The status quo is unsustainable

July 11, 2017 by Fred Allebach

A friend is attending the JC and having registered for classes, the next step is to look for books and get them ordered. The textbook for American History is over $150, as is the Spanish 1 textbook. Aside from being outrageous monopoly price gouging, this situation reveals another troubling aspect about our society and culture: rampant conspicuous consumption, unnecessary use of energy, and wasting resources to make new versions of what is already good enough.

Rather than shoot for a long-term carrying capacity level of consumption, our system is set up for short-term planning horizons, and competition-based boom and bust crashes. Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, Why Civilizations Decide to Succeed or Fail, that pushing beyond resource carrying capacity has been the cause for past civilizational collapses. This is a choice we now make, and the choice is clear, carrying capacity or crash.

The relentless production of new things is supposedly necessary to keep our economy thriving. Growth is seen as necessary. Growth comes from people buying new things. Growth comes from a too high a birth rate. Yet many, if not most new things are completely unnecessary, and are not qualitative technological advances. Consumables are strategically changed only to give a new shape, color, noise or smell, so as to create demand and attract an impulse buy.

The root of all of this could simply be that we are a species that has so much brain- power capacity that we need novelty to be entertained. Novelty can be generated internally, but we need foils upon which to exercise such capacity, and these foils involve the need for material props upon which to work and exercise our creativity. Material props mean stuff, which means energy to produce and transport such stuff so we can consume it, to keep ourselves occupied.

All this new stuff comes at a cost for natural resources and for energy use. Education, art, communication, writing, gardening, travel, tourism, remodeling, it all takes energy and stuff to pull off; it all has greenhouse gas impacts. The prognosis is clear: what is good for economic actors, and for human creative capacity, what gives people jobs, what pays the rent and stimulates trade and the GDP, what gives philanthropists funds to trickle down, what satisfies our natural abilities, is all based on an out-of-scale, unsustainable system of endless and unnecessary consumption of gussied up versions of the same old shit.

This brings me back to the $150 Spanish 1 textbook. Here is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with our system and why getting to carrying capacity,  sustainability and addressing climate change will be next to impossible. With a world full of Spanish 1 textbooks, at every Thrift store, and a Spanish language that has been stable for 100 years, the cost of a beginning book should, by this time, be reduced to less than $10.00 A standard issue would serve the purpose just fine.

Somehow we exist in a system where we end up needing $150 Spanish 1 textbooks to prop up the existing order. This is a bad spot, as the wanton consumption, seen as necessary, is heading us straight down the drain.

Every economic ecosystem, such as educational books and materials, is dependent on manufacturers to supply the goods. The suppliers find it in their advantage to collude, consciously or not, in forming monopolies, and then constantly producing new versions of the same thing, to claim it is “new”, and “better”, and to keep prices high. For textbooks this means constant demand for paper products, trees, inks, transport, and energy to do all of the latter. For students and their families, and school systems, they have to work, produce the money somehow, and pay out the nose.

The educational materials market, school systems and ultimately, students, are subject to, and complicit in, the assumptions that make having to buy outrageously priced-gouged and unnecessary text books as a normal, desirable, and even necessary process. And so, the budgets of individuals, households, and school systems is a metaphorical cart hitched a crazy system of gratuitous consumption that is not only a monopolistic rip off, but is ruining the planet and exacerbating social inequity. How many poor people will say, “screw that Spanish 1, I cannot afford  $150 textbook!”

No wonder kids are ending up with tremendous debt, the whole educational system is one big rip off that values façade and status above substance.

Indeed, what has changed so much about ser and estar, and with personal pronouns to justify such an outlandish textbook cost at the JC? Think of the costs to the Sonoma valley Unified School District, for K – senior in high school textbooks. This must be an astronomical cost equal to that of stadiums and swimming pools.

The $150 Spanish 1 textbook illustrates how our whole consumer-dependent economic system rides on this same exact pattern: cars, drugs, clothes, fashion, make up, body care products, tools, paint, construction materials, kitchen utensils, computers, phones, software, shoes, food; all has to be gussied up and repackaged to stimulate added sales. The huge bulk of these changed goods are not actual technological advances, but rather calculated repackaging of the same exact products.

This requires a huge waste of materials and resources, and output of energy. The byproducts of this consumptive demand and energy use result in a greenhouse gas footprint that is tipping the planet’s climate system to a point where life as we know it will be destroyed for hundreds of millions of years in a 6^th Great Extinction.

At this point, this is not just regional civilizational collapse but a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem collapse for the whole planet. This is the consequence of failing to learn the lack of carrying capacity lessons of past civilizational collapses.

Short-term thriving, if not at carrying capacity, is equal to long term collapse.

 

What to do? First of all, we are not helpless automatons stuck in having to accept the urgings and outcomes of Madison Avenue consumer hype.  We are not helpless in front of economic power players calling for more consumption. We are not helpless in our ability to design a more adaptive future. We can choose; we make the systems that we then obey. It’s time to make, and demand systems that sustain us, that carry us, not destroy us. A carrying capacity level of consumption can be socially equitable, as it will not allow vast accumulations of wealth by a few. A carrying capacity is sustainable for the environment, society and economy. A carrying capacity is fundamentally cooperative, a choice to live and not die.

Carrying capacity embodies the social equity and resource stewardship needed to care for all. What more incentive do people need than to see that our actions now will preserve life for countless beings in the future, being just like us. We are they. Thou art that.

Otherwise a collapse born out of selfish, every dog form himself memes will be our sad and wasted legacy.

Suggestions on how to dial down consumption:

Locally, housing and social equity needs to be a top priority, not as isolated mitigations but rather as part of a systemic change to a carrying capacity (sustainable) regional human system. A system that grows our own food, feeds and houses all, takes care of the heath and aging needs of all, cares for the environment and water resources, and does it cooperatively. However, regional sustainability cannot pretend to be actually sustainable by funding it with high energy use economic heroin, with a high tourism transportation footprint GHG and conspicuous consumption by others to finance it all.

Forget the JC and get Spanish 1 at a Thrift store; get a small group together and learn it yourself. Native Spanish speakers go get an old English 1 textbook; do the same thing. Then mix groups, create some ties, teach each other; throw down for activities that socially enrich and that don’t cost money.

For entertainment, consume stuff that has already been produced. Some items take energy to produce, but can last a lifetime, and be vehicles for our vast creative potential. A musical instrument fills the bill, and is the basis for performance or a dance. Thrift stores near universities frequently have great books, for 50 cents or a dollar.

Get a solar charger for your device and computer. This takes care of verbal capacity and communication/ networking needs and lowers energy demand. If only Silicon Valley would stop making computers etc. obsolete every 5 years…

Fight the power and don’t allowing advertising and spin to substitute for sound understandings and policy. Get off the inane and trivial social media, and to satisfy innate capacities, become involved in public policy. Study the issues, cultivate your opinion, show up, and let it rip.

Let public officials know that an unquestioned allegiance to the status quo might just be a death sentence for our civilization. It’s time for those with power to as the Hidden in Plain Sight study implores think and act outside the box.