Consumption and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Consumption can be understood as the complex sphere of social relations and discourses that center on the sale, purchase, and use of commodities by individuals and households. Consumption, as more than an act of purchase, considers the range of practices and discourses through which people make and give meaning to goods and services, including choice and selection, rituals of use, resale, and disposal. While consumption implies the using up of things, it also involves the production of meaning, experiences, knowledges, or objects. Central to the notion of consumption is the commodity a good, service, idea, or even person, which takes its form as an object of consumption and exchange. In capitalist societies, commodities exchanged through an economic system assume a use value (the capacity to satisfy a want or need) and an exchange value (the ability to command other commodities in exchange). However, because commodities both convey and create meaning, their consumption is equally about symbolic value. The meaning ascribed to commodities is also a significant part of the material culture of societies and their environments. Like commodities themselves, consumption practices and their meanings occupy different social and spatial “moments” as they are transformed over time and distances. This means that consumption, and its expression in different environments, can only be understood within specific contexts in which discourses and practices of politics, economics, citizenship, gender, race, age, and religion are involved.

Although societies are characterized by an abundance or paucity of commodities, consumption matters as part of individual wants, needs, and desires. Consumption has been an intrinsic part of social relations since humans first created, used and exchanged objects, but the emergence of “modern” consumption is said to have it’s origins in 17thand 18th-century Europe in societal changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The development of new technologies, factory-produced commodities, the separation of production from consumption sites, and the emergence of new socialites and consumer practices around consumption evolved during this time.

However, it was during the 19th and earlier part of the 20th centuries that the sphere of consumption expanded rapidly, facilitated by the global extension of the capitalist mode of production, new technologies, burgeoning advertising and marketing industries, and wider availability of industrially produced commodities. In the 20th century, commodification (the process where more and more aspects of social life become subject to exchange in the marketplace) has been accompanied by social change directed toward consumerism. Consumerism entails the everyday lives of individuals becoming enmeshed in commodity acquisition.

Contemporary Changes

Over the second half of the 20th century, the sphere of consumption has become more complex, deepening and broadening to encompass new spaces, practices and relationships. More and more consumption is occurring in dematerialized spaces, via information and communications technologies, including the Internet. There are numerous consumption sites such as e-shopping, trading, and gaming. Internet auction site eBay, for example, set up in the United States in 1995, now provides a medium of consumption for tens of millions of registered users globally.

While themed shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, chain stores and commodified leisure activities are most often cited as evidence of the growing visibility of consumption in contemporary landscapes, they continue to evolve alongside other forms of consumption, many of which may be more mundane (outdoor/indoor markets, grocery stores, auctions, and secondhand commodity exchange) but none the less important. Consumers frequently service more of their own needs through consumption than previously (for example, automated tellers, via self-service retail outlets, and vending machines).

Consumption activities have also become subject to de-differentiation, where previously discrete consumer activities such as shopping and banking, medical services, travel, theme parks, and shopping malls now merge. The term McDonaldization has been coined to examine how this trend has become increasingly instrumental and rationalized due to predictability, control, efficiency, and quantification. Themes and visual activity in such spaces (such as video, live entertainment, and leisure activities) provide a means of re-enchanting such spaces and promoting both excitement and a point of difference for consumers.

Extension into Social Contexts

The significance of consumption in contemporary societies extends well beyond the individual consumer and their use of commodities. While consumption is commonly equated with “shopping” practices connected with identity, such a view is limited; as the sphere can involve a whole range of commodity practices involving goods and services connected with such things as daily needs, leisure, sport and recreation, tourism, housing, and education. The extension of the commodity form to more and more aspects of social life connects consumption with other social, political, and cultural formations. Marketers, advertisers, and designers of goods and services help reflect and create consumer taste, while simultaneously establishing particular modes, and norms of consuming. Spaces of consumption may also shape consumer identities and practices through surveillance and the regulation and representation of appropriate ways of consuming. Privately-owned shopping malls, for example, frequently masquerade as “public spaces,” yet are often policed and controlled.

