Thomas Princen

Consumption and environment: some conceptual issues

Abstract Consumption ranks with population and technology as a major driver of environmental change and yet researchers and policymakers have paid it scant attention. When the topic is addressed, its conceptual foundations are either taken as self-evident or are conflated with production, overall economic activity, materialism, maldistribution, population or technology. The risk is to adopt the latest buzzword in the environmental debate, stretch the concept to encompass all conceivable concerns, and forfeit any advantage—for analysis or for behavior change—that may accrue to a new perspective on environmental problems. Consumption must be distinguished conceptually from other approaches to environmental problems. One approach is to work within the consumption–production dichotomy, examining not just purchasing but product use and non-purchase decisions. A second approach, one that challenges the prevailing dichotomy and its propensity to relegate consumption to a black box, is to treat all resource use as consuming, that is, ‘using up’, and ask what risks are entailed. Consumption can then be seen as material provisioning where risks increase with increasing distance from the resource; as background, misconsumption, or overconsumption depending on the social concern raised; or as a chain of decisions that compel the behaviors of restraint and resistance among ‘producers’. Pursuing the consumption and environment topic engenders resistance among a wide range of actors for reasons that are personal, analytic, and policy related. Nevertheless, the topic appears to have the potential of helping analysts and others transcend conventional approaches to excess throughput.

The shading and distancing of commerce: When internalization is not enough

Abstract A political economy of degradation and of sustainability should account not only for the full range of production costs but the sources of those costs. It should consider how the pursuit of wealth can, deliberately or not, lead to uncounted costs and unaccountable actors. This article explores the conditions of cost generation and externalization, especially those that are largely unintended and inadvertent. It shows how the pursuit of wealth, the expansion of markets, the mobility of capital, and the entanglements of production processes can lead to the unwitting generation and displacement of costs. It analyzes competitive business strategy and patterns of production and consumption for their contribution to such costs. Business strategy and state policy tend to create a never-ending search for frontiers, however simulated and however unecological they may be. The costs generated in those frontiers are a function of shading, that is, obscuring of costs, and distancing, the separation of production and consumption decisions, both of which impede ecological and social feedback and create cognitive, institutional, and ethical lags between initial benefits and eventual full costs. As distance increases along dimensions of geography, culture, bargaining power, or agency, negative feedback loops are severed, stakeholders expand while decision making contracts, environmental problems are displaced, and shading and cost externalization increase. The likelihood of sustainable resource use increases as distance is lowered, as institutions locate decision authority in those who receive negative ecological feedback and who have the capacity and incentives to act on that feedback, and as the burden of proof for economic interventions shifts to the interveners.

Principles for Sustainability: From Cooperation and Efficiency to Sufficiency

If analysts of political and ecological economy take seriously critical trends in environmental degradation and accept social responsibility for contributing to the reversal of such trends, they must go beyond the descriptive and predictive to the prescriptive, beyond marginal environmental improvement to sustainability, beyond cooperation and efficiency to sufficiency. Cooperation and efficiency principles are useful when biophysical underpinnings remain intact. Otherwise, sufficiency principlesrestraint, precaution, polluter pays, zero, reverse onusaddress the defining characteristics of current trends, namely environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion. They engage overconsumption. They compel decision-makers to ask when too much resource use or too little regeneration risks important values such as ecological integrity and social cohesion, when material gains now preclude material gains in the future, when consumer gratification or investor reward threatens economic security, when benefits internalized depend on costs externalized. Under sufficiency, one necessarily asks what are the risks, not just in the short term and for immediate beneficiaries, but in the longterm and for the under-represented.

Consumption and its Externalities: Where Economy Meets Ecology

If social scientists are going to make a contribution to environmental policy-making that is commensurate with the severity of biophysical trends, they must develop analytic tools that go beyond marginal improvement and a production focus where key actors escape responsibility via distanced commerce and the black box of consumer sovereignty. One means is to construct an ecologically informed consumption angle on economic activity. The first approach is to retain the prevailing supply-demand dichotomy and address the externalities of consumption and the role of power in consuming. The second approach is to construe all economic activity as consuming, as using up. This approach construes material provisioning in the context of hunter/gathering, cultivation, and manufacture and then develops three interpretive layers of excess consumption: background consumption, overconsumption, and misconsumption. An example from timbering illustrates how, by going up and down the decision chain, the consumption angle generates questions about what is consumed and what is put at risk. Explicit assignment of responsibility for excess throughput becomes more likely.

