The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 1

After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping.

Thomas Friedman, NYTs

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn’t call for sacrifice. He called for shopping. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” he said. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

Justin Fox, Time Magazine

We are consumers. That is, of course, obvious. We are good at being consumers, too. Compared to the rest of the world’s population, we consume an inordinate amount; the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports:

For many resources, the United States of America is the world’s largest consumer in absolute terms. For a list of 20 major traded commodities, it takes the greatest share of 11 of them: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, tin, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil and natural gas. For many more it is the largest per-capita consumer.

Our (grand)parents raised us with the expectation that our lives would be better than theirs and, for them, the ability to consume whatever we want whenever we want was proof that things were always getting better. For example, we had more than a hundred different kinds of cars to choose from when we wanted to buy one; but look overseas and that “freedom of choice” was limited, and in many cases, such as in the communist USSR, basically non-existent. That was their proof of the superiority of “the American way of life.”

Somehow, ineluctably, our status as consumers became fused with our status as citizens. Bush’s direction to go shopping right after 911 revealed that there was really no difference. Since not much has changed as far as our national rate of consumption, there is no difference.

There are at least 3 problems that arise from our equation of consumer and citizen:

1) Gaia cannot bear the stress of the unlimited consumption of biomes by humans. (Actually, it is more accurate to say that Gaia can bear the stress, but we cannot.)

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

2) We are deploying our military around the globe to try to control, and lower the costs of, the extraction of resources needed to keep up the present national rate of consumption; this use of our military is economically unsustainable, politically counterproductive and morally untenable.

The most telling example of how our military is being deployed to ensure our present rate of consumption is the news that Afghanistan contains untold mineral wealth:

It has long been known that Afghanistan had significant deposits of gemstones, copper and other minerals, but United States officials say they have discovered and documented major, previously unknown deposits, including copper, iron, gold and industrial metals like lithium.

A Pentagon team, working with geologists and other experts, has shared its data with the Afghan government, and is working with the Afghan Ministry of Mines to prepare information for potential investors in hopes of placing some mineral exploration rights up for auction within the next six months. On Thursday, Afghan officials said they believed that the American estimates of the value of the mineral deposits — nearly $1 trillion — were too conservative, and that they could be worth as much as $3 trillion.

We find the same story when we look to Iraq:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

3) To review: our consumerism is driving the global environmental crisis, and our use of the military to attack people who live near materials we need to keep up our national rate of consumption. Add to this that our economy is bankrupt, and that we borrow heavily from future generations to maintain “the American way of life” as our parent’s define(d) it, and it is obvious that our children are not going to live lives that are better than ours.

Or are they?

Related posts:

1. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 2
2. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 3
3. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, conclusion
4. if you are “sacred” then… (pt2)
5. Our Place—journal writing in the ruins of Holyoke