Buy Less Sh*t Or We're All F*ck*d

This rather droll "Special Commemorative Issue 5 Carrier Bag" from satirical cartoonists Modern Toss highlights an important tension between economic recovery and sustainability at the heart of the current recession. Broadly speaking, for the environment the opposite is true: Buy Less Sh*t Or We're All F*ck*d.

According to classical economic theory, keeping consumers confident so they keep spending is key to economic recovery. For instance, some say that one reason the Japanese economy got stuck in recession for so long was that consumers kept the thrifty habits they had developed during the bad times and didn't spend as much when the good times returned.

But this is precisely what we need to do to develop a more sustainable model of business and living.

As a society, we need to step off the insane treadmill of consumerism which is a relatively recent 20C phenomenon. Its roots are in the Industrial revolution but a consumer society really took off in the west after WWII when disposable household income shot up and people could afford luxuries rather than necessities.

And as an economy we need to break the current model of relentless growth based on a false assumption that resources are limitless and which doesn't take into account the environmental consequences.

Perhaps it's no accident that at the exact moment we need to make this enormous decision for the sake of the environment, our existing economic system has collapsed and needs to be re-built - probably on a mixed model of part state and part private ownership.

So can we do it? Re-engineer a 500-year old system of capitalism and start to value other forms of 'growth' and 'wealth' (for instance social happiness and wellbeing, regeneration of our environment, and so on)?

There are only 93 months left, according to some calculations (others are even less optimistic), before we pass the tipping point to runaway climate change, so avoiding a return to 'business as usual', with the consumption of resources and CO2 emmissions that endless economic growth implies, is probably our most important task. The clock is ticking...

[Green Thing actions related to this post are: Stick With What You Got and All-Consuming]

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