binges, gas guzzling
vehi-cles, luxury spending, energy intensive
conveniences, and throwaway products. And for some, the environmental impacts of overcon-sumption are yet another sign of moral decay brought on by material self-indulgence.
not call it just that, resource use? Or if it is primarily a problem of economic activity why not call it, say, economic output and its externalities? Or might the consumption problem simply relate to what consumers do, that is, purchase and use goods and services? If so, humans have engaged in mutually beneficial exchange throughout his-tory. If it is that basic, why is such activity now a problem? Are there some kinds of consumption that are good, or natural or acceptable, and oth-ers not? Or is it the overall level of consumption and, if so, how is that different from economic output?
There is no resolution, let alone systematic at-tention, to such questions in the literature. The term is taken as self-evident and is rarely defined. These questions reveal, in fact, the considerable ambiguity if not confusion in contemporary usage. In this section I identify four common usages and note their shortcomings.
One common usage is to equate consumption with overall material or economic activity. In an article inScience, biologist Norman Myers draws on Stern et al. (1997) to define consumption as ‘human transformations of material and energy’ (Myers, 1997, p. 54). Such consumption is a prob-lem when it ‘‘makes materials or energy less avail-able for future use and... threatens human health, welfare, or other things people value’’ (1997, p. 54). Substituting economic acti6ity or even
con-sumption’s apparent polar opposite, production, for the word consumptionin this definition would render an equally meaningful statement. Or one could substitute any other species for human and get a similar result. What is more, in the human context, this definition could just as readily be for ‘the environmental problem’. In a rejoinder to Myers in the same article, economists Vincent and Panayotou define consumption as that which ‘‘spans the full range of goods and services that contribute to human well being ’’ (Myers, 1997, p. 53). A synonym for lay people and policymakers might be an ‘economy’ or, maybe, all aspects of an economy that people desire. On the question of whether there is a problem of excess consumption, Myers is diametrically opposed to Vincent and Panayotou. But the two sets of authors share the proclivity to take an extremely broad view of
consumption — human transformations or well being — a view that can be stretched to include just about anything. As transformation, consump-tion is equivalent to all human material activity. As well being, it is everything that is good for humans. These usages allow biologists and others to re-work the limits-to-growth arguments under the rubric of consumption and economists to deny there is a consumption problem except for full-cost pricing.
None of these authors shows what is distinctive about consumption, as opposed to production, income, or overall economic or material activity. And none show how consuming behavior leads to environmental harm. Myers states that rich hu-mans are consuming excessively and wastefully and that aggregate levels are driving global warm-ing, pollution, and other environmental problems. Once again, substituting the term producing for
opposed to a production perspective (see below) or, say, an income or industrialization or even population perspective, offers new insights into environmental problems. Most significantly, nei-ther ties consumption patterns to biophysical pro-cesses. Myers in effect says that all economic activity (or at least that conducted by the wealthy few) destroys the environment. Vincent and Panayotou say consumers do not destroy the en-vironment, producers do (or producers in dis-torted markets do).
In the book, En6ironmentally Significant Con
-sumption (1997), arguably the most thoroughly reasoned analytic treatment to date on the con-sumption and environment problem, psychologist Paul Stern and his colleagues do show how some consumption patterns lead to environmental im-pacts. For example, motor vehicle travel can be disaggregated to show how carbon emissions vary over time and among Northern countries. But in some of the work in this collection, consumption is individual and household purchasing, in others it is energy and material flows, and in still others it is economic activity. By defining consumption as human transformations, the authors not only employ the term variously, they readily slide into the broad research agenda known as human di-mensions of global change. In fact, in the book’s conclusion, the authors barely mention consump-tion, instead focussing almost exclusively on ‘‘the causes of significant anthropogenic environmental changes’’ (p. 136), a critical agenda to be sure, but not distinctively consumption.
The central weakness of this and related ap-proaches may derive from the apparent intended audience, governmental policy makers, primarily those at the federal level. InEn6ironmentally Sig
-nificant Consumption, a brief reference to a pur-portedly successful example of consumption management is revealing. In critiquing a popular usage of consumption that targets individuals, not organizations, Stern cites automobile emissions control technology as a ‘politically practicable policy’ and then argues that ‘‘a broader definition of consumption might help identify such strategies and allow analysis of how much they can accom-plish’’ (p. 19). As I will argue further below, such policies are best seen as consistent with the
pre-vailing perspective on economic and environmen-tal problems, namely, the production perspective. Production-oriented policies may be politically ex-pedient and they may reduce the intended envi-ronmental impact, but they do not fundamentally change the problem, in this case, automobile use and its myriad environmental consequences. Rather, they tend to displace the problem or create new problems.
