Needs and Wants Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Our social , economic , and political arrangements are supposed to serve the fulfillment of human wants and needs; our concepts of wants and needs, and the methods by which we try to fulfill them, have profound environmental and social implications. We need those things without which we would suffer greatly; we want things that would be desirable, but that we can fairly easily do without.

The distinction between needs and wants can be very fuzzy and politically contentious, especially because degrees of suffering are not simply determined by external circumstances, but also by human psychological states. Furthermore, particular desires may point to underlying unacknowledged needs, for example, an eating disorder involving excessive food cravings or an obsessive desire to lose weight may be a response to an unmet need for love.

Is Environmentalism a Luxury?

The science that most directly studies human needs is psychology. For example, Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of the subdiscipline of humanistic psychology, recognized a hierarchy of needs, beginning with physiological needs (such as for food) at the base, and progressing to needs for safety and security, love and belonging, esteem, and finally, self-actualization. He classified all but the last as “deficiency needs,” the absence of which inhibits growth and development, and postulated that these deficiency needs had to be met before people could devote themselves to self-actualization, a “growth need.” Other psychologists conceptualize needs somewhat differently, but it is important to note that “nonmaterial” needs are widely recognized as basic to healthy human development.

Much cruder hierarchical models of human needs than Maslow’s are at the basis of claims that the desire for environmental protections is a “postmaterial” want that becomes important only once a society has reached a certain level of affluence. According to this conception, environmentalism is a luxury that the poor cannot afford; they are served best if pollution of air, water, and land is condoned as a necessary price of progress. Hence, the siting of polluting industries in poor countries and neighborhoods helps both the rich (who can indulge in NIMBYism) and the poor (who gain by an increase in employment opportunities).

Critics of this conception point out that even (and especially) the poorest people need such things as friendship, social solidarity, and a sense of identity. For example, Manfred Max-Neef developed a matrix of human needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, and freedom, each of which involves being (e.g., the subsistence need of being healthy), having (e.g., the need to have peace of mind as a part of idleness), doing (e.g., the need to participate by cooperating and dissenting), and interacting (e.g., the need for a setting in which one belongs as part of identity). He posits these needs to be nonhierarchical and finite. According to this conception, there is no necessary reason why “material” needs should be prioritized over “nonmaterial” needs; hence, for example, we should not wait until needs for food and shelter are met before talking about the need for a clean environment.

An Environmentalism of the Poor

The very distinction between “material” and “nonmaterial” needs is erroneous, however, in the sense that material needs include natural resources that are not provided by the market. Thus, as argued by Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, there is an “environmentalism of the poor,” which focuses on the needs of the poor for access to resources such as clean water and air, fuelwood, fodder, medicinal plants, grazing land, and fertile soils. If these resources are taken away from them and managed for the benefit of elite interests (e.g., timber for the wood industry), the results typically include the intensification (or creation) of poverty and unsustainable resource management.

It is in the interest of the poor to ensure that their local resources are used sustainably, because they know that they and their children will not be able to move to another place in order to exploit resources there. This environmentalism of the poor may differ from that of the rich (which may focus on beautiful views, for example), but is no less real.

Economic Growth Versus Living Simply

Neoclassical economics is based on a conceptualization of needs going back to late 19th-century positivist approaches, which treated needs and wants as beyond the reach of scientific inquiry because of their irrationality. It ignores any distinction between needs and wants by treating them both as wants. These wants are posited to be infinite, in the sense that a person’s wants can always expand beyond the present capacity to fulfill them-and usually do. Hence, people are believed to live in a condition of perpetual scarcity.

Markets are believed to be capable of fulfilling most human wants-or at least, they are believed not to interfere with the fulfillment of any important wants. If a market transaction does interfere with the fulfillment of others’ wants, this is considered an “externality,” usually regarded as an exceptional occurrence. The problem of ranking different people’s wants is to be performed by the market: the amount people are willing to pay for a commodity (its exchange value) is supposed to be an accurate indicator of their desire for that commodity (demand) balanced against the difficulties of supply. Political processes of ranking different people’s needs and wants are regarded as an unnecessary and counterproductive interference in the workings of the invisible hand of the market. These claims help justify the universal “need” for continuous economic growth and for minimal government regulation either to protect the environment or to promote social welfare.

In opposition to these claims of neoclassical economics, various critics have pointed out that both wants and needs are constantly being created. The multimillion-dollar advertising industry exists solely to stimulate desires where they may not have existed before; likewise, shopping environments are designed in an attempt to stimulate wants of the customers.

Needs, and not mere desires, are being created by what Illich has called “radical monopolies.” For example, urban environments are transformed to the point that people can no longer reach their destinations by walking or cycling, so that they need mechanized transport. If, furthermore, public transport is allowed to decay, people need cars and have lost important freedoms.

In the words of Peter Hershock, “the better we get at getting what we want, the better we get at wanting; but the better we get at wanting, the better we get at getting what we want, though we won’t want what we get.” According to such arguments, economic growth as we know it is incompatible with the satisfaction of people’s most important needs and leads to senseless environmental destruction. Nonmarket mechanisms are needed in order to direct economic development in ways that actually allow people to reach their highest goals (such as for self-actualization).

On the basis of similar critiques of the concept of unlimited needs, sometimes based in religious ideas (for example, monastic traditions in Buddhism, Taoism, and Catholicism), some people seek freedom through the elimination of wants, either individually or collectively. Their goal is to “live simply so that others may simply live,” such as in intentional communities that seek to live in harmony with their natural surroundings. Efforts to reduce people’s needs may also focus on larger scales, such as the promotion of “livable cities” that reduce reliance on cars and other energy-demanding technologies.

Bibliography:

Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, , Cultural Economy (SAGE, 2002);
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising, the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (McGraw-Hill, 1976);
Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (Earthscan Publications, 1997);
Peter Hershock, “Changing the Way Society Changes: Transposing Social Activism into a Dramatic Key,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics (v.6, 1999);
Peter Hershock, Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (State University of New York Press, 1999);
Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper & Row, 1974);
Ivan Illich, “Needs,” in Wolfgang Sachs, , The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Zed Books, 1992);
Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper, 1954);
Manfred Max-Neef, “Development and Human Needs,” in Paul Ekins and Manfred Max-Neef, , Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation (Routledge, 1992).