Environmentally Significant Consumption Research Paper

Two familiar categories of activities are at the root of the problem: production and consumption. In the modern world, more and more of people’s time and energy is spent producing goods and services to earn a living and then using this income to purchase an unprecedented quantity and variety of items for consumption. These are the principal activities involving human use of fuels, materials, water, and soil and therefore the basis for environmental disruption. For this reason, production and consumption are the obvious targets for changes in behavior.

Production and consumption cannot be called to a halt, but they can be carried out differently. Which changes, and how much change, are desirable are not questions that can be answered in a definitive way. Bold ideas are needed to break the cycle of more people, more production, more damage. The social and natural sciences can provide guidance for trying out these ideas in what is essentially a social experiment on a global scale. Contemporary information technologies make possible an unprecedented quality of public access to information and participation in debate.

Many efforts to reduce systematically harm to the environment focus on creating technological options for production activities. Another active area of investigation produces policy advice for public and private-sector executives. The focus of attention on consumption is relatively recent. It holds the promise of technological and policy opportunities, such as more fuel-efficient cars or tax breaks for better insulated homes. However, in addition, it also opens up the new prospect, which is far less developed, of systematically exploring lifestyle options for the direct benefit of household decision-makers. Thus the following questions can be posed. Which environmental changes are most problematic? How is consumption related to environmental change? Can people change their life-styles and consumption patterns? The final section describes how social scientists can enhance the prospects for changes in consumption.

2. Which Environmental Changes Are Most Problematic?

The environment consists of air, water, soil, minerals, microorganisms, animals, and plants—all bound by the great cycles and overlapping systems of which they are part. Changes to the environment, whether due to human activities or not, exhibit an unlimited variety. For example, ‘water pollution’ may involve contamination by a variety of wastes, each with different properties. The concentration of a particular waste material (as measured in g m− of water) depends on the amount discharged and the condition of the water—for example, whether it is still or moving. Another variable is whether other foreign materials are also present in the water and in what quantities. Polluted water could be confined to a remote location, or it could be heavily utilized for industrial purposes, irrigation, or even household use. Furthermore, different individuals will react differently even upon similar exposure to the same pathogen or toxic material.

Thus a specific act (like discharging a volume of chlorine from a paper mill into a river) will under different circumstances be associated with a variety of changes to the environment, and these changes may have either benign or ill consequences. The inter-actions of several different activities are common and compound the unpredictability. We would like to rank-order environmental problems according to a single, unambiguous criterion and resolve them one after the next starting with the most serious, but this is not a realistic expectation. Consider the set of problems that are candidates for the most threatening to life on earth, such as climate change, the contamination of fresh water, or the ubiquity of toxic materials. Like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, each one subdivides into a large number of component problems, most associated with the confluence of multiple activities.

The only approach to preventing environmental damage that can hope to match the enormity of the challenge is the wholesale change of habits so as to eliminate many problems in one fell swoop. This would require a limited number of powerful solution concepts, each of which is capable of governing innumerable individual changes. Recent thinking about how to reduce the environmental impact of production activities provides examples of such concepts. Industrial Ecology promotes the transformation of industrial systems by copying a few basic principles that are characteristic of ecological systems. One is to close production loops, reclaiming wastes of one process for productive reuse in others, instead of discarding them as useless. Design for the Environment includes environmental criteria in the design process for industrial products, alongside the conventional criteria of performance, cost, and esthetics. Finally, Life-Cycle Analysis describes the environ-mental impact of a product from the extraction of materials for its fabrication to its disposal. Based on such studies, many analysts have concluded that producers should take responsibility for products over their full life cycle. Such solution concepts are working their way into the language and customs of corporate cultures. Some firms make changes only when they are cost saving in the short-term or required by law. With the passage of time, however, and for a variety of reasons, others are seizing the initiative to reduce the environmental impact of their production activities. In this research paper a parallel path toward greater citizen initiative is described.

3. How Is Consumption Related To Environmental Changes?

There are systematic differences in the environmental pressures associated with lifestyles of poverty and of affluence. In this research paper the concern is mainly with the consumption patterns typical of the industrialized countries because they serve as models for aspirations and emulation around the globe.