Consumption has a role in the constitution of a diverse range of social groups and institutions from the “family” to the “state.” States, and other institutions in turn, also have a role in promoting or prohibiting forms of consumption (for example, encouraging patterns of consumption centered on particular constructions of gender, domesticity, and family), and in the making of consumer “citizens”-for example, patients and students constructed as consumers of medical and educational services respectively.

The increased significance of consumption discourses, practices and spaces in contemporary societies has been associated with the theorized emergence of a post-modern condition from the 1970s. As part of this condition, consumption is assumed to have a greater economic and political significance, having an important role in the formation of human desires. Commodities and their meanings provide individuals with a repertoire of identity choices. Consumption plays a role in the formation of lifestyle or consumer cultures, built around such things as fashion, food, leisure activities, and music; it also provides a social identity for movements built around ethical responses to consumption (such as Green consumerism, slow food movements, charitable organizations, and recycling groups).

However, a post-modern view of consumption as “identity shopping” centered on hedonistic, materialistic, and individualist consumerism is problematic. This concept tends to neglect the mundane and social reasons why people consume, ignoring that commodities also exist through noncommodified moments (as in gift-giving) and that some forms of consumption (such as the state providing housing, education, or health) do not center on the commercial purchase of goods.

There is considerable debate over the significance of consumption in identity formation and whether processes of consumption are actually new or simply an extension of much older relationships and practices. The rapid opening up of previously Communist-run European countries to commodification and new practices of consumption, for example, has not replicated the experiences of the new emerging capitalist economics in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Extension of capitalist relations of consumption and production in Russia, for example, have occurred unevenly – with access to many of the new forms of consumption and commodities concentrated in larger cities and accompanied initially by increases in inflation, crime, poverty, and social division. Rapid increases in car ownership have produced undesirable environmental effects, particularly in cities, exacerbating traffic congestion and contributing significantly to air pollution.

Globalization and Consumption

Contemporary change in consumption has been linked to processes of globalization, which result in increasing homogeneity and social and spatial convergence-for example, the serial repetition of consumer spaces such as shopping malls, theme parks, and fast food outlets, and global availability of brand-name commodities. Western ways of consuming and rising consumerism are assumed to erase social difference and diversity, subsuming local cultures, practices, and environments under processes variously described as Americanization, Coca-colonization, and McDonaldization. While globalization has exposed more people to a wider range of commodities and to different ways of consuming, the notion of global homogenization is partial, relying as it does on people and places as passive recipients of cultural change emanating from “outside” and failing to acknowledge the extent to which globalization is also a material practice, and one that also produces new kinds of difference in society and environment. Globalization may heighten inequalities in access to goods and services. It can also have a role in distancing people from the effects of their actions, spatially separating consumption and production processes, and removing their immediate social and environmental consequences from households and shifting the environmental costs of consuming to other institutions or places.

While globalization has meant many people have had greater exposure to a wider range of commodities and their meanings, the geography of consumption is uneven and contradictory. The Worldwatch Institute reports 60 percent of private consumption occurs in the 12 percent of the world population that lives in North America and western Europe, while the one-third living in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa only accounts for 3.2 percent. Inequalities in access to resources, wealth, and ability to purchase cannot only be mapped between countries but within borders of nation-states as well. While consumption provides a medium for identity construction and choice, it can also operate as a source of social exclusion. In the United States, changes in desires and the expectation of a “good life,” changing concepts of needs and wants, and a desire to “upscale” has been labelled Affluenza, yet the percentage of families going hungry or homeless continues to rise. Commentators argue rising consumer aspirations and purchases have both undesirable social effects (sweatshops, social polarization, debt, and poverty) and environmental consequences (landfills, resource depletion, pollution, and a decline in biodiversity from land development).