Speaking of sustainability: the potential of metaphor

One approach to understanding and promoting sustainable consumption is to get the language right. Not just saying “sustainable” and “conserve” and “green” a lot, but speaking in ways consistent with the imperative of living within ecological constraint. Regarding an agenda for social change, philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) put it pithily that, to paraphrase, cultural change occurs not when people argue well, but when they speak differently. Here, then, I motivate different speaking by focusing on metaphor, not because metaphors add poetic flourish, but because they have power over how humans think and act. Indeed, although “metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language,” write cognitive linguist George Lakoff and linguistic philosopher Mark Johnson (1980), cognitive science indicates that it is best understood “as a means of structuring our conceptual system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform.” What is more, they argue, “It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone do not change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.” And metaphors guide action appropriately to the extent they are grounded in experience, direct and indirect, and fit the purpose at hand—here, getting on a sustainable path. This essay explores how, through metaphor, proponents of sustainable consumption can shift from a worldview that is linear, mechanistic, reductionist, expansionist, and consumerist to one that is cyclic, organic, complex, constrained and, shall we say, productive or self-generating. The fact that metaphors are inescapable, that they provide normative interpretations and affect how we act, suggests that new metaphors, ecologically grounded ones, can indeed be constructed. The fundamental shifts now underway—biophysical, economic, political—make such constructions imperative. Starting Points: Value Orientation

Long-Term Decision-Making: Biological and Psychological Evidence

A central conundrum in the need to infuse a long-term perspective into climate policy and other environmental decision-making is the widespread belief that humans are inherently short-term thinkers. An analysis of human decision-making informed by evolved adaptationsbiological, psychological and culturalsuggests that humans actually have a long-term thinking capacity. In fact, the human time horizon encompasses both the immediate and the future (near and far term). And yet this very temporal duality makes people susceptible to manipulation; it carries its own politics, a politics of the short term. A legacy politics would extend the prevailing time horizon by identifying structural factors that build on evolved biological and cultural factors.

Toward a theory of restraint.

Consumption largely remains a black box in the population, environment, and global change debates. The dominant perspective takes insatiability as axiomatic and assumes that reduced consumption will only happen through scarcity or the impositions of external authority. Yet humans often exhibit resource limiting behavior that is not the result of external controls nor is it altruistic or aberrant. This article develops the concept ofrestraint as an evolutionarily and culturally significant behavior, yet one that in modern times has been relegated to a regressive, if not trivial, status. The article defines restraint, hypothesizes its historical and evolutionary roots, lays out the conditions under which it can occur, and develops a theoretical parallel to cooperation in international relations theory.

Notes on the Theorizing of Global Environmental Politics

Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earths life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful?

Keep Them in the Ground: Ending the Fossil Fuel Era

Coal, oil, and gas—fossil fuels: we can’t do without them. They are the life-blood of modern industrial civilization. These highly concentrated, widely available stores of energy have unleashed modern civilization’s astonishing productivity, liberating billions of people from drudgery and insecurity. Finding more fossil fuels and getting them to markets around the world is the challenge of our times.

Fifteen claims: social change and power in environmental studies

Claims about social change and the dynamics of power permeate the environmental science and studies (ESS) curriculum. These claims are frequently implicit, under examined, and contradictory. Their acritical internalization by students and faculty can undermine the efficacy and relevance of an ESS education. This essay describes 15 such claims and summarizes patterns of ESS student response from three workshops. We make no argument about which claims are superior, how social change occurs, or how political power is best analyzed. Instead, we seek to encourage those who design and deliver ESS programs to become more self-critical and intentional when disseminating, however unwittingly, claims about power and social change.