Purchased goods and services satisfy not only basic needs but also the desire for mobility, novelty, physical comfort, and luxury. The use of consumer items entails environmental degradation beyond that associated with production. The automobile provides the most important illustration. It is responsible for noise, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, and disposal problems in addition to the emission of a variety of pollutants that enter the atmosphere and get swept into soils and water supplies. Food consumption likewise presents major challenges quite distinct from the formidable ones associated with agriculture. What people choose to eat has major implications for land use, and packaging for foods (as well as for other household items) ends up after a short service life in landfills. The disposal of half-used containers of household chemicals or pharmaceuticals is also a serious problem. In recent years there have been systematic efforts to quantify the different ways households use energy, materials, and water and the various kinds of garbage that people discard (see, for example, Dillman et al. 1983, Schipper 1996, Wernick 1996, Rathje et al. 1992).

One of the most striking differences between production and consumption activities is the enormous amount of time, effort, and money that have gone into developing technological alternatives in the production environment and studying the implications of choosing different options. One reason for this amount of scrutiny is that a new plant may cost hundreds of millions of dollars and serve for many decades. Households, by contrast, are offered mainly commonsense advice in popular books or by interested parties (for example, through mailers that accompany utility bills). There are important opportunities, which should be exploited, such as better insulation and more energy-efficient appliances. Perhaps the best example is the real prospect for substantially more fuel-efficient cars. However, increasing numbers of researchers are convinced on the basis of their analyses (e.g., Duchin and Lange 1994) that these technological changes cannot offset (and through lowering costs may even stimulate) the growth in demand.

More fundamental changes in consumer behavior, especially regarding mobility (linked to cars and, increasingly, air travel) and material goods, are possible, but they are difficult to achieve for two reasons. First, consumer behavior reflects underlying lifestyle decisions that are intimately tied up with the sense of personal identity. Individual consumer purchases are part of a pattern, and large changes cannot be made one element at a time. For example, if a household decided to give up its cars, it might be necessary to change jobs or to move from a house to an apartment near public transportation or nearer to work. Second is that lifestyle changes are strongly constrained externally, notably by policy decisions like zoning and tax legislation or investment in highways rather than public transportation infrastructure. Some countries have experimented with nationwide incentives for eliminating unnecessary packaging and reusing or recycling the rest (Germany; see Fishbein 1994) or with extensive and convenient public transportation systems intended to displace car travel (The Netherlands). These are efforts of historic significance, but their success is inconclusive. To realize the potential of such initiatives, people need to examine their own households’ lifestyle decisions, not just their consumption choices, in a context of well-articulated alternatives, in the same way that firms have begun to actively consider organizational and technological alternatives aimed at reducing their environmental impact. If households come to favor new alternatives, their choices can be expected to influence legislation and public investment priorities.

4. Can People Change Their Lifestyles And Consumption Patterns?

Starting in childhood, people experience relationships with family, friends, neighbors, bullies, shopkeepers, thieves, police, librarians, and teachers. They develop values and opinions, acquire habits, hobbies, and skills. Later they may engage in paid work, all sorts of unpaid work, and political and community activity, choose where they will live and with whom, establish a household, and possibly have children of their own. They may frequent fast food restaurants, forego meat, prefer bowling or opera, drive tens of thousands of miles a year, etc. All of their attitudes and activities, constrained as they are by such things as legislation and public infrastructure, jointly comprise their life-style. The pattern of consumption, with its direct implications for the environment, is one expression of lifestyle choices. If lifestyle does not change, changes in consumption, in particular as they affect the environment, are likely to be slow and incremental. Many people today suspect that changes in lifestyle could bring about decisively better outcomes.

All people have the same basic material needs for food, clothing, shelter, and fuel and are daily exposed to common cultural messages. Even in a modern society that strives for individual self-realization and is relatively tolerant of unconventional living arrangements, only a limited number of distinctive lifestyle patterns emerge. We can define a household’s lifestyle in terms of how it carries out the activities that satisfy its members’ needs and desires. A taxonomy for describing these activities is proposed by Duchin (1998):

(a) Food

(b) Care of old and young

(c) Healthcare

(d) Personal care

(e) Education

(f) Household administration

(g) Clothing (garments and cleaning)

(h) Recreation and entertainment

(i) Vacations

(j) Housing (systems and maintenance)

(k) Household appliances and furnishings

(l) Household cleaning

(m) Transportation

(n) Home work for pay

(o) Home work for community

(p) Work outside home

(q) Idleness.

Market researchers in the US have provided a uniquely holistic view of American household life- styles, laying the groundwork for a systematic approach to the questions that interest us. Based on the statistical analysis of a large database compiled from diverse sources, they concluded that the lifestyles of the approximately 100 million American households could be described in terms of only a few dozen categories. They gave these categories colorful names such as Furs and Station Wagons (described as ‘new money in metropolitan bedroom suburbs’), Gray Power (‘upper middle-class retirement communities’), Single City Blues (‘downscale, urban singles districts’), and Public Assistance (‘America’s inner-city ghettos’) (Weiss 2000). Today, consumer-marketing strategies use these categories routinely to target client house- holds that are likely to purchase particular products. Households with similar consumption patterns tend to have similar impact on the environment.

