Originally Posted by
Blownb18c
The consumer-driven economy of the United States is based on a constellation of concepts about ourselves, God, growth, wealth, and the world we live in. These conceptions deny the relevance of God or spiritual life to business activities. Nature is primarily to be used for human benefit, and anything that cannot be counted or measured in monetary terms has limited or marginal "utility."
The Earth is valued for its resources, which are assumed to be an infinite and inexhaustible. Even if not, we have faith that human ingenuity will find suitable substitutes for any shortages, and technological "fixes" for serious degradation of our natural environment.
The consumer-driven economy presumes that nations and corporations must grow in order to "progress," and assumes that the "rational economic person" will strive to amass as much material wealth and experience as much pleasure as possible. "You only go around once in life," the Schlitz beer commercial used to implore, "So go for all the gusto you can!" These beliefs encourage overconsumption as a way of life, for they posit a world of boundless freedom without natural limits or moral restraints on human action.
Electing freedom to disobey God's limits, mankind exits the Garden of Eden and enters a world where nature is to be conquered rather than accepted or embraced. The roots of our alienation from nature are deep; not surprisingly, then, the institutional engines of overconsumption are many and varied. They include the "free market economy" as presently practiced in the U.S. and the "free trade" regimes of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The institutional supports for overconsumption also include laws which protect the rights of "free speech" as exercised by large corporations in lobbying, advertising, and contributing to political parties and candidates. Such supports include the U.S. political system generally, political parties, the U.S. judicial system, the media, and administrative agencies.
In the course of this article, various laws, domestic and international, will be examined as part of national and global legal structures, along with international institutions that - unwittingly or not - promote overconsumption. Overconsumption, like any general phenomenon, is multi-faceted and eludes precise definition. In a broad sense, we use or consume many kinds of things in our lives (air, water, electricity, wool, land, cotton, fertilizer, paper, chocolate, plastics, CFCs, graphite, fuel oil, food), and corporations "consume" many things in the production of goods and services for "consumers." Moreover, not all consumption degrades the environment. But a broad and growing literature strongly suggests that we are consuming in ways that are unhealthy for ourselves and unsustainable for our natural environment. In this article, I will suggest that overconsumption occurs where (1) people (individually or collectively) make consumption an end in itself, rather than a means to some higher human purpose, where (2) economic/legal systems fail to follow free market principles, or where (3) the economic/legal system fails to adequately recognize and account for future costs, the interests of future generations, or finite limits to the use of natural resources as "capital."
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