"Ultimately, Our Problem is Consumption..."

"Sustainability." The term used to mean what it implies: balanced stewardship of resources whereby materials are procured in ways that enable their availability in perpetuity. Truly sustainably managed resources are never taken at a rate greater than replacement. This is what ensures long-term viability. Sustainability. Yet this term has been co-opted by marketing and all manner of industry because corporations know that people, when given the choice, very often want to do the right thing. And they're willing to pay for it. So the great corporate-sponsored greenwash is unleashed, and a lot of people, to0 busy with their own hectic lives, fail to notice the lack of substance, and the very unsustainable practices behind the hype. Shame on them. And shame on us.

While I don't intend to discuss sustainable consumer goods in this post, I do think it's important to pause and think about the meaning of sustainability. Why? Because even a locally-produced, sustainably-managed product won't make the world a better place if we--and by "we" I'm referring to citizens of industrialized countries--don't bring our consumption in line with total available resources. As Eamon O'Hara recently wrote in a BBC News post, "The modern Western lifestyle...has an inbuilt dependency on the cheap resources and low carbon footprint of developing countries, which has compounded global injustice...The world simply does not have the resources, renewable or otherwise, to sustain Western lifestyles across the globe." In the aggregate, our consumption is creating misery, injustice and global instability, as well as environmental devastation. This is a huge problem, and we, the ones using up more than our share, have to be the ones to begin solving it.

One way for industrialized societies to begin to address their global footprint (carbon, political, human suffering, etc.) is to begin relocalizing their economies and learning to live with what's available around them. Now, obviously, this would not be a simple undertaking, even if you do happen to live in a beautiful place with many wonderful natural resources close at hand. Not only do many people live in places that are just completely unable to support the population (Arizona comes to mind), but the poorest of the world's poor, the people's whose resources we're exploiting, have also become dependent on a system we've imposed upon them. Simply removing that system won't necessarily help them and will likely even hurt them in the short-run. It's a daunting and massive undertaking that is bound to spawn greater suffering, whether perceived (Westerners learning to live much more simply) or real (poor countries losing foreign investment dollars). But what other ethical choice is there? In the short-run we're destroying the future potential of the world's poor. The long-run? Well, the long-run looks a lot like our poor behavior catching up with us. Fast. Shall we be proactive or reactive? Shall we do the right thing now or wait for our collective debts to come due?

There are organizations around the world doing the work of re-introducing displaced peoples to lands and practices that used to comprise their ways of life, before empire and corporate multinationalism moved in. Heifer International (www.heifer.org) is one organization addressing ways to relocalize food security on nearly every corner of the globe. We, too, are displaced, in many senses. The multitudinous skills of our ancestors have been replaced by service and expert economies in which most of us really only hone one skill and have to pay someone else to perform the other services we need to live. Trying to re-learn all of these skills may not be possible, but we can re-learn how to produce food, building materials and clothing, for a start. Food, shelter and clothing. That's more than a lot of the world's people have. And, collectively, I'm confident that a community can re-learn a whole lot more than just the basics. We'll just have to get comfortable with sharing what we know.