A second common usage is to equate consump-tion with materialism. Critical and religious
stud-ies have a longstanding history examining
changing patterns of consumption in modern soci-eties in the context of materialism, alienation in the work place, cultural imperialism, gender dis-crimination, and personal dissatisfaction (e.g. Sci-tovsky, 1976/1992; Rappoport, 1994; Richins, 1994; Miller, 1995; Schor, 1995; Agarwal, 1996; Ger and Belk, 1996; Ahuvia and Wong, 1997; Ger, 1997; Wilk, 1998). With the rise of environ-mental concerns, these critiques have expanded to include the environment. What is more, social critics and environmental analysts and activists alike have tended to appropriate each other’s findings. Anthropologists can not only denounce the rise in materialist values among traditional peoples, but show that forests are despoiled in the process. Environmentalists can not only argue that biophysical conditions limit overall consump-tion, but that personal well-being does not im-prove with ever-increasing convenience and material indulgence. The mutual crossover of these two lines of analysis and prescription may enhance the agenda of each but it does not consti-tute a focussed research agenda on the consump-tion – environment interface. A consumpconsump-tion and environment agenda is useful to the extent it generates new questions and insights which is unlikely when one field merely appropriates issues from another field to buttress a pre-existing framework or prescription.
produces 70% of the world’s goods. To frame the North – South discrepancy as a consumption problem is to imply excess or inequity. If it is excess, then the analyst must specify what exactly is excessive — any material use beyond basic hu-man needs? Anything beyond the society’s aver-age? Anything beyond comparable societies’ average? Such questions lead one into a morass of competing claims for the moral high ground in lifestyle and individual and collective choice. Res-olution is extremely unlikely. If excess is anything that has environmental impact, then all material use is indicted, production and consumption, hu-man and non-huhu-man. If it is only that which is harmful then it begs precisely the key question — what is harmful? Answering this question — that is, what is harmful about consumption as opposed to production or overall economic activity or material provisioning generally — begins to nar-row the agenda. Research must show how con-suming behavior itself is harmful. It should show how the distribution of harms is distinctively tied to consumption patterns, not to, say, investment, lending, trade or technological patterns, all of which have distinctive research agendas.
If the problem is one of inequity, no analytic advantage is gained by calling it consumption. Adding the environment and calling the problem consumption only muddles the longstanding de-bates of North and South, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, to include environmental inequities. These problems are real and serious, but, a priori, there is no reason why consumption per se should be identified as the problem. Access to resources, control of decision making, and ability to resist external intrusions are closer to the problem and agendas are devel-oped in politics, community development, civil society, and the like.
A fourth usage is to conflate consumption with population or technology issues. One tendency is to label what is truly a consumption problem as a population problem. For example, from 1960 to 1990 in the US state of Michigan the amount of land converted to residential and commercial use increased 76% (Wilkins, 1997, p. 7). A common reason given is that more and more people need housing and the evidence is their willingness to
pay for lots and houses in the countryside. The fact, however, is that in the same time period, Michigan’s population increased only 13%. The problem is not primarily a population problem but, indeed, a consumption problem, using up farmland when other residential space is available. Freshwater usage is similar. According to a United Nations report, worldwide water usage this century has been increasing more than twice as fast as population (Lewis, 1997).
In general, the population problem is easily construed as a consumption problem because more individuals obviously consume more, all else equal. The consumption problem arises, however, when all else is not equal, when, regardless of population changes, demand on ecosystem ser-vices increases. If China’s population increases and everyone continues to (mostly) rely on pedal power for everyday transportation, the increase in demand for bicycle tyres is part of the population problem. But if China’s population increases or if it stays the same and people shift to automobiles, creating increased demand for car tyres, fossil fuels, and roads, it is a consumption problem.
The problem of consumption also tends to be conflated with technological issues and manage-ment. If people buy a product that is produced with more pollution than an alternative product, the problem is primarily one of production. It can only be a consumption problem if, for example, the consumer has useful information about the life cycle of the product, prices and quality are equivalent, and the consumer still buys the more environmentally harmful product. These condi-tions stimulate important research questions about the distribution of impacts of consumption patterns — e.g. who really pays for gas guzzling private automobiles in the US.
exceeds the regenerative capacity of the fishery, and why fishers whose livelihoods depend on the fishery are responding more to market signals than to ecological signals. I return to this point in the next section.
