Sustainable Consumption Quotes

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money. This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption. This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.

The system of consumerism may seem like an immovable fact of modern life. But it is not. That the system was manufactured suggests that we can reshape those forces to create healthier, more sustainable system with a more fulfilling goal than 'more stuff

Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

The problem isn’t just the type of energy we’re using; it’s what we are doing with it. Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill – all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain. We will do these things because our economic system demands that we grow production and consumption at an exponential rate.

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption.

In paying attention to our wellbeing, we address the needs of our environment - the society that we live in and our planet. Sustainability depends on community - when we learn to be happily reliant on each other, we're less likely to turn to material consumption to meet our emotional needs.

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.

Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten. All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self-sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agon of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy.

If a business borrows to buy a machine, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. During the past six years, America—its government, its families, the country as a whole—has been borrowing to sustain its consumption. Meanwhile, investment in fixed assets—the plants and equipment that help increase our wealth—has been declining.

The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty.

Sustainability depends on community—when we learn to be happily reliant on each other, we’re less likely to turn to material consumption to meet our emotional needs.

It means that, while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can’t fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you’ve thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fill the void again. It’s the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it’s a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption.

I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.

Magnesium is believed to reduce the brain damage sustained during a stroke by reducing the massive amount of excitatotoxicity that is associated with this event.  Not only does magnesium help in this context, high magnesium consumption is believed to confer a degree of protection against stroke

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

Too much consumption is not the problem. Actually it's the opposite. The problem is that we don't consume enough. The problem is waste - which only exists when something is produced but not consumed. So what we need is a system whereby everything produced is consumed. That system is Permaculture Economics.

But if the saleslady means what she says—and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past— then it must follow that the other articles in the past were also you and are no longer. How can that be? It could only be because some sort of consumption takes place. The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self.

since the advent of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1977, consumption data from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that Americans have been doing exactly what they have been told to. Americans have consumed less meat and dairy and replaced their animal fats with vegetable oils. They’ve eaten more grains, fruits, and vegetables. And what has happened? A tsunami of obesity the likes of which the world has never seen.

That might have led to an Easter-Island–like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more nearly sustainable resource consumption rates. The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.

In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

Got Milk — Or Leave It? Dairy is best kept to a minimum. There are many good reasons not to consume dairy. For example, there is a strong association between dairy lactose and ischemic heart disease. There is also a clear association between high–growth–promoting foods such as dairy products and cancer. There is a clear association between milk consumption and bladder, prostate, colorectal, and testicular cancers. Dairy fat is also loaded with various toxins and is the primary source of our nation's high exposure to dioxin. Dioxin is a highly toxic chemical compound that even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admits is a prominent cause of many types of cancer in those consuming dairy fat, such as butter and cheese. Cheese is also a power inducer of acid load, which increases calcium loss further. Considering that cheese and butter are the foods with the highest saturated–fat content and the major source of our dioxin exposure, cheese is a particularly foolish choice for obtaining calcium. Cow's milk is "designed" to be the perfect food for the rapidly growing calf, but as mentioned above, foods that promote rapid growth promote cancer.

A free-market system is one in which economic production and consumption are determined by the free choices of individuals rather than governments, and this process is grounded in private ownership of the means of production. In very simple, practical terms, a free-market system means that people, not the government, own the farms, businesses, and properties in a nation (“the means of production”). “Fundamentally,” says Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, “there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals—the technique of the market place.”47

What is happening in “the last mile” (the access networks) caused by the end user’s behavior will have a big impact on the debate of data center sustainability. Research conducted by Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne (CEET 2013) show that by 2015 wireless cloud (Wi-Fi and cellular technology) will consume between 32 TWh (low scenario) and 43 TWh (high scenario) compared to only 9.2 TWh in 2012. An increase between 248% and 367%. The take-up of wireless devices is shown by the fact that global mobile data traffic overall is currently increasing at 78% per annum and mobile cloud traffic specifically is increasing at 95% per annum. Wireless cloud traffic is about 20% of mobile traffic and approximately 35% of data center traffic. The result of this is that wireless access network technologies account for 90% of total wireless cloud energy consumption. Data centers account for only about 9%. The energy consumption of wireless user devices is negligible.

Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tackling solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to stop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, isn't going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It's going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place. {...} There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us—but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable.

