Consumed

Heard the Marketplace show kick off a new series on consumerism today, read about it here. See http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumed/ They started off at the port of Long Beach California, what they called the mouth of the consumer economy, and they worked around to a huge landfill nearby, the other end of the consumer economy. Landfills take in a quarter of a billion tons of plastic every year, accounting for ten percent of our oil imports.

They found a local family named Simpson, (the real Simpson family) who live like green churchmice in their 1,000 square foot house, drive their only car less than 1,000 miles a year, cook at home, waste not, want not, and calculated that if everybody on the planet lived like they did, it would take the resources of three and a half earths to sustain them.

The website has a calculator to figure your own impact. I needed 4.8 earths. The average American needs 10 earths. What pigs we are. (Give me 700 Krusty Burgers.)

Jared Diamond, author of the excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel spoke about his new book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He referred to the ancient Mayan civilization as one that perished because they outstripped their water and soil resources. Another example he used was Rwanda in 1994, how an overcrowded people in a depleted place responded by going at each other with machetes. He said that our world faces a dozen crises that unmet, will collapse our civilization in the next 30 years.

That means that by the time my teenagers are my age, they will be living in a different world, if any.

Reminds me of Bertrand Russell saying “the only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”

Marketplace will continue with the this special report for the next two weeks.