In sum, when common usages of consumption are explored in some depth, the concept of con-sumption becomes slippery and the utility of their applications doubtful. Conflating consumption with overall economic activity risks sliding into a conventional approach to environmental prob-lems, namely, as problems of production that only macro-level governmental policies can correct. Conflating it with materialism or maldistribution only confuses other agendas and misses the eco-logical component. And conflating it with popula-tion or technology issues obscures many of the driving forces. An objective of the remainder of this article is to suggest ways of specifying and distinguishing the issue of consumption and envi-ronmental impact to avoid such conceptual and, eventually, policy problems. Not to do so is to risk the common tendencies of jumping on the bandwagon with the latest buzzword in the envi-ronmental debate, stretching the new concept to encompass all conceivable concerns and, in the process, forfeiting any advantage — for analysis or for behavior change — that may accrue to a new perspective on environmental problems. The risk, in short, is to simply re-label old problems and old solutions without generating new insights. The careful analyst and activist must accept the possi-bility that the consumption topic may, in the end, not yield new insights into environmental prob-lems. Consumption may be no more than a buzz-word. A premise in this article, however, is that it can be more.
Below, I suggest two general analytic ap-proaches that may push the topic beyond mere fad. I assert that, in pursuing the research topic of consumption and environment, one has to make some basic choices, each of which has its own limitations. One choice is between accepting the prevailing production – consumption, supply – de-mand, producer – consumer dichotomy, on the one hand, and seeking an alternative framework on the other. In the production – consumption di-chotomy, one can investigate consumption via
price and income elasticities and purchasing pat-terns. These are well developed in microeconomics and marketing studies and need no elaboration here. To focus on environmental effects, however, one can investigate a broad range of product-re-lated decisions of which the purchase decision is only one. I explore some of these in the next section below. This approach attempts to open the black box of consumer sovereignty and con-sumer preferences. It also rejects the exclusive focus on market purchasing and considers a range of behaviors that comprise the end use of re-sources and products. The limitation of this ap-proach is the tendency to focus on marketplace activity to the exclusion of a wider range of human activities that are, in some sense, ‘consum-ing’. Moreover, environmental impacts tend to be incorporated as add-ons, not as integral compo-nents of the analytic framework. Thus, in the following section I posit a framework that begins with material provisioning and its biophysical ef-fects. The aim is to suggest not only how research on consumption can transcend the production – consumption dichotomy and how it can follow different paths but, importantly, how the analytic starting points — price determination and pur-chasing behavior versus resource use — can lead to very different questions and prescriptions.
3. Consumption as product use
Disaggregating the relative impacts of purchase and use decisions is certainly critical to the con-sumption and environment agenda. But a more extensive approach would be to go beyond ‘product’ to consider the ‘non-purchase’ decision. That is, individuals consume to meet needs. Sometimes those needs can only be met with purchased items — say, grain, electric power and high technology equipment. But many other needs can be obtained through productive effort, indi-vidually or collectively. Fresh produce can be purchased at a grocery store or grown oneself. Personal transportation can be had by driving to work or walking (or at least walking part way). Community members can raise funds to purchase playground equipment and pay to have it in-stalled or they can collect materials and build it themselves. If one has a need for musical experi-ence, one can buy an album or call a few musician friends over for a jam session. In each of these examples, a priori, one cannot know for sure which activity has the least environmental impact. But an initial and plausible operating assumption is that the commercial, purchased choices are
more a part of the current trends —
ever-increasing throughput, ever more ‘manufactured’
resource use (see below) — than the
non-commercial, and thus have a greater impact. Little if any research has been done on peoples’ choices not to purchase or to seek less consump-tive, less material-intensive means of satisfying a need (De Young, 1990 – 1991; Maniates, 1998). The reason may be obvious: it is very hard to get an analytic or empirical handle on an act that entails not doing something. But my hunch (and it can only be a hunch given the state of knowl-edge on this kind of question) is that this gap exists in large part because the question is out of, or contrary to, the dominant belief system where value is presumed to inhere in market transac-tions. A consumption perspective that is more expansive, that recognizes that individuals actu-ally meet their needs with non-commercial or relatively non-material means, makesthe non-pur
-chase decision a critical focus of inquiry.