How can someone be considered wealthy if, for example, he is worth only $460,000? After all, he’s not a millionaire. Charles Bobbins is a forty-one-year-old fireman. His wife is a secretary. They have a combined annual income of $55,000. According to our research findings, Mr. Bobbins should have a net worth of approximately $225,500. But he is worth much more than others in his income/age category. Mr. and Mrs. Bobbins have been able to accumulate an above-average amount of net worth. Thus, they apparently know how to live on a fireman’s and secretary’s income and still save and invest a good bit. They likely have a low-consumption lifestyle. And given this lifestyle, Mr. Bobbins could sustain himself and his family for ten years without working. Within their income and age categories, the Bobbinses are wealthy. The

When the corporation’s investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company’s growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can’t get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can’t credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption.

In their studies, students who successfully acquired one positive habit reported less stress; less impulsive spending; better dietary habits; decreased alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine consumption; fewer hours watching TV; and even fewer dirty dishes. Sustain the discipline long enough on one habit, and not only does it become easier, but so do other things as well. It’s why those with the right habits seem to do better than others. They’re doing the most important thing regularly and, as a result, everything else is easier.

A free market system is one in which economic production and consumption are determined by the free choices of individuals rather than by governments, and this process is grounded in private ownership of the means of production.

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

You reflect yourself in your creations, and they reflect themselves in their consumption and self-expression. The combination leaves both sides fulfilled. In a world where human creativity is the last remaining sustainable, competitive advantage and the principle driver of value creation, your most potent weapon is you.

To defend what we love is sanity; insanity is to continue to act with irresponsibility when a biological limit has been overrun, and with it the deepest human propriety. One-third of the world’s natural resources have already been expended, so it doesn’t take much effort to figure out that current levels of consumption are far from indefinitely sustainable.

Iain Pirie, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick University, argues that it’s not just the way women are represented in the media that’s helping to fuel this rise (a well-documented problem), but capitalism itself, which has corrupted our relationship with our own bodies and the food that sustains them. Pirie argues that the cycle of bingeing and purging that characterizes bulimia nervosa is similar to the accelerated and chaotic consumption that underpins modern culture and is vital for economic growth.18 The conflicting expectations placed on our bodies by advertisers – bombarding us with messages that food is a reward and a compensation (Have a break, have a KitKat), while at the same time telling us that not eating puts us higher on the moral and social hierarchy – are actually deadly.† Eating so much it hurts and then throwing it up in a fit of utter self-loathing is the perfect metaphor for consumerism.

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

If we focus on substance over size, sustainability over consumption, we can create a solo business that is efficient and profitable. This may seem entirely conceptual (and it is), but changing your philosophy from “Bigger is Better” to “Business Edited” will allow you more freedom, flexibility, and profit. Living Business Edited You may want to grow your business into a thriving company. And that’s a great goal. But the philosophy can be the same. Create a business based on substance over size. Bigger is not better. Become an expert in efficiency and embrace the less stuff, less overhead philosophy. Here are a few examples of how to live Business Edited: Focus on a niche instead of trying to do everything for everyone (think small target market over large target market) Get rid of paper – no one reads brochures! Embrace technology that helps you integrate and organize (think iPad over PC) Choose sustainable and local whenever you can Create a leaner office space Choose dual purpose items Don’t purchase “stuff”  – purchase only what you truly need Minimalism

He respected Ellen’s choice as one she felt compelled to make, not easy for her, but necessary. He also hoped when he heard her reasons, he could argue her past them, and the hoping was… awful. Hope and Val Windham were old enemies. Best enemies. He’d hoped his brother Victor would recover, but consumption seldom eased its grip once its victims had been chosen. He’d hoped his hand wasn’t truly getting worse, until he couldn’t deny that reality without losing use of the hand entirely. He’d hoped his brother Bart would come home from war safe and sound, not in a damned coffin. He’d hoped St. Just might escape military service without substantial wound to body or soul, but found even St. Just had left part of his sanity and his spirit at Waterloo. He’d hoped he might someday do something with his music, but what that silly hope was about, he’d never been quite sure. And now, he was hoping he and Ellen had a future. The hope sustained him and tortured him and made each second pass too quickly when he was with her. But he couldn’t always be with her, because Ellen insisted she have time to tend her gardens and set up her little conservatory. Val

