The following is a paper I wrote last year for an environmental sociology class I took as a senior. Hope you enjoy it.
Introduction
Imagine, if you will, a future where people no longer bore into the planet or cut down trees for materials; rather, people trudge through landfills sifting for metals and plastic to be recycled and reused. It’s not much of a stretch when one considers just how close we have come to exhausting the planet’s finite resources today. Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, corporations have been engaged in a global race to deplete every natural and finite resource such as oil, trees and water all while producing waste and toxic byproducts which pollute our environment at an alarming rate. Unsustainable practices have become our lifeways. Nearly all of the western world has become highly dependent on fossil fuels and relies heavily on the conveniences and comforts derived from modern luxuries, amenities and technological advances.
America is said to be a very individualistic nation where we are afforded the privilege to be unique and expressive. Theoretically, everyone here is afforded the same opportunity to be educated and to make their way up the totem pole of socioeconomic success. Whether it be a promotion from store manager to regional supervisor, a highly paid executive board position or a lucky break playing the stock market, we can do as much or as little to increase our monetary earnings as we desire. And with that comes a level of expectations from your peers to engage in similar habits and social practices. You may be expected or required to dress a certain way, drive a certain kind of vehicle, eat certain foods or dine at certain establishments, live in a certain kind of house in a certain kind of neighborhood and engage in the same level of consumerism as the rest of the crowd.
The higher up the income bracket you move in America, the more you are expected to feed the cycle of consumption which drives our economy and keeps us at a very high level of comfort.
For the most part, we need not grow or forage for food or collect water from natural sources and we do not have to acquire much in the way of vocational skills above what is needed to maintain at least a minimum wage job in order to earn enough money to purchase the most basic survival needs. This, of course, keeps us heavily dependent as well on the monetary system. All any capable individual needs to do in order to maintain a fairly decent standard of living is be willing to dedicate about a third of five or six days out of the week to performing mundane tasks in exchange for money which will purchase any and all goods and services necessary to sustain life.
But if one is to belong to the appropriate socioeconomic strata, then one must partake of the same level of consumerism, if not more. In this game, consumption is key. It might be well and good for a college student from a working class family to brown bag their lunch, but when that individual graduates and begins to climb the corporate ladder, it will be seen as odd if he brings leftovers to the office for lunch instead of ordering from the fancy deli with everyone else. If he continues to wear the same beat up old shoes that got him through a long cold semester he may not get a promotion. If he does not splurge for an oversized television with cable and premium channels, the office Super Bowl party will likely not take place at his home, even less so if he still lives in the same old apartment rather than have moved into a nice condominium upon getting the new job.
Our self-esteem is often measured by how happy we are with ourselves and our lives overall; how confident we feel. Our consumerist society is believed to be happiest when we are shopping and buying all of the newest styles and fashions and trending commodities such as electronic devices, cell phones, video games, kitchen appliances and even cars to name a few. Everything is designed and redesigned year after year to create the new model or new version of nearly everything. Advertisers bombard us with repetitive campaigns, memorable slogans and catchy songs. News and talk shows air regular reports on what is “new” and “hot” each season and during holidays. And many of us go along with it out of fear of being social outcasts. We rarely stop to think about how our participation in this cycle is impacting more than just our societal structures and depleting our sense of values, it is depleting every natural finite resource known to man and creating an environmental problem we can no longer afford to ignore.
Structural Causes
Most lay people and experts alike will cite many causes of environmental destruction which seem to make perfect sense, e.g., deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, dumping of toxic waste products, so on and so forth. On the surface this would appear to be the truth and of course it is, in essence. However, there is something underlying these physical structural causes which stems from the human psyche, or the manipulation thereof. In other words, we, primarily in the West, have been conditioned to believe we desire life to be a certain way and we must desire the goods and services which facilitate our modern convenient lifeways and practices. Before the industrial revolution and the advent of mass media and communication our culture was not as fast paced and consumer based. People sourced materials and foods locally; and while we had a monetary system in place, people still bartered goods and services. Advertising was less common, salespeople would have to go door to door and mom and pop shops were part of the community.
At the start of World War I, the US Army employed the expertise of a man by the name of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, whom at the time was living in New York, to advise them on conducting a campaign urging citizens to join the war effort. Bernays opened the world’s first public relations firm then, and is considered to be the father of propaganda (Curtis. 2005). He had studied his uncle’s work closely and understood that humans were emotionally driven and that we have a need to feel a sense of belonging, along which comes a sense of safety and security. This was outlined later on by Abraham Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs model.