To develop the research agenda within the con-sumption – production dichotomy, then, product use, not just purchase, must be addressed. What is
more, both post-purchase decisions and non-pur-chase decisions must be included in the analysis. At least two empirical questions arise. One, under what conditions do individuals switch from pur-chasing a high environmental impact item to a relatively low impact item, when impact is evalu-ated not just in production but in the use of the product itself? This question might fit existing research programs including that of energy use (e.g. Cleveland et al., 1984; Schipper, 1997);
household metabolism (e.g. Noorman and
Uiterkamp, 1998); industrial ecology (e.g. Ke-oleian and Menerey, 1994; Graedel and Allenby, 1995) and of market research (e.g. Richins, 1994; Ahuvia and Wong, 1997; Ger, 1997). Two, and this may well be the most difficult yet most impor-tant question, under what conditions do individu-als opt for a non-commercial or relati6ely
non-material response to meet a need? Research does exist on intrinsic satisfaction as it relates to conservation behavior (De Young, 1990 – 1991), subjective well-being (Inglehart and Abramson, 1994; Andrews and Withey, 1976), and work and leisure (Scitovsky, 1976/1992; Schor, 1995). Much of this research could be extended to consumption patterns and their environmental impacts.
A more radical approach, one that challenges this dichotomy and its propensity to relegate con-sumption to a black box or to the marginal status of emotion or personal values, would be to treat all resource use as consuming and ask what risks are entailed in patterns of resource acquisition, processing, and distribution. This approach would be more consistent with the ecological economics perspective where human economic activity is seen as an open subset of a finite and closed biophysical system. Consuming is that part of human activity that ‘uses up’ material, energy, and other valued things (Daly, 1996).
4. Consumption as ‘using up’
A definition of consumption that transcends the supply – demand dichotomy would start with bio-physical conditions and their intersection with human behavior. That intersection, following from systems theory, has many attributes but key is ecological feedback, that is, signals from the biophysical system that are picked up and reacted to by individuals and groups in the social system (Kay, 1991; Ulanowicz, 1997; Costanza et al., in press). At its most basic and general level, the human behavior that intersects with the biophysi-cal realm can be termedmaterial pro6isioning, that
is, the appropriation of material and energy for survival and reproduction.
4.1. Material pro6isioning
All human activity can be divided among over-lapping sets of behavior that includes reproduc-tion, defense, social interaction, identity formation, and material provisioning. Three broad categories of material provisioning are hunting/gathering, cultivating, and manufactur-ing. The question then is, what aspects of each category of material provisioning are best con-strued as consumption? Alternatively, the ques-tion is, if hunting/gathering, cultivating, and manufacturing is each construed as consumption, rather than as production, the dominant view-point, what insights are gained? To answer this requires first a general definition of consumption itself.
According to the American Heritage dictionary, consumption is to expend or use up, to degrade or destroy. Thermodynamically, it is to increase en-tropy. Biologically, it is capturing useable
mate-rial and energy to enhance survival and
reproduction and, ultimately, to pass on one’s genes. Socially, it is using up material and energy to enhance personal standing, group identity, and autonomy.
A defining characteristic of consuming behav-ior, therefore, is that it is that feature of material provisioning that permanently degrades material and energy and serves some purpose to the indi-vidual or to the group. Within hunting/gathering, consumption begins when the deer is shot or the apple is picked and ends when the user has fully expended the material and energy in that deer or apple. It is important to stress that, in hunting/
gathering, the consumption act is only the appro-priationof the itemand its ingestion. The one deer and the one apple are permanently degraded, not the deer herd or species and not the apple tree or species. This level of consumption is the most fundamental biologically and, indeed, is integral to all life. When some argue that consumption is ‘natural’, they are right — at this level.
time. Thus, a corn field may generate more calo-ries than its grassland predecessor but it does so only with continuous external inputs. It likely operates at a net energy loss and without the resilience of a less ‘productive’ yet self-organizing system.
Also, this treatment is not to suggest that there is no value in cultivation. The consumption per-spective on cultivation merely directs analytic at-tention to degradation and irreversibility in a way that the prevailing perspective — the production perspective — does not, or does so only as an add-on where value added is the focus and envi-ronmental impacts are unfortunate side effects that can be cleaned up if actors have the funds, the interest, and the political will.
Whereas cultivation involves rearranging extant plants and animals, manufacturing, quite literally, is making things by hand. It is applying human labor and ingenuity to create wholly new sub-stances. Ecologically, it draws on more than the available soil and water and associated ecosys-tems. In particular, manufacturing extends con-sumption beyond the direct use of individual organisms and ecosystems to the use of energy sources and waste sinks. Converting a log into lumber and then furniture entails an expenditure of low entropy fuel and the disposal of waste material and heat. From the production perspec-tive, this is value added. But from the consump-tion perspective, it is using up secondary resources (energy and waste sink capacities) to amplify and accelerate the use of primary resources (forests, grasslands, fisheries, etc.). Consuming here may entail permanent and unavoidable depletion as with fossil fuels, or a temporary drawdown with the possibility of regeneration as with soil buffering.