Here is why the wellbeing economy comes at the right time. At the international level there have been some openings, which can be exploited to turn the wellbeing economy into a political roadmap. The first was the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The SDGs are a loose list of 17 goals, ranging from good health and personal wellbeing to sustainable cities and communities as well as responsible production and consumption. They are a bit scattered and inconsistent, like most outcomes of international negotiations, but they at least open up space for policy reforms. For the first time in more than a century, the international community has accepted that the simple pursuit of growth presents serious problems. Even when it comes at high speed, its quality is often debatable, producing social inequalities, lack of decent work, environmental destruction, climate change and conflict. Through the SDGs, the UN is calling for a different approach to progress and prosperity. This was made clear in a 2012 speech by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who explicitly connected the three pillars of sustainable development: ‘Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible.’82 Unlike in the previous century, we now have a host of instruments and indicators that can help politicians devise different policies and monitor results and impacts throughout society. Even in South Africa, a country still plagued by centuries of oppression, colonialism, extractive economic systems and rampant inequality, the debate is shifting. The country’s new National Development Plan has been widely criticised because of the neoliberal character of the main chapters on economic development. Like the SDGs, it was the outcome of negotiations and bargaining, which resulted in inconsistencies and vagueness. Yet, its opening ‘vision statement’ is inspired by a radical approach to transformation. What should South Africa look like in 2030? The language is uplifting: We feel loved, respected and cared for at home, in community and the public institutions we have created. We feel understood. We feel needed. We feel trustful … We learn together. We talk to each other. We share our work … I have a space that I can call my own. This space I share. This space I cherish with others. I maintain it with others. I am not self-sufficient alone. We are self-sufficient in community … We are studious. We are gardeners. We feel a call to serve. We make things. Out of our homes we create objects of value … We are connected by the sounds we hear, the sights we see, the scents we smell, the objects we touch, the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the dreams we imagine. We are a web of relationships, fashioned in a web of histories, the stories of our lives inescapably shaped by stories of others … The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all … Our land is our home. We sweep and keep clean our yard. We travel through it. We enjoy its varied climate, landscape, and vegetation … We live and work in it, on it with care, preserving it for future generations. We discover it all the time. As it gives life to us, we honour the life in it.83 I could have not found better words to describe the wellbeing economy: caring, sharing, compassion, love for place, human relationships and a profound appreciation of what nature does for us every day. This statement gives us an idea of sufficiency that is not about individualism, but integration; an approach to prosperity that is founded on collaboration rather than competition. Nowhere does the text mention growth. There’s no reference to scale; no pompous images of imposing infrastructure, bridges, stadiums, skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. We make the things we need. We, as people, become producers of our own destiny. The future is not about wealth accumulation, massive

Your total animal-product consumption (beef, poultry, fish, dairy products) should be limited to twelve ounces or less per week. Keep

The China Project showed a strong correlation between cancer and the amount of animal protein, not just animal fat, consumed.6 Consumption of lean meats and poultry still showed a strong correlation with higher cancer incidence. These findings indicate that even low-fat animal foods such as skinless white-meat chicken are implicated in certain cancers.

Epidemiologic studies indicate an inverse association between frequency of nut and seed consumption and body mass index. Interestingly, their consumption may actually suppress appetite and help people get rid of diabetes and lose weight.38 In other words, populations consuming more nuts and seeds are likely to be slim, and people consuming less seeds and nuts are more likely to be heavier. Well-controlled

Locavorism is appealing as an environmental strategy because it permits its practitioners to believe they're doing good for the world by doing good for themselves, and to recast their consumption and nutrition preferences as contributions to humanity....

Good On You (goodonyou.eco) is currently the world’s leading source for fashion sustainability ratings. Led by campaigners, scientists, academics and industry insiders, the Good On You directory features 2,200 brands at the time of writing, all rated by a five-point system that takes into account more than fifty different certification schemes and standards. Child labour, modern slavery, worker safety, living wages, energy use, carbon emissions, water consumption, chemical waste, animal welfare – it’s all represented.

One could argue that time is the most valuable thing we have or “own.” We even seem to have a cultural and societal agreement on this, materializing in sayings like “time flies,” “life is short,” “our children are only on loan,” etc. It therefore seems odd that time is one of the “things” that we easily give away. We sell our time for money that we spend on new consumer goods instead of limiting our consumption in order to make it possible to sell less of our time. We engage in “ought to” events and arrangements that we don’t really want to attend in order to fit in. We waste our time on insignificant series and movies that are provided to us by endless streaming services in order to feel ready for another day of selling our time. This vicious circle is unsustainable.

