Consumption and Environment in a Global Economy • Ken Conca

Consumption and Environment in a Global Economy • Ken Conca KenConsumption Conca and Environment in a Global Economy Not long ago I received an unsolicited mailing from the Sierra Club, containing a request in the form of a sales pitch. The letter urged me to become a Club member, using the problem of logging in America’s national forests to illustrate why I should become involved. The letter presented a powerful explanation for the decline of America’s old-growth forests: The destruction is driven by rapa- cious corporations; access roads on federal lands are a valuable subsidy for the loggers; I and “every honest, tax-paying American” have been subsidizing defor- estation in this manner; the logging constitutes plunder of the public trust, at public expense, for private gain. I was also offered a special, discounted membership rate of $15 and a free gift. In other words, what started out as an urgent appeal for help had shifted into an opportunity to buy into the Sierra Club at a low price. The free gift, a backpack emblazoned with the Club logo, was pitched as “Perfect for a hike in the woods or a picnic in the park” and something that would “help you show your support for all the Club’s efforts on behalf of our environment.” The promotional ºyer—JOIN NOW and you’ll receive this FREE GIFT!—carefully described the backpack’s special features, differentiating it from all the other backpacks presumably already owned by the recipients of this mailing. Timothy Luke has argued that such practices expose much of today’s main- stream environmentalism as a form of consumerism.1 Luke argues that despite the genuine accomplishments of groups such as the Sierra Club, “Environmen- talism, like corporate capitalism, increasingly is forced to pitch its messages in consumerist terms to win any widespread popular support.”2 For Luke, common practices—such as marketing calendars with glossy, surreal, and dehumanized images of nature, or privatizing landscapes in order to protect them, or promot- ing eco-tourism to generate revenue for environmental protection—reveal main- stream environmental NGOs to be engaged in the commodiªcation of nature. This harsh criticism may be warranted—particularly for those groups busy developing schemes to buy and sell slices of the Earth’s atmosphere, or engaged 1. Luke 1998, 175–212. 2. Ibid., 175. Global Environmental Politics 1:3, August 2001 © 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638001316881403 by guest on 27 September 2021 54 • Consumption and Environment in a Global Economy in promotional giveaways of wild-animal trading cards with gasoline retailers. No doubt they would reply that these are necessary evils in the quest for real- world environmental protection. In any event, what struck me most about this episode was the absence of any recognition—in both the forest narrative and the backpack giveaway—that consumption patterns constituted part of the problem. When environmental problems crowded their way onto the international agenda in the early 1970s, overconsumption was a central theme in the dis- course of many environmentalists. The UN Conference on the Human Environ- ment, held in Stockholm in 1972, framed the problem of environmental deteri- oration primarily as a byproduct of afºuence. The notion that human society was beginning to encounter “limits to growth” strongly informed ideas about the link between economic growth and environmental degradation. This frame created substantial discord between the industrialized coun- tries and the less-developed world, which argued that the North’s international environmental agenda could stiºe development in the South. The resulting im- passe forced a new look at the links among environmental degradation, poverty, and economic development, which in turn yielded some powerful insights: Not all forms of economic activity do equal environmental harm; there is a pollution of poverty as well as a pollution of afºuence; careful attention must be paid to the quality or “sustainability” of growth. These themes were stressed in Our Common Future, the inºuential report of the Brundtland Commission which provided the framework for the 1992 Earth Summit. To be sure, focusing on sustainability marked an advance over some of the more simplistic notions of ironclad limits to growth that marked the Stock- holm-era debate. But one side effect of reframing the problem this way was to shift attention overwhelmingly toward the need for more efªcient, cleaner production systems—and away from the consuming interests and needs fed by those systems. Thus, the Brundtland Commission saw no contradiction in offer- ing a vision of global sustainability that presumed a ªve-fold increase in world economic output.3 The notion of sustainable growth has been a salve to the many environmental organizations and movement groups that have been reluctant to launch a frontal assault on the values and practices underpinning the consumer society—preferring instead to channel their energies into regulatory and technological strategies of environmental protection. The ironic result is that, at a time when social theorists see consumption, consumerism, and the globalization of consumption patterns as increasingly important phenomena, the centrality of consumption to ecological worldviews and environmental activism seems to have faded.4 This subordination of consumption is alarming because traditional 3. World Commission on Environment and Development 1987. 4. See for example, Firat and Dholakia 1998. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638001316881403 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ken Conca • 55 supply-side strategies of technological and regulatory controls seem increasingly ineffective in the face of deepening trade integration, accelerating capital mobility, technological innovation, and changes in the organization of production—that is, in the face of globalization. In this article I will argue that changes in the world economy are giving new importance to the question of consumption and its linkages to global environmental degradation, for two reasons. First, economic globalization is alter- ing the nature of the “consumption problem.” We tend to see the world in terms of an overconsuming North (with its pollution of afºuence) and an underconsuming South (with its pollution of poverty). Yet perhaps the biggest environmental dilemma of globalization is the impact on consumption patterns in the planet’s “sustaining middle”—the large but fragile segment of the planet’s population that lives, works, and consumes in ways that most closely approximate genuine sustainability. Viewing economic globalization from the consumption angle calls attention to this eroding middle. A second way that global economic change is giving new salience to consumption is political. Changes in the organization of production and the scope and complexity of international transactions are making traditional regulatory approaches to global environmental protection increasingly ineffective. Power in global production systems has shifted both upstream and downstream from the factory ºoor, where traditional environmental approaches have focused. If efforts to protect the planet and its peoples from environmental harm are to be effective, they will have to follow that shift in power. In particular, activism and advocacy will have to follow power downstream to the ideologies, symbols, re- lationships and practices that drive consumption. To understand the ecological impacts of a changing world economy re- quires a careful consideration of what we mean by economic globalization. Thus, the article begins with an overview of some important economic trends at the heart of what is often referred to by this term. In contrast to the more popular (but ultimately incomplete) view of globalization as more frequent cross- border transactions, I stress changes in the underlying organization and logic of production in the world economy. Two particularly important changes in the global organization of production are discussed: the proliferation and lengthen- ing of genuinely global commodity chains, and the continuing shift toward so- called post-Fordist modes of production, emphasizing competitiveness, adapt- ability, ºexible specialization, and niche marketing. The article then examines what I take to be the most important consequences of these changes for efforts to promote environmental protection. These consequences include the squeezing of the planet’s “sustainable middle” via global economic restructuring; the problem of greater spatial and social dis- tancing between production and consumption; and the threatened obsoles- cence of traditional approaches by environmentalists in the context of a new conªguration of power in transnational economic activity. The article concludes Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638001316881403 by guest on 27 September 2021 56 • Consumption and Environment in a Global Economy with speculations on some of the ways that environmentalism as a global social movement will be forced to adapt in light of these changes and their consequences. Changes in the Global Organization of Production Some have suggested that talk of globalization constitutes little more than globalization hype or “globaloney.”5 One common criticism is that much of the analysis on which globalization claims are based lacks a sense of history. Critics are quick

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