Both cultivation and manufacturing risk per-manent degeneration in ecosystem functioning. But manufacturing is generally more risky due to the separation of activity from primary resources. High technology and global finance are extreme examples where so-called ‘wealth creation’ is far removed, some would argue completely removed, from a natural resource base. The consumption perspective directs attention to the heightened risks of such distanced material provisioning (Dryzek, 1987; Princen, 1997a).
In sum, an ecologically grounded definition of consumption takes as a starting point human material provisioning and the draw on ecosystem services. It is distinguished from those that begin with market behavior and ask what purchasers do in the aggregate and from those that start with social stratification and ask how consumption patterns establish hierarchy or identity. The po-tential of such an ecological definition is to escape
the confines of both limits-to-growth and
economistic frameworks that tend to prescribe top – down, centralized correctives for errant (i.e. over-consuming) human behavior. An ecological approach to consumption directs attention to eco-logical risk and the myriad ways clever humans have of displacing the true costs of their material provisioning. The next step in conceptualizing the consumption – environment nexus is to specify what is excessive or maladaptive consumption. In particular, it is to ask how a given act of con-sumption (e.g. eating the apple, converting the forest, manufacturing the chair) can be inter-preted or judged. I start with the broad biophysi-cal context in which consuming behavior can be interpreted as ‘natural’ or ‘background’ and then consider both ecological and social definitions of degradative consumption, what I will call ‘over-consumption’ and ‘mis‘over-consumption’.
4.2. Excess consumption:three interpreti6e layers
A strictly ecological interpretation takes con-sumption as perfectly ‘natural’. To survive, all organisms must consume, that is, degrade re-sources. This interpretation of a given consump-tion act I term background consumption. It refers to the normal, biological functioning of all organ-isms, humans included. Every act of background consumption by an individual alters the environ-ment, the total impact being a function of aggre-gate consumption of the population. Individuals consume to meet a variety of needs, physical and psychological, both of which contribute to the ability of the individual to survive and reproduce, and hence to its ability to pass on its genes.
popula-tion explosions and crashes and irreversibilities caused by the expansion of one species at the expense of other species. If, however, the interpre-tation is modified to include human concern for population crashes, species extinctions, permanent diminution of ecosystem functioning, diminished reproductive and developmental potential of indi-viduals, and other irreversible effects, then ‘prob-lematic consumption’ becomes relevant. I specify two interpretive layers, o6erconsumption and
misconsumption.
Overconsumption is that level or quality of consumption that undermines a species’ own life-support system and for which individuals and collectivities have choices in their consuming pat-terns. Overconsumption is an aggregate level
con-cept. With instances of overconsumption,
individual behavior may be perfectly sensible con-forming either to the evolutionary dictates of fitness or to the economically productive dictates of rational decision making. Collective, social be-havior may appear sensible, too, as when in-creased consumption is needed in an advanced industrial economy to stimulate productive capac-ity and compete in international markets. But eventually the collective outcome from overcon-suming is catastrophe for the population or the species. From a thermodynamic and ecological perspective, this is the problem of excessive throughput (Georgescu-Roegen, 1993). The popu-lation or species has commanded more of the regenerative capacity of natural resources and more of the assimilative capacity of waste sinks than the relevant ecosystems can support. And it is an ethical problem because it inheres only in those populations or species that can reflect on their collective existence. What is more, for hu-mans it becomes a political problem when the trends are toward collapse and when the distribu-tion of impacts generates conflict.
The second interpretive layer within problem-atic consumption I term misconsumption. It deals with individual behavior. The problem here is that the individual consumes in a way that undermines his or her own well-being even if there are no aggregate effects on the population or species. Put differently, the long-term effect of an individual’s consumption pattern is either suboptimal or a net
loss to that individual. It may or may not, how-ever, undermine collective survival. Such con-sumption can occur along several dimensions.
Physiologically, humans misconsume when they eat too much in a sitting or over a lifetime or when they become addicted to a drug. The long-term burden overwhelms the immediate gratifica-tion. Psychologically, humans misconsume when, for example, they fall into the advertiser’s trap of ‘perpetual dissatisfaction’. They purchase an item that provides fleeting satisfaction resulting in yet another purchase. Economically, humans miscon-sume when they overwork, that is, engage in onerous work beyond what can be compensated with additional income. With more income and less time, they attempt to compensate by using the additional income, which is to say, by consuming (Schor, 1995).4
Ecologically, humans misconsume when an in-crement of increased resource use harms that re-source or related rere-sources and humans who depend on the resource. In the short term, if one builds a house on a steep, erosion-prone slope, the construction itself increases the likelihood of mas-sive erosion and the destruction of one’s con-sumption item, the house. In the longer term, if one uses leaded house paint, one’s children or grandchildren are more likely to have develop-mental problems.