Let’s not fall into the trap of conventions and habits and convince ourselves that the way we are consuming now is next to impossible to alter because of regulated options, economic limitations, cultural norms, accessibility, or whichever excuse we come up with. Let’s remember that just as it is momentarily the norm to mindlessly shop and consume, it could easily become the new norm not to; to radically reduce one’s consumption and to focus on the usage and aesthetic nourishment of the objects one owns and invests in. Something being the norm doesn’t mean that it is carved in stone. Norms are changeable. Not easily changeable, but nevertheless changeable. Cherishing, mending, and repairing one’s belongings could become the new normal.

I am not on a mission that involves preaching doomsday. Yes, there are definitely a lot of pollution-based problems in the world. And, yes, we most certainly need to change our consumption and production ways radically in order to stop ongoing climate change, inequality, and mindless consumption. But I think that one of the many reasons this “turning things around” is so hard is that the way we are being told to change things is lecture-based and fear driven.

1.​Textile production produces an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.47 2.​The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did just fifteen years ago, and keeps them for about half as long.48 3.​By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent, from 62 million tonnes to 102 million tonnes. That’s equivalent to more than 500 billion extra T-shirts.49 4.​By 2050, the equivalent of almost three earths could be required to provide the natural resources it would take to sustain our current lifestyles.50 5.​A polyester shirt has more than double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt.51 And yet the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt can take 2,700 litres of water to grow – that’s enough drinking water to last a person three years.52 6.​At its current rate, the fashion industry is projected to use 35 per cent more land to grow fibres by 2030. That’s an extra 115 million hectares of land that could otherwise be used to grow food, or left to protect biodiversity.53 7.​Approximately 80 per cent of workers in the global garment industry are women aged 18–35.54 But only 12.5 per cent of clothing companies have a female CEO.55 8.​Among seventy-one leading retailers in the UK, 77 per cent believe there is a likelihood of modern slavery (forced labour) occurring at some stage in their supply chains.56 9.​More than 90 per cent of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility of negotiating their wages and conditions.57 10.​Increasing the price of a garment in the shop by 1 per cent could be enough to pay the workers who made it a living wage.58

It is prudent to analyze the dynamics of innovations and its sustainable transition.

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Once you cross a certain threshold, money doesn’t get you more happiness. Our main concern is that if you have growth which is blind, fed by people’s growing consumption, it’s not really sustainable. What we are trying to do in our own little context is see what pattern of growth will be sustainable and desirable.” Fellow Traveler The secretary introduces me to another government minister, a fortyish gentleman who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Everything about the investment process is a series of trade-offs. Investing itself is delaying current consumption for future consumption. You can either try to maximize your chances of getting rich or minimize your chances of missing out on your goals and becoming poor. You have to be willing to accept periodic large losses to earn higher long-term returns. Or you have to save a lot more money to accept lower returns and decrease your chances of short-term losses. You have to be able to sleep at night, but also be able to sustain your living standards throughout retirement. You have to worry about certain spending needs in the near-term but also your spending needs many decades out. Decisions, decisions.

consumption of flour, which raises blood sugar more than table sugar does, is

It is high-fructose consumption that turns on fat production and storage in your liver through a process called lipogenesis.

Vegetables. Fruits. Nuts. Seeds. Meats. Eggs. Fish. That’s it. For millions of years our ancestors survived purely from these 7 things. Typically, the women gathered the nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables while men hunted for meat. Together these food sources provided the necessary components of a complete diet that sustained healthy living. Climate, geography, and luck mainly determined how balanced these sources were. But remember, regardless of how much of each food they ate, these were the only foods available to our ancestors, so naturally our bodies have adapted to their consumption. It wasn’t until about ten thousand years ago, a blip in our time on Earth, with the cultivation of plants and domestication of animals, that large quantities of breads, potatoes, rice, pasta, and dairy became available. These relatively new sources of calories were the main reason our complex societies were able to develop, and our overabundance is to a large degree due to them. However, for millions of years our bodies evolved on diets without any of these. The relatively miniscule time span since the domestication of plants and animals has not prepared us to live healthy lives with diets consisting of too many breads, pastas, rice, and potatoes. Yes, life expectancy has greatly increased in this time span, but this can be attributed not to new foods, but rather to man’s no longer having to live life on-the-go while dealing with hunger, thirst, illness, injuries, extreme cold, and fighting dangerous animals with primitive tools. So think of these new calories as little more than fillers. If you find yourself overwhelmed by nutritional definitions and rules, just ask yourself this: For millions of years before the domestication of plants and animals, what did we eat?

Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at a healthy 3 percent annually. By 2050 it would in theory reach $138 trillion. With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per-capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam, in the course of which—and this worries me even if it doesn’t worry you—the effort to enlarge productive land will wipe out a large part of the world’s fauna and flora. “The appropriation of productive land—the ecological footprint—is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it’s growing larger. A recent study building on this concept estimated that the human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth’s sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972. In short, Earth has lost its ability to regenerate—unless global consumption is reduced, or global production is increased, or both.

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53 With this new, organic farming system, fresh and minimally processed whole foods would be more abundant and possibly cheaper. But such a system wouldn’t favour the monocultures required for UPF that do so much damage. By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall (without the requirement for fossil-fuel-based agrochemical inputs) – and those of UPF would rise.

Regardless of the issues with defining and measuring dietary fiber, if you examine the Nutrition Facts Labels of many packaged foods, you will find that dietary fiber is lacking in much of what we normally eat. Packaged foods made with refined flour and copious amounts of added sugars provide no sustenance for the microbiota and likely translate into guts populated by starving microbes. The FDA recommends that an adult male consume 38 grams of dietary fiber per day while a woman should consume 29 grams. Despite these recommendations, the average American consumes a measly 15 grams of dietary fiber per day, a deficiency that is undoubtedly contributing to the malformation of the Western microbiota. While images of emaciated microbes may be floating through your mind, this is not strictly the case: bacteria can be extremely resourceful in their dietary-fiber-deprived state. That is because they have another source of carbohydrates, our intestinal mucus. During times of low fiber consumption, gut bacteria can sustain themselves on the carbohydrates that our intestinal cells continually secrete into the gut environment, which serves as a barrier to protect our own human cells from direct contact with the microbiota. But by feasting on mucus carbohydrates, our microbes deplete the protective gut mucus layer, compromising barrier function and increasing inflammation. While the long-term effects of less gut mucus on human health are still unknown, preliminary experiments suggest that loss of intestinal mucus can lead to colitis. But the microbiota is very adaptable: provide sustenance in the form of dietary fiber and many microbes will switch their focus from eating your mucus to eating your most recent meal.

Free will is, however, one of the problematic, perhaps even mistaken, beliefs of modernity that ultimately fuel the fires of consumption. Heidegger claims that actions follow from one’s immersion in a culture that socializes individuals to relate to the immediate world according to their historical experience, rather than from some context-free and autonomous choice. Choices are more akin to habits. Unless the actor understands the process and “chooses” it over the idea that the “free self” is at work, the resultant choice of action is inauthentic and lacks meaningfulness for the actor. The more that choice is propelled by social forces, such as advertising and peer pressure, the less authentic the action will be, and the less satisfaction will show up at the root of Being.8

A system that relied on these kinds of promises and deliveries to feed 10,000 people also must have required long-range planning over long time periods. For a city to sustain itself, it takes more than a year-by-year distribution system. How will you make sure, for example, that there will be sufficient meat to feed the city next year? To solve a problem like this, the planner needs to balance current consumption against the rate that flocks and herds replenish themselves. This is a financial problem. A flock of sheep left to itself (and with plenty of pasture) will grow exponentially through time, but this growth also depends on how many are slaughtered for consumption. The mathematics of growth can get really complicated.

Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences.

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true sustainability requires something antithetical: slowing down and being satisfied with what we have and only what we need.

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it’s safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)

In one recent study, people who were given the feedback that their electricity use was above average cut their use, but people who were below average actually increased their use when given information that they were below the neighborhood average (this demonstrates the power of the social norm to influence behavior; people don’t want to be too different, no matter how different is defined). However, this was overcome with a simple “smiley face” drawn on the energy bill. The smiley face indicated social approval for lower energy consumption. People who received the smiley face continued to use less energy.