Armed with his understanding of group think and mastery of emotional manipulation, Bernays continued his work and accomplished such things as: convincing women that smoking cigarettes would empower them and their movement for social justice, convincing the public that eggs and bacon were the all American breakfast foods and convincing the entire world that the lightbulb was invented by Thomas Edison when in fact it was an accomplishment of Joseph Swan, British physicist and chemist. Later on, a good portion of his career was spent working on marketing campaigns for Proctor & Gamble/Ivory Soap as well as being the mastermind behind the Dixie disposable cups scheme having convinced the public that it is more sanitary to throw a cup away than to have to wash and reuse it; and it made for less domestic work which was great for housewives (Curtis. 2005).
As Bernays went about his career having widespread impact on the psyche and lifestyles of the American public, major corporations went on to develop newer “space-age” materials and more convenient household appliance, stronger cleaning agents and so-called health and beauty products. However, there was another phenomenon unfolding from within the schools of design and manufacturing industries, i.e., planned and perceived obsolescence.
This story begins in Shelby, Ohio at the start of the twentieth century with the Shelby Light Bulb Company and an incandescent lightbulb that would come to be known as the Centennial Light. Shelby manufactured lightbulbs that as far as anyone can tell to this day will last over a million hours. We know this because one of their earliest bulbs was installed in Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California where the very same bulb remains in the ceiling and lit as of this writing (it has outlived two webcams!). While this is exciting to learn, the story does not have a happy ending.
In 1924, General Electric organized a team of individuals known as the Phoebus Cartel whose task it was to buy out the Shelby Light Bulb Company and help establish a global standard setting lightbulb life expectancy at not more than one thousand hours. With the help of overseas conglomerates, they were quite successful up until World War II. By then, this idea caught on with other major global manufacturers of consumer goods and even became a routine practice. It was not only applied to electronics and appliances; nylon stockings were originally designed and created sturdy enough to tow a car with, with planned obsolescence they would get runs in them after a short while needing to be replaced frequently. This practice made items less expensive, abundant and easily replaceable, which increased demand and in turn supply. It would seem good for the monetary economy in that it necessitates the constant flux of production and consumption (Dannoritzer. 2010).
Economics
When we hear the word “economics”, we often think of the monetary system and the markets wich it accompanies. For some time now, most of the planet has traded goods and services in terms of monetary exchanges or the incurrence of monetary debt. At one time, US currency was backed by precious materials, namely gold. More recently, it is regulated by the Federal Reserve and printed or created digitally as needed, regardless of value, and loaned to the government with interest. This money is then circulated among the public and private sectors and used to create goods and pay for services. Everything is commoditized in the West. Very few Americans provide their own needs by growing or foraging for food, collecting water from natural sources or producing energy by way of ingenuity and technological knowhow. Most of us could not even build a house if we had to. All of these barebones necessities are for sale and nearly every one of us is buying.
Economy in and of itself refers to the management of goods and services within a particular group or between groups within a geographic region, although today our monetary economy is played out on a global stage with the manufacturing of goods scattered around the globe, materials being extracted from regions typically oceans away from factories and factories typically oceans away from warehouses which are often thousands of miles from retail outlets. This means that the monetary value of goods is not only based on the amount of materials it takes to manufacture the goods and labor, but the cost of transporting and warehousing the goods must be taken into account. And if those goods are perishable the cost of warehousing increases with the need to preserve. In addition to the monetary cost to retailers and consumers, we must factor in the expense of environmental destruction at the point of extraction where natural resources are depleted, at the point of manufacturing when the process creates toxic byproducts and waste, the cost of pollution at the point of disposal and the cost to indigenous peoples as their land is ravaged (Leonard. 2013).
Ideology
The economy described above relies on the cycle of production and consumption, or consumerism. In order for a consumer based economy to thrive, the consumer, in this case the whole of the American public, must desire a consumptive way of life. One must be motivated to want more than just what is needed to survive, more so even than what is needed to live a comfortable and convenient life (Lebow. 1955). Industries do this by using Bernays’ well-established tactics of playing into the human psyche and creating an emotional connection to a product or company. Consumer goods become engrained in the collective mind by way of landmarks, catchy jingles, holidays, loveable and relatable characters, stories, and memories. The television show Mad Men captures this well, albeit with much creative license.