Misconsumption, then, refers to those individ-ual resource using acts that result in net losses for the individual. They are not ‘rational’ or sensible in any of several senses — psychological, eco-nomic, or health-wise. And, once again, they may or may not add up to aggregate, ecological de-cline. The question that critically defines the con-sumption and environment research agenda at this, the individual level, is, what forms of individ-ual misconsumption lead to collective
overcon-4This is not to say that the marginal work effort is generally
sumption? Put differently, when is overconsump-tion not simply a problem of excessive through-put — that is, a problem of too many people or too much economic activity — and when is it a question of the inability of individuals to meet their needs in a given social context? When, in other words, do individuals simultaneously wreak
harm on themselves and on the environment
through their consumption patterns?
These questions are important because they point toward potential interventions that make sense at both levels and without requiring evolu-tionarily novel human behavior such as global citizenship (Low and Heinen, 1993) or authoritar-ian command structures (De Young, 1996). These questions point toward win – win, ‘no-regrets’ policies that simultaneously produce improved human welfare and reduced ecological risk to humans’ life-support system. A critical area of research, therefore, is the intersection of miscon-sumption and overconmiscon-sumption where individuals and society together can potentially benefit from improved consumption patterns. This may offer the greatest, and certainly the easiest, opportuni-ties for interventions. But a second area is at least as important yet more vexing. This is consump-tion patterns that involve individually satisfying behavior with net benefits to the individual and, say, to that individual’s kin, yet net harms to others. This is unavoidably a distributional ques-tion and, hence, a moral and political issue. Below I explore part of this moral and political dimen-sion by considering how producers must exercise
restraint and resistance when demand is
overwhelming.
4.3. Material decision chain
Categories of material provisioning and layers of interpretation for a given consumption act help position human consuming behavior in ways the supply – demand dichotomy and the production perspective do not. But these two approaches only hint at actual decision making, the processes by which individuals and organizations use and com-pete for resources. Here, I posit a third approach to consumption, modelling all human resource use as a chain of decisions that begins with the
initial resource extraction decision and ends with the final consumption and disposal decisions. This ‘material decision chain’ parallels the life cycle approach of industrial ecology but traces deci-sionmaking, including interactive decisionmaking among more than one actor, rather than materials and energy flow. A simple example illustrates the approach and some of its implications.
Imagine a resource is stressed, say, more timber is being harvested in a watershed than the forest ecosystem can regenerate. What is more, the pri-mary reason is demand. Consumers want more of the timber than the ecosystem can bear and they can pay a sufficiently high price or marshall enough coercion to compel high production.5 In
this case, forest users — that is, direct users, those who decide harvest rates and methods and man-agement techniques — are responding completely to demand, managing the forest and choosing harvest rates and practices that best fit that de-mand. As demand increases, they increase the harvest rate in the short term and, for the longer term, plant, say, fast-growing species.
Such production-oriented measures may be able to accommodate more of the demand but when demand continues to exceed supply (in an ecolog-ical sense), the real issue is, indeed, the demand, not the supply. Better forest management prac-tices, less wood waste, more efficient milling, and lower transportation costs will have little effect on the excessiveness of the demand.6 The
overhar-vesting is, therefore, really a consumption issue, yet one that can affect all steps along the chain of decisions. Activists will typically focus on the end-use of the chain, attempting to dampen
de-5This scenario, although highly simplified to make the
argument, is not unlike that which occurred in the great cutovers of North America (Cronon, 1991, pp. 148 – 206) or that are occurring currently in South America and Southeast Asia (Peluso, 1993).
6More efficient use of a tree may appear to be a logical
response to increasing demand. Certainly, getting more use-able wood per tree would, all else equal, accommodate at least some of the excess demand. But, in general, such an efficiency
mand. This is the aim of certification programs, moratoria, and bans (Princen, 1996; Kiker and Putz, 1997). Producers might focus on the other end, extraction, sensing a threat to their own long-term production. They may initially seek production-oriented measures — that is, those whose primary aim is to respond to demand as it exists and, in the case of excess demand, to in-crease output. But as these prove inadequate in the face of ecologically excessive demand, under some conditions they will seek measures to limit
output (McGoodwin, 1990; Colchester and
Lohman, 1993; Alcorn and Toledo, 1995). Such measures entail behaviors by producers that tend to be ignored when a production perspective is dominant. Two such behaviors coming from the
consumption perspective are restraint and
resistance.
