In Part One of a two part series, Adrian Glamorgan suggests we each have a role to play in finding ways to let us all enjoy responsible and sustainable prosperity."

Many of us recognise the broad dimensions of the planetary crisis: global warming and runaway CO2, the spread of deserts, the shortage of water, the costs of war, the pressure of population, the need to care for our forests and oceans, how vital it is to maintain our withering biodiversity. The Earth Century we live in calls us to care for the planet as if our life – yours and mine – depended on it. (Former Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Brundlandt put it best in her powerful and influential 1987 Report, “Our Common Future”.)

But at the same time, we are addicted to things: buying them, consuming them, discarding them and, while still bloated, gnawed also by an unfillable emptiness, we foray out to find more things to buy, consume and discard. Can we learn to live beyond this neurosis? Can we find ways to consume sustainably? Can we create a system that gives us “responsible prosperity” because we all know how much is enough? Or are we locked into an economic system that is incredibly consuming for one third of the world, impoverishes the other two thirds of the world, and is quickly but quietly destroying the life support systems for us all?

A first Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, established an “Agenda 21” plan for our century. In 2002, a second such gathering of world leaders met in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Much was discussed. Must India pay the price because Europe and America went on a materials carbon binge for 200 years? Sustainable production, using renewables and burning less fossil fuels, being eco-efficient, studying the life cycle of processes, was well canvassed. But the need for sustainable consumption was also clear.

There were a lot of thoughts about the need for research and consumer education. For example, over the last decades, companies have been very successful in keeping information away from consumers. Companies haven’t had to do life cycle assessments on what happens to their product, cradle to grave. Nor do producers have to be forthright in providing consumers with information. Monosodium glutamate becomes “621” in very, very small print. Genetically modified canola used as “vegetable oil” doesn’t have to be identified. A shiny new four wheel drive doesn’t come with a global warming warning, or point to wars or the threat of wars its throbbing engine will implicate us in. The packaging of products is often not something we think about. And very few of us give any thought to end use. (I enquired about an electric product a little while ago, and was very tempted. But I said to the salesperson, “What happens to the nickel cadmium batteries at the end of their life?” He blinked, and replied, “No one’s ever asked me that.”) Increasingly, we have to become aware of what’s called “the world beyond the product”.
Then there’s force of advertising. Advertising is the brassy trade that makes us feel inadequate as we currently are, guaranteeing inner and outer fulfilment if we buy, consume and upgrade. Next! A few years back Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), argued that if we are to move towards more sustainable consumption, marketeers need to make it cool. Some advertisers have got the message. We will have a storm front of feeling good about ourselves.

But still the Tuscan villas with the black roofs and the megawatt air conditioners go up on the edges of our cities. Still we transport basic food commodities across the world, ignoring local producers. Advertisers will play a significant part in telling us what is ugly (waste and overconsumption), but their own clients’ products will never be depicted in that category. It’s understandable. Excess is never something that advertisers normally shrink from! Their understanding of what it will take to stem the environmental crisis is likely to lag at least a generation of environmental thinking behind what’s needed.

Coming out of the Johannesburg meeting has been the “Marrakech Process”, a global effort to promote action on implementing sustainable production and consumption. It’s worthy, and necessary, but it’s not enough. It operates at international levels, and there is no way to enforce suggestions except through the lengthy process of conventions. National governments remain sovereign.

Tucked into the World Summit in Johannesburg was (bow to certain large countries) none of this action should be used to stop trade, but (glance to the rest of the world) appropriate regulatory, financial and legal frameworks would be needed. National governments, sovereign, much more influenced by corporations than they are the UN, still need to do something. Obviously there can be incentives to “go solar”, or put in rainwater tanks. Government procurement, requiring certain standards in products that are purchased for the government’s own consumption, can bring a sea change in producers’ behaviour. Governments, through spending on infrastructure (like Perth’s new southern railway), can have a dramatic impact on how a city or even nation consumes. They can help create the conditions for companies wanting to make their products and services more sustainable.

But something is missing. It’s the question: “How will we know how much is enough?”
Scientists can tell us what the planet can take, what our “ecological footprint” is limited by: so much water, so many food miles, so much CO2 in the atmosphere. But it is a tricky way to mediate whether I buy this pair of socks or go on that particular world trip. All that has been done so far, and much more, must continue. But it can’t all be done only at government level. It is not just about structures and processes. It’s about “being”. We are human “beings”, as well as human “doers” and human “thinkers”.
The assumptions behind the overconsumption and poverty effects of our current economic system actually feed our being. Or should I say, their effect has often been to numb our being, to carve it out and leave it empty, to lay siege to a person’s own deeper and unexplored ambitions and wishes, creating all kinds of constrictions and appetites that take us away from our own inner purpose.
In my next column, I’ll explore ways in which we can focus more on our own “being” so that when we act, and when we consume, we do so more responsibly, leading to our own and others’ sustainable production consumption. But a clue: it’s a lot about your, and my own, deepest purpose.