Consumption and Environment

Though consumption is conceptualized as the selection, purchase and use of commodities by “final” consumers (individuals and households), debates about the environmental effects of consumption often include consumption by the public sector and the use of resource and material inputs by companies. The state may be a direct consumer of resources, but it may also naturalize particular forms and patterns of consumption (for example, through promulgating notions of consumer sovereignty, facilitating private home-ownership, or through differential taxing of goods and services). Similarly, firms consume resources, goods, and services as part of commodity production. The concept of an “ecological footprint” has been promoted as a means of measuring the consumptive capacity of populations. This involves calculating the amount of productive land and sea resources consumed by humans on different parts of the planet, and has been used to encourage reflection on consumption patterns as well as to speculate on future resource depletion.

Sustainable Consumption

While households and individuals are not the largest contributors to environmental degradation, consumer practices and preferences can be linked via commodity chains (particularly buyer-driven forms) to production processes and their environmental challenges. Individual and household consumption is nevertheless still significant, having steadily increased over the last two decades. Global expenditure by households on goods and services was more than $20 trillion in 2000, increasing fourfold since 1960. Harmful environmental affects result from the use of vehicles, food consumption, cleaning products, home heating and air conditions, and waste disposal practices. Increasing numbers of goods are used and discarded (including packaging), with the amount of municipal waste in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) countries expected to grow by 43 percent from 1995 to 2020. A consequence of the purchase of computer and electronic commodities, for example, is their discards often end up as stockpiles of toxic e-waste, a proportion of which is exported to countries with less stringent occupational and environmental regulations. While local people’s economic livelihoods have become established around the reprocessing and sorting of computer, television, and mobile phone components, workers are frequently unprotected from the damaging effects of lead, cadmium, toner, mercury, barium, and beryllium common in high-tech waste; and these toxic elements may contaminate both ground and water supplies.

There is a diverse range of factors and institutions that both promote and constrain consumption practices. These include price, availability, policy and regulatory frameworks, media discourse, belief systems, processes of identity formation, lifestyle, purchasing patterns, gender, family and household structures, socio-economic status, education, technology, and infrastructure. Consumption is also influenced by moral dispositions, which can inform particular politics and agendas for change. Visible representations of “the hungry” in the media, for instance, may conjure polarized metaphors of under-consumption by the poor, or overconsumption by rich. Moral imaginings of consumption as greed and materialism, or more positive constructions of consumption in terms of caring, social justice, and ethical obligation, can both be used to promote politics of action designed to alleviate poverty and encourage sustainable resource use. While consumption is not intrinsically negative, it is important to recognize that individual consumption choices that may be morally good for some (such as purchasing a larger vehicle to transport more people at once, land clearance for self-provision of food) may be destructive for others (resulting in more pollutants, use of fossil fuels, deforestation, and greenhouse gas). Most of the negative consequences of consumption tend to occur at the regional or national level, so ascertaining how individual consumption choices leads to particular environmental consequences is not straightforward.

Altered moral dispositions about consumption influence how the negative environmental effects of consumption might be addressed. Viewing consumption solely as a matter of individual choice, for example, would suggest an appropriate action to reduce environmental effects would be to change the conditions in which people make consumption decisions via such measures as education, fuel taxes, or more public transportation. When consumption is understood as a social phenomenon, change might involve addressing particular social relations and norms such as the link between consumption of electronic commodities and marketing focused on disposability and fashion.

The recognition that sustainable consumption is a necessary component of sustainable development emerged from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and the publication of Agenda 21. Sustainable consumption does not necessarily mean the reduction of consumption, but involves changing patterns of consuming goods and services so as to minimize the use of natural resources, toxic material, and emissions of waste and pollutants. Individual governments have facilitated sustainable consumption through their legislation and policy, as well as international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Basal Convention on Hazardous Wastes. Nongovernmental organizations have also had a significant role in promoting more sustainable patterns of consumption, including the United Nations Environment Program and its Commission on Sustainable Development, and the Environment Directorate of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Yet institutional action and reform is only part of reducing environmental impacts of consumption. Questions about the sustainability of consumption cannot be separated from politics and economics, nor from how consumption is practiced, experienced, understood, and manifested by individuals in particular social and environmental contexts.

Bibliography:

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