If forest users respond not only to demand but also to threats to their own long-term economic security or to their desire for multiple uses of the forest — for example, timber, recreation, and wa-tershed — then, when demand is low, these forest users would harvest little and invest little. But they would also shift to different forest uses, from timber harvesting only, say, to hunting and fishing and tourism, as well as to different means of making a living.7 If demand is high (and this
would be the test case for long-term sustainable use), they would increase the harvest rates only to a point. Beyond that point, a point determined not by short-term economic opportunity but by a sense of ecological limits, by a risk-averse ap-proach to complex natural systems and to users’ economic security, they would restrain their har-vests so as not to jeopardize future use and those other uses (Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Acheson and Wilson, 1996; Princen, 1997b). What is more, if
demand is so intrusive, so overwhelming via temptingly high prices or coercion (force or law), then a second behavior would be resistance. Users would develop organizational, legal, or, if neces-sary, coercive means of their own to resist the intrusion, limit their harvest, and thus maintain the resource over the long term.8
The problem here may appear to be one of production — i.e. harvest rates. But it is really one of consumption vis-a-vis production. The foci of conventional production analysis — questions of investment, management, extraction, pricing, pro-cessing, distributing — tend not to ask questions about restraint and resistance among producers. Quite the contrary, the productive enterprise is precisely one of opening markets, lowering prices, gaining efficiencies, and capturing market share — in short, increasing production. It is a process that sees the addition of value, not the subtrac
-tion of value, not the risks to multiple uses or to the long-term viability of the supporting ecosys-tem.
In sum, a consumption perspective on resource use problems — especially problems of ecological overuse — compels examination of decisions among extractors and processors that tend not to get asked from a conventional production per-spective. Among these decisions are those associ-ated with the general behaviors of restraint, that is, self-limiting behavior, and of resistance to destructive intrusions. Comparing cases where restraint and resistance are prominent with those in which they are not, and applying indices of sustainable practice would be a logical research direction. I turn finally to the difficulty of pursuing a research agenda on consumption and environment, an agenda that at once chal-lenges the dominant belief system and, I argue, contravenes personal, analytic and policy orienta-tions.
7Some evidence does exist that extractors who attempt to
maximize their long-term economic security rather than re-spond to extant demand pursue strategies of diversified pro-duction. When either demand or the resource declines, they shift to other pursuits. Fishermen in the Norwegian Arctic and many independent farmers follow this model (Jentoft and Kristoffersen, 1989; McGoodwin, 1990; Clunies-Ross and Hildyard, 1992). To my knowledge, however, no systematic research has been done on such work strategies and their impact on natural resources.
8Empirical support for restraint does exist, especially in the
common property literature (Ostrom, 1990; Bromley, 1992). Other instances in private property are beginning to develop. See, for example, the cases being developed by the MacArthur Foundation’s Sustainable Forestry program. On resistance, see Gadgil and Guha (1992), Peluso (1993) and special sections of
5. Resistance to the agenda: or, why the person sitting next to you does not want to talk about consumption
On first mention, consumption is readily seen by analysts, policymakers, and others as an im-portant topic, one probably deserving of consider-able research and action. People seem to know at least intuitively that most individuals of the North and most elites of the South are consuming too much. But my experience in the classroom, with colleagues, and with funders is that pursuing the issue much further, whether conceptually, empiri-cally or normatively, makes people uneasy. They prefer to shift to questions of overpopulation, inefficient production, or skewed governmental policies. I offer explanations for this reaction from three realms of activity: the personal, the analytical, and the political.
5.1. Personal
In a graduate seminar on this topic, at one point or another, each member felt the need to reveal one’s own misconsumption or one’s appar-ent contribution to overconsumption. It was al-most as if one could not address this forbidden topic without first admitting one’s sins. Activists Ryan and Durning found that readers of early drafts of their book on the impacts of everyday products felt ‘‘overwhelmed or depressed after learning the true stories of how things are made’’ (Ryan and Durning, 1997, p. 6). The authors in turn felt compelled to issue a warning that the product life stories could be disturbing and that readers should pace themselves.
These anecdotes suggest that consumption is a topic that is deeply and unavoidably personal. Unlike many related issues such as population or conservation or international development, it is nearly impossible to get analytic distance. The reason may be because consumption is one social problem that, in its contemporary manifestation (i.e. industrial driven misconsumption and over-consumption), cannot be assigned to someone else. For Northerners, international development and population, say, can be easily construed as someone else’s problem. Poverty and
overpopula-tion are problems of the South, the uneducated, the undercapitalized, the pre-modern. Not so with consumption. The finger points at us Northerners and Southern elites. Another reason may be that it is very personal in its execution — we all do it — and, for reasons of individual liberty or reli-gious right or cultural trait, we resist intrusions, however well intended.