The primary aim of planned obsolescence is to drive the economy to remain in flux with monetary gains in favor of corporations and those who feed the machine their currency. Perceived obsolescence is a whole other animal. Its primary aim is to create the illusion that we are in tow with the status quo and that we want to be in mode so as to be accepted as part of the dominant social group. Planned obsolescence is simply the belief that what was “hot” before is no longer in style only because there is a new ad campaign for a slightly different product which must now be consumed, only because it is being supplied. Where the demand did not exist, marketing garners it.
Social Cultural Practices
For several generations at least, certainly since my father was born in the 1940’s, those of us living in and around densely populated metropolitan and suburban areas have not had to give much thought to where our waste goes and what happens to it. We can toss all of our garbage to the curb or take it to large dumpsters where it is hauled away by trucks never to be seen by us again. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind, or so we have thought until recently. We are not only running out of space for our waste, we are also running out of resources to create the products we dispose of. Also, in America, our government has passed regulation banning the disposal of certain toxins into and around our environment; corporations have taken to shipping some of their waste, particularly e-waste (electronic parts destined for landfills), overseas to be dumped in third world and developing nations were regulations are less strict or nonexistent (Wieser. 2016).
We can see the impact of our consumerist and consumptive ways when we look to the inner cities and see how over populated and crowded they have become. People have moved into metropolitan areas because it is easier to get a job and commute than it is to live in a more rural area and grow or forage for food. Indigenous people in parts of South America, Africa, and India are being forced out of their once natural resource rich habitats and made to work in factories producing the commodities we consume at very high costs to their sovereignty and wellbeing. In China, the manufacturers of Apple’s iPods had to install suicide nets around their buildings because the negative health effects of the chemicals used to make the devices are so detrimental that workers were throwing themselves out of the windows. Yet we await each new version of the iPod with eagerness as if the one we have in our pocket, which is working perfectly fine, is no good (Leonard 2013).
Conclusion
These were difficult pages to make it through without becoming increasingly angry at the situation. As I discuss the idea of consumerism relating to one’s sense of belonging, I cannot help but recall how it feels to so often be the only one in a room full of people making what are small sacrifices for the sake of our planet’s future. I am not bothered by the notion of being considered a social outcast or radical. What is more disturbing is knowing that it is possible to greatly reduce my own negative impact on the environment by mitigating my level of consumption and consumerism and trying to set the example while seeing others shrug their shoulders and make statements that begin with “yeah, but…”.
It does take an effort in the beginning when transitioning from conventional consumerism to a greener more sustainable lifestyle. My family and I have had to learn to make health and beauty products and cleaning agents. We have begun to learn how to grow a number of different vegetables, herbs and spices and how to preserve them naturally. It also takes time and effort researching the products we do buy so that we know we are buying the most ethically sourced, eco-friendly and sustainable commodities. We have had to make many radical changes to our diets and cultural practices such as the celebration of holidays. We have also had to learn how to optimally reuse, recycle and upcycle as much of the things that we own and use as possible. It takes work.
We have been able to do this while living on an extremely fixed income and will certainly continue to learn and make improvements where needed. As our income and socioeconomic status grows, so too will our efforts to reduce our environmental impact. Some strive to make more money so they can have more things and live an easier life, we strive to be more viable and productive members of our community so that we can be an example to all concerned citizens wishing to do their part to minimize our collective impact on not just our local ecosystem, but the entire planet. We may soon have a presidential cabinet in Washington DC whom will care very little about environmental issues, but we can vote with our dollars by no longer spending them as consumers, rather spending them to build local, ethical, eco-friendly and sustainable independent economies.
References
Curtis, A. (Director). (2005). The Century of the self [Video file]. England: BBC Two.
Dannoritzer, C. (Director). (2010). The Light Bulb Conspiracy [Video file]. France: Arte France.
Fresco, J., & Meadows, R. (n.d). Engineering a New Vision of Tomorrow. Futurist, 36(1), 33. Lebow, V. (1955). Price Competition in 1955. Journal of Retailing, Spring.
Leonard, A. (2013). The Human Cost of STUFF. Yes!, (67), 17-22.
M., E. (2016). Slowing the Flow. Library Journal, 141(15), 40.
Sachs, J. (2014). You Be the Hero. Yes!, (70), 40-42.
The Venus Project. (1995). Futurist, 29(6), 66.
Wieser, H. (2016). Beyond Planned Obsolescence. GAIA: Ecological Perspectives For Science & Society, 156-160. doi:10.14512/gaia.25.3.5
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