Consumption junction

In decades past folks worried over the human population bomb, essentially adhering to a Malthusian faith that humankind would eventually overpopulate and exhaust Mother Earth. Now with human population expected to peak at 9 billion in mid-century and then decline, in some nations precipitously, thereafter, the earth-shattering population explosion appears destined to be a dud. Does that mean Gaia can breathe a carbon-dioxide enriched sigh of relief? Not really. Certainly not as long as the notion that human development=improved standard of living (i.e., higher levels of consumption) persists.

In today's NY Times, Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California (LA) and the author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel points out that it is consumption, not raw population that is at the heart of our sustainability problems. As long as every person in the so-called developing world aspires to (or, cynics might add, is Mad-Avenue programmed to aspire to) the consumption-heavy lifestyle of America, where obesity troubles as both an actual and metaphysical malady, the future does not look too bright for a small blue planet in an obscure corner of the galaxy.

People in the affluence-addled first world consume at an average rate 32 times greater than their brothers in the impoverished third and fourth worlds of this planet. A day of reckoning--or at least $100 barrels of oil--is at hand no matter the world you trod upon. Some of this sustainability problem the sorta-invisible hand of the free market will address through higher prices on basic commodities that will move toward equilibrium between the first and under-worlds; on many issues governments will have to intervene (overfishing, green-building codes, global warming, etc.). Ultimately though it will be up to the individual in the first world to ask what he should do for the leaster worlders out there. A huge step forward might be to ask why he is trying to fill that big spiritual hole in his life with more things instead of the things that really matter. It is a lesson in authentic development (PP: 14) that applies to all of us, no matter which world of our world we inhabit.