5.2. Analytic
A second reason why consumption makes peo-ple uneasy is that it is analytically slippery under the dominant rationalist paradigm. As discussed in Section 2, it tends to become conflated with more familiar issues of production, materials and energy flow, materialism, and population. When the concept is pushed beyond the dominant per-spective, it necessarily challenges that perspective. The best way to see this is via the conventional notion of efficiency.
A productive efficiency is an undeniably, unas-sailably good thing. If one can produce the same quantity of goods with less input or more goods with the same input, everyone is better off. Better off ceteris paribus, of course. But it is precisely here in the ubiquitous qualifier, ‘all else equal’, that aggregate resource use and the scale of eco-nomic activity enter. It is here that irreplaceable ecosystem services are, in effect, taken as given.
In practice, efficiency gains can become in-stances of problem displacement (Dryzek, 1987). They can be disguised means of passing on true costs in space or time, especially when generations and political boundaries are spanned (Princen, 1997a). What is more, efficiency gains can divert attention from the real problem, that is, scale and ecological functioning. For example, in the US, automobiles have become considerably more effi-cient since the 1970s oil shocks. But the country as a whole is no less dependent on foreign oil nor does it emit less CO2, SO2, and other pollutants.
all the changes in consumption behavior. But,
of course, from the perspective of toxic
loadings, CO2 emissions, habitat destruction, lost
farmland and the like, the consumption behavior is precisely the issue of most interest and, ulti-mately, most import, not the technical efficiency. It seems that few people want to talk about this, preferring to pursue ever-greater efficiencies. The
reason is that to talk about consumption
levels and consumption patterns is to talk ‘out of paradigm’. It is to eschew the produc-tion perspective and to raise analytic quesproduc-tions that conventional analytic tools — price de-termination, cost-benefit analysis, even life cycle analysis — cannot comfortably address. It is, ultimately, to raise question of purpose (Schu-macher, 1973; Daly and Townsend, 1993; Smith, 1993).
5.3. Policy
This, then, brings me to a third realm of activ-ity that may account for a general reluctance to engage this issue. Policy makers, both private and public, often find problems easier to solve — or, at least, address — by increasing the pie, not dividing it or redistributing it. If I run out of book shelf space, I, in my accustomed efficiency mode, con-strue the problem as too few shelves and thus seek more bookshelves or a bigger office or, ideally, both. I tend not to construe the problem as too many books and consequently do not seek ways to limit the inflow or to donate the excess to the library. If traffic is congested, planners expand the road. From an efficiency perspective, the problem is construed as inadequate avenue, not too many cars. There are, of course, many good reasons for this individual and collective behavior. A large literature exists on the growth imperative (Hirsh, 1976/1995; Meadows et al., 1992; Ayres, 1996; Daly, 1996).
To address the consumption question not only forces the hard question — how to divide or redis-tribute the pie, sometimes a shrinking pie — and thus precludes the relatively easy response, growth promotion, but challenges individual choice and free will which, at least in North America, are held sacrosanct.
The current belief system operates as if free choice makes no threat to the biophysical system. Certainly leaders will restrict choice when harm to others is direct, immediate, and visible. Consider restrictions on heavy weapons, pornography, slan-der, and noxious substances. But in the present paradigm, one can irreversibly destroy an ecosys-tem depriving themselves, others, and future gen-erations of species and the functions, many unknown, that are associated with those species in an ecosystem. To construe such behavior as a consumption problem, a problem that cannot be solved by ever more economic activity or ever more efficiencies, is to operate outside the domi-nant belief system. It is to ‘shift paradigms’. And, as with shifts in all paradigms — scientific, social, and religious — most of us resist until change is unavoidable.
We do, however, change. If former communists can embrace free markets, it is not inconceivable that individuals and policymakers in an ecologi-cally constrained world can embrace, indeed, re-embrace, such notions as thrift, frugality, and self-reliance. Consequently, a major prescriptive task of a consumption and environment research agenda is to show how individuals can continue to strive for more, how they can thrive, how they can meet immutable human needs for status, iden-tity, stimulation, association, and the like, and all without ever-increasing material consumption.
Acknowledgements
Support for this research was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (c96-34311). Helpful comments on earlier drafts were given by Edward Comor, Raymond De Young, Maya Fischoff, Anu Kumar, Donald Mayer, Daniel Mazmanian, Norman Myers, Karl Steyaert, Paul Stern, and Richard Wilk.
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