Columns With the holiday season winding to a close and the world moving forward into another new year, it may be the perfect time to reflect on our way of buying and using goods.
The majority of the world’s economy is based on the concept of consumerism. On the surface, this does not seem to be a bad thing as we need to consume goods and services in order to live. However, the excess acquisition of goods may lead to extremely harmful practices.
Consider our increasingly unhealthy dependence on imported goods from far away — products that often could be produced much closer to where they are actually used, thus resulting in substantially less use of climate-harming fossil fuel. This is not only unsustainable for our ecology, but also for our economy, with trade imbalances impoverishing the United States and enriching China, for example. That deficit was more than $310 billion in 2020, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Consumerism is not entirely good or bad — it depends on the practice. Does a company exploit workers? (Yes, Walmart, we mean you.) Do they pollute? (Looking at you, Coca-Cola.) Is the corporation guilty of defrauding consumers? (Wow, RJ Reynolds, BP, Volkswagen, Enron and others)
Are consumerism and sustainability compatible? Sustainability focuses on a morally just and ethical approach, caring equally for the consumer, the environment, and the producers. Meanwhile, consumerism focuses solely on profit, including planned obsolescence — designing goods that will too quickly become either unusable or unfashionable. Laws in most places are inadequate to stop most producers from failing to pay the true costs, often passing those on to the taxpaying public or future generations. If lawmakers grappled with stopping those externalized costs ethical consumerism would be far easier.
