Curbing Consumerism for Sustainability's Sake

June 19, 2008

Over the past century and a half, the United States has all but defined itself through its consumer culture. The unbridled prosperity of two post-World-War economic booms, and the huge increase in productivity that accompanied the rise of the information age thrust money into the hands of American consumers on a scale the world had never seen. While Americans—even rich Americans—living during the Revolutionary War had almost no concept of disposable income, by the mid 1800s, purchases had already begun their transformation from survival necessities to the complex social signaling mechanism they are today.

There have always been critics of this consumeristic approach to life. Philosophers, among them Karl Marx and Thorstein Velben, were some of the first to take issue with the idea that material purchases could bring happiness. In the United States itself, early dissatisfaction with the consumerist life set the stage for several great religious revivals, and inspired Henry David Thoreau’s excursion into the woods around Walden Pond, as an experiment with a simple lifestyle.

While successive waves of countercultural thought have turned to Thoreau’s experiences at Walden for inspiration in the 160 years since, perhaps at no time before the present has Thoreau’s maxim of “Simplify, simplify” been so pertinent and culturally relevant. With an economy weekend by the tremendous amount of money spent by Americans on foreign-made goods, and an environment battered by the side-effects of producing and shipping these goods, a reduction in purchases and possessions seems like an all-but-necessary course of action.

It is onto this stage that the 100 Thing Challenge has strode, gaining momentum with people strung up, struggling with, and stressed out by the myriad of devices, gimmicks and gadgets that complicate their everyday lives. As professional organizer Julie Morganstern says "It's a very emotional process. Often these are things that represent who you once were, but once their purpose is over, they just keep you stagnant."

But taking a radically reductive approach may have benefits well beyond a simple self-assessing, self-relieving purge; as the saying goes, the greenest product is almost always the one that never gets bought. By reducing both the need for goods to be produced, and the need to heat, cool, and otherwise maintain the space to hold all these goods, limiting the number of possessions you have is an excellent way to increase the sustainability of your day-to-day activities.

Of course, literal adherence to the 100 Things Challenge isn’t a silver-bullet climate solution. What exactly constitutes a “thing” can be notoriously hard to define, and the whole experiment is largely a self-exploratory trend, not a hard-and-fast rule for more environmentally-friendly living. Still, the underlying philosophies of the project could have a very promising impact in the creation of a smarter, less-consumptive way of life.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons