Originally posted at BrightSpot Social
I recently wrote about why consumer behavior matters in response to Annie Leonard’s piece on why good citizens are more important than good consumers. Without rehashing that piece, I argued that good consumers help change our consumption culture and invest in sustainability, and that’s exactly what we need to get to a sustainable society.
To be frank, despite all of our “eco-consciousness,” we’re actually not doing very well in our pursuit of sustainability. I argue that this is, in large part, due to our reluctance – and in most cases, near inability – to consume less, even while we succeed in efficiency by making each thing we consume less damaging. A good case for this is California, where legislation has regularly increased our energy efficiency requirements for appliances. They have been very successful, but energy usage per capita has remained approximately constant– it hasn’t decreased – for the last few decades (compared with rapid growth in the rest of the U.S.). The laws met their purpose, but we have filled in our savings with increased usage in other areas. That is, we increased consumption, even as we reduced the damage of consumption. This savings is still quite good compared to where we could be, but we need to reduce our impact much further if we hope to meet our social and environmental goals.
