David Crossley

Voracious consumers no more?

President, Houston Tomorrow, Apr 06, 09.

Tagged with environment, sustainability, planning

In Europe last week, President Obama said “…in some ways the world has become accustomed to the United States being a voracious consumer market and the engine that drives a lot of economic growth worldwide.” Most of the press coverage said that he went on to imply it was unlikely that the world could continue to count on the US in that role.

So the President described the people of the United States as voracious consumers. Others note that China’s growth is also based on a voracious consumer market.

When I searched the term “voracious consumer” in Google on Friday, I found 16,000 pages. Searching it on Sunday evening, I found 28,000.

One of those, on the first page, is about “voracious consumer salaries.” Turns out the average voracious consumer makes $60,000 a year. Yet “average voracious consumer salaries can vary greatly due to company, location, industry, experience and benefits.”

One online observer said “Something about being a ‘voracious consumer market’ does not sound very appealing to me. It sounds like piranhas scrambling for the same meat.”

A long time ago, John Stuart Mill said “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels…are the most desirable lot of mankind.”

It’s not clear whether President Obama is simply talking about reductions in degree, or whether he foresees that consuming is getting a little old as a playful lifestyle that is clearly dangerous for a variety of reasons and therefore maybe we should consider calming our lust for stuff.

One of the Houston region’s public agencies has an internal sustainability group. They found the number of words required to express the way back from the abyss is two: use less.

Is that possible? Can significant numbers of people begin to use less and buy less, and perhaps take the edge off of a lot of thorny issues about the collapse of human civilization and the end of the world and so forth?

We were seeing one big indicator in that direction before last fall’s financial implosion. Americans were driving fewer miles than the previous year, and this trend has continued for about 14 months. This trend began before the interesting experience of $4 gasoline in the summer of 2008.

Something is afoot. Without any serious research, I quickly found a reference that implied the value of Real Estate Investment Trusts dealing with self-storage facilities is down nearly a third. Does this mean anything? Less new stuff and reduced need to store old stuff?

Farmers’ markets are growing, Forty percent of households are growing vegetables. The number of people farming small acreage around Houston is growing. A Google search for “localism” brings back 1,750,000 pages.

But how far can this retreat from voracious consuming go? Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, writing in “Beyond the Limits” in 1992, tried to outline a society in which people lived lives not focused on voracious consumption. They said, among other things:

“From a systems point of view a sustainable society is one that has in place informational, social, and institutional mechanisms to keep in check the positive feedback loops that cause exponential population and capital growth.
“A sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not as a perpetual mandate. It would be neither for nor against growth, rather it would begin to discriminate kinds of growth and purposes for growth.”

They add that whatever such a society would be like in detail, it could hardly be more different from the one in which most people now live. But that reference to “most people” may be a clue to the future. Something on the order of 40% of Americans want a variety of characteristics that can be described as helpful in moving toward sustainability. That is a minority, to be sure, but it is a large and growing minority, and it is moving with the tide of history.

In the next commentary, we’ll note that “sustainability” has become a key term in business and academia, and in some places in politics as well – and we’ll explore what the people who invented the term think it means.

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