Crisis of consumerism

NGO Germanwatch contributed to the German release of this year's "The State of the World" report by the Worldwatch Institute. Titled "Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability," the report said preserving the planet and tackling the world's most pressing environmental problems requires a cultural shift away from a growing dependence on consumption.

Deutsche Welle: In the report your 2008 consumption figures say $30.5 trillion was spent worldwide on everything from meeting basic needs to luxuries. Is this sustainable? Can the planet keep on producing goods for people at this rate?

Stefan Rostock: No, it's for sure not sustainable. We are over-consuming our resources, over-consuming energy. But more or less, this is known since the first Brundtland Report and since the reports in the 70s and in the 80s, and now we see we need more than 1.3 earths per year to fulfill our needs.

So, we're effectively living on credit, in a sense. And that trend is increasing.

And we see that we are running into a gap between our needs and what the earth can provide, as resources and for fossil energies. And if we are not going to change this process in a guided and directed way, we will run into conflict-like situations where we have to deal with these shortages coming up.

So when will this bank account, in a sense, run out - and what's that going to look like?

There's no specific date that we can say. We will be running into shortages of every resource at a certain time, and for some resources, we will find extra or other types of products we can use - other types of resources where they can be replaced.

There's no certain date where we can say, now we are running into conflict. But we see prices going up - we have seen that in the past, and if we don't deal with it as soon as possible, we will see that the poorest on the planet will suffer most from this transition.

And the report you put out is very clear in arguing that the problem is one of our culture. Can you perhaps elaborate on that? There's a culture of consumerism, and you think this is what needs to be tackled, not just technical fixes in terms of technologies.

After Copenhagen, there were several debates - how to deal with the energy resource and especially the climate crisis. And this book, "The State of the World Report 2010," elaborates the problem of our consumerism culture. Since the Second World War, industry, big business, is really shaping our culture, our way of shopping, our way of living and our way of feeling healthy and feeling comfortable, just by buying and by consuming goods and services.

But you're running up against some strong ideas here. In Western countries, people would take it for granted that they live much better lives today than they did, say, half a century ago. Everything from a car to freezers to what they're able to eat at dinnertime - this is much better than the way their grandparents lived.

Yes, it's a difficult line we are talking about. I do not talk about necessary consumption for developing countries or countries in transition. I talk about overconsumption in industrialized countries. And the biggest problem is that this overconsumption is starting in early childhood, when kids are pushed to see advertising on television, in the media, in school, in the streets, and they start to feel the need to consume - otherwise they cannot stand in their group of peers or group of classmates.

What you're saying can probably sound very threatening to a lot of people. It can often sound like state interventionism, as though you're telling people to stop doing something that has improved their lives. You're bearing a very unpopular message in a sense, aren't you? Consumerism has often been identified with freedom and progress.

I don't think that we are acting against the interests of people. The level of happiness since the early 70s didn't increase, so even with more and more consumption, more and more money to spend on consumer goods and food, the people are not happier than in the early 70s.

So what we are working for is bringing the people back into the power of being the guide and the boss of their own lives - taking back the power from the companies which they have over their lives. So, empower people to make their own choices.

How much do you think the problem is tied to long-standing perceptions that we're somehow separate from the planet, that humans are different from nature, they live in a vacuum, in a sense?

I totally agree with your point. I think when people look back, how they have spent the last week, they will see that it was really less time they've spent in nature. And maybe there's even no time they have prepared food. So our contact with nature is limited to a dangerous level where we lose contact to nature, and in the same way, how to live with nature, how to deal with nature.

But I'm thinking here even in terms of how dependent we are on nature - how natural systems supply everything from our daily meals through to the fuels that we use.

Yes, that's the direct consequence: When you don't have any contact to nature, you can't see the relationship you have, and you can't see the consequences your daily consumption has toward nature.

For example, Germanwatch has a program on makeITfair, and we are just showing that mobile phones are consuming enormous amounts of resources coming from conflict countries. And nobody is aware of this, nobody even is taking care of recycling electronic products to make use of those rare elements inside electronic products.

Diet is another area where, as people become more wealthy, they tend to eat more, and they especially like to eat more meat. When you talk about trying to change cultures, how do you change the culture of eating? I mean, something seems to be ingrained in us almost genetically is a predisposition toward eating meat because over millions of years of evolution, this was an efficient source of calories.

And protein - yes, I understand that completely. But in the moment, we are on the way to change cultures, where eating less meat or eating even no meat is a cultural norm since more than 100, 500 or 1,000 years.

But we don't really have another 500 or 1,000 years to change the habits of what is approaching 9 billion people on the planet.

This is one of the difficult things to face - that changing cultures takes time. And from the point of resource efficiency and from the point of climate change, the big changes have to come in the next 10 and the next 15 years.

So changing cultures toward energy-efficient and sustainable lifestyles has to be one important part in a set of decisions made by companies, but even more importantly, made by governments. They have to set the framework that consumers can act sustainably.

Stefan Rostock is the senior advisor on education and information for climate and development at the Germanwatch offices in Bonn. Established in 1991, Germanwatch is a non-governmental organization that supports global equity and sustainable development.

Interview: Nathan Witkop (arp)
Editor: Anke Rasper