Evidence for climate change has been available for some time, so why has this 'urgent global response' (in Stern's words) not occurred? The IPCC (2015) have argued that we could limit the effects of climate change by changing our individual and collective behaviour. We could fly less, eat less meat, use public transport, cycle or walk, recycle, choose more low carbon products, have shorter showers, waste less food or reduce home energy use. There has been some significant change but nothing like the 'global response' required to ameliorate the further deleterious effects of climate change. We are reminded here of a somewhat depressing statistic reported by a leading multinational, Unilever, in their 'sustainable Living Plan.' In 2013, they outlined how they were going to halve the greenhouse gas impact of their products across the life cycle by 2020. To achieve this goal, they reduced greenhouse gas emissions from their manufacturing chain. They opted for more environmentally friendly sourcing of raw materials, doubled their use of renewable energy and produced concentrated liquids and powders. They reduced greenhouse gas emissions from transport and greenhouse gas emissions from refrigeration. They also restricted employee travel. The result of all these initiatives was that their 'greenhouse gas footprint impact per consumer... increased by around 5% since 2010.' They concluded, 'We have made good progress in those areas under our control but ... the big challenges are those areas not under direct control like... consumer behaviour ' (2013:16; emphasis added). It seems that consumers are not 'getting the message.' They are not opting for the low carbon alternatives in the way envisaged; they are not changing the length of their showers (to reduce energy and water consumption); they are not breaking their high-carbon habits. The question is why?

Being sustainable is not just about the product itself which is built to endure over time. It’s also about the people, time and energy involved in the process, and the consumption that its existence requires. If any single part of the process cannot be maintained over time, it’s unsustainable.

Resolving [the destruction of nature] is not only down to conservation areas and governmental policies; it’s also down to shifting to more sustainable methods of production and consumption.

Germany borrowed some $600 million a year, of which half went to reparations, the remainder to sustain the rebound in consumption after the years of austerity.

A relentless worker, Myers only stopped producing when he was felled in 2006 by an inoperable brain tumor. He died at fifty-four on March 27, 2007; that week the journal Science published his last, groundbreaking paper: it provided convincing evidence that the decimation of sharks in the Atlantic had produced a cascade of unintended effects that were distorting ecosystems up and down the East Coast. He and his colleagues calculated that between 1970 and 2005, the number of scalloped hammerhead and tiger sharks declined by more than 97 percent, and bull, dusky, and smooth hammerhead sharks dropped by more than 99 percent. During that same period nearly all of the sharks’ prey species exploded: the cownose ray population off the East Coast expanded to as much as forty million. They became the thugs of the ocean, rampaging and pillaging in their quest to sustain their ever-rising numbers. Cownose rays eat tremendous amounts of bay scallops, oysters, and soft-shell and hard clams, and by 2004 their consumption of nearly all the adult scallops in the North Carolina sounds forced the state to shutter its century-old bay scallop fishery.

The time is ripe for confronting consumption. Not only are ecological problems like climate change more pressing than ever, consumerism has lost some of its allure in its North American epicenter. A majority of Americans already feel that their quality of life is suffering because of overemphasis on work and material gain. Encroachment of work and shopping on leisure time has millions of people searching for ways to restore balance in their lives—through lifestyles that trade money for time, commercialism for community, and things for joy. These people—”downshifters” or practitioners of “voluntary simplicity”—may one day attract the majority to their way of life by demonstrating that less stuff can mean more happiness. A North America that prospers without overusing the Earth—a sustainable North America—is entirely possible. All the pieces of the puzzle—from bike- and transit-friendly cities to sustainable farms to low-impact lifestyles—exist, scattered all over the continent. All that remains is for us to do the work of putting the pieces together.

The existential fact is, we do need to use animals compromising their right to live, if we are to sustain health and welfare in human life, but we can reduce that consumption to a great extent. For example, you can avoid clothing that are made by slaughtering animals. We need animals for food, because vegan diet is not necessarily healthy, as I said earlier, but the same is not true for clothing. We do use animals for clothing, but we don't need to. We could do just fine with non-animal and non-cruel clothing and other apparels.

These two trends - the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture - have an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up. I've always taken solace in this dynamic. It means that while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can't fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you've thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fulfill the void again. It's the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it's a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption. But it's always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force - the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die., And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism.

One of the most fascinating areas of research in recent years has been related to the therapeutic value of cruciferous vegetables, which include vegetables in the cabbage family and others such as kale, collards, watercress, arugula, cauliflower, and bok choy. Cruciferous vegetables have the most powerful anti-cancer effects of all foods. Most of the phytonutrients function as antioxidants in your body, meaning they neutralize free radicals, rendering them harmless and reducing cancer risk. The phytonutrients in cruciferous vegetables also activate your body’s own antioxidant control system. These unique compounds cycle through the body for three to five days after consumption, offering protection and fueling numerous bodily systems, enabling them to function more effectively.

I don't need three cars and a great big fucking house [for two people]. But I do and I want it. This is the issue.

I don't need three cars and a great big fucking house [for two people]. But I do and I want it. This is the issue. [The Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. SFI Community Lecture, August 29, 2017]