On the day after Thanksgiving, Marin Goldstein and Han Shan climbed to the top of the Mall of America outside Minneapolis and unfurled a 600-square-foot cartoon that depicted the earth falling through a broken shopping bag. They wanted the mall visitors to ditch their purchases, go home, and observe Thanksgiving Friday as Buy Nothing Day. “Our consumption,” said Shan, “is the mother of all environmental problems.”
If you take the manifesto for Buy Nothing Day literally, it’s just plain false. Buying decisions made by individual households create only a small fraction of the world’s environmental problems. That’s one of the key points made in a slim book from the National Research Council entitled Environmentally Significant Consumption: Research Directions. Sociologist Paul Stern of George Mason University writes, “The vast majority of energy use, releases of water and air pollutants, and many other environmentally destructive activities in the United States results directly from organizational behavior rather than individual behavior–specifically, from the acts of corporations and governments.”
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Improved efficiency in other areas has begun to disconnect “consumption” as measured in dollars and cents from “consumption” as measured by pollution and resource usage. If you’re above a certain age you might remember when crushing a beer can with one hand was a minor feat. Not anymore. Aluminum beverage cans weigh about two-thirds as much today as they did in 1973. (This is sometimes called “dematerialization,” and it’s most dramatic when you read the New York Times on-line rather than buying a paper edition.) Similarly, U.S. population has grown 16 percent since 1980, but our water usage has dropped by 10 percent. Most importantly, since the energy crisis of the early 70s, total energy use per constant dollar of gross national product has declined by more than one-quarter. Environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook makes this point more vividly in A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism. “In 1974,” he writes, “the typical [North Carolina] residential customer had a 1,000-square-foot dwelling with no air conditioner, no color television, and no frost-free refrigerator. By 1992 the typical Duke Power customer had 1,250 square feet of air-conditioned space, two color televisions, and a frost-free fridge–yet was using slightly less electricity than in 1974.”
The same hopeful but inconclusive trend appears when you look at national economies from the outside. Researchers who compare rich, poor, and middling countries have consistently found that pollution increases as consumption rises–but only up to about $10,000 gross domestic product per capita; then it starts going down. (The U.S. is close to $30,000.) According to Jeffrey Vincent and Theodore Panayotou of the Harvard Institute for International Development, writing in Science, this is true of well-known emissions like sulfur dioxide and particulates in the air, as well as suspended solids, nitrate, nitrite in the water, and the more insidious carbon dioxide, which contributes to the dreaded greenhouse effect.
Environmentally Significant Consumption: Research Directions, edited by Paul Stern, Thomas Dietz, Vernon Ruttan, Robert Socolow, and James Sweeney, National Academy Press, $34.