Households with distinct lifestyles have different prospects for changing their lifestyle scripts. Individuals move from one category of household to another at turning points in the life cycle, for example upon graduation from high-school or university or at retirement. The challenge is for people to consider a new set of lifestyle scripts, especially at these critical junctures when change is more easily achieved.

It is an open question as to whether people will be engaged by this challenge rather than mainly responding to initiatives taken by corporate executives and politicians. There is a wide range of views about the extent to which individuals act in their personal self-interest or take a wider set of concerns into account (for an overview see Friedman 1996). People behave differently with their loved ones and with strangers and are generally less selfish in family settings than in business decisions. They often trade off immediate gratification for longer-term considerations and are willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of others—not only intimates or acquaintances but anonymous others or society at large. In fact, some people will go out of their way to save a river or risk their lives to prevent an accident. Can a critical mass of people be expected to travel less or eat less meat voluntarily in pursuit of a better quality of life, or for the good of the planet?

The standard economic proposition is that self-interested behavior is ‘rational’ behavior and that people act ‘altruistically’ only in exceptional circumstances. According to this view, the only way to influence firms or individuals to act differently—for example, to use less energy or generate less waste—is by the coercion of regulations or, better still, by affecting the money bottom line through subsidies and other positive incentives, or through charges and taxes. But is it true that this is the most effective way to prod households, like profit-making firms, to act in the public good?

Psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists view the personal decision process to be a complex balance among considerations that frequently over-rule individual self-interest. They provide reason to believe that appeals to the full set of motivations and behaviors—accompanied by an analysis of bold options—can encourage lifestyle decisions that reduce pressures on the environment. While different cultural settings call forth different patterns of motivation and behavior, Fiske argues persuasively that they can all be covered by a four-category taxonomy that includes communal sharing, authority ranking, and equality matching, as well as the kinds of behavior associated with what he calls market pricing (Fiske 1991).

When there are not powerful motivations to act otherwise, people often try to do the best they can for themselves, and ‘rational choice’ is a compelling explanation for many everyday decisions. But large numbers of people are passionate in their concern about the environmental dangers they perceive and ready to take initiative to transform the situation. This is what it means to say that there is an environmental movement (Stern et al. 1999). Nonetheless, consumption behavior has changed relatively little compared to attitudes about the environment. Arguably the most important obstacle is the difficulty of imagining new scripts and removing the obstacles to actually living them. What is needed are a detailed and sustained dialogue about lifestyle options, demonstration projects designed and implemented with the collaboration of a variety of experts, and the celebration of pioneers in all walks of life. How can such an unprecedented dialogue and experiment be initiated?

5. What Can Social Scientists Contribute?

This research paper has argued that environmental problems are too numerous and varied to yield to policies designed to deal with them one by one. Taxes and subsidies act only indirectly and slowly. A direct focus on a few powerful solution concepts can, in principle, resolve many problems at once. A great deal of research by engineers and applied physical scientists is already aimed at radical technological innovations in production (and consumption) and demonstration projects to illustrate their feasibility. Now it is time to turn to lifestyles and consumption.

Social scientists are interested in how different kinds of households carry out the full range of everyday activities. They can provide a coherent and systematic description of types of households and household lifestyles as a basis for understanding how we now live. The development of this structure makes it possible to use quantitative methods to analyze the implications of adopting new lifestyle scripts, ones that capture the public imagination. The objective of the analysis is to see how much difference it would make if particular new scripts were adopted. Feedback from analysis can sustain a more realistic public dialogue than one based only on anecdote and advocacy.

This is the age not only of the environment but also of the Internet, with its capability for sharing in-formation and networking of both physically proximate communities and virtual ones with members around the globe. This medium might provide a powerful way to launch and maintain relevant public dialogue about individual and community decisions. If facts, figures, demonstration projects, and analysis inform this dialog, the combined effort of experts and citizens could actually make a difference. In fact, universities—and social science scholars in particular—might profitably reinvent their disciplines in the process.

Bibliography:

1. Consumption and Environment 1999 Journal of Ecological Economics 28(3): 363–466
2. Dietz T, Stern P C, Guagnano G A 1998 Social structural and social psychological bases of environmental concern. Environment and Behavior 30(4): 450–71
3. Dillman D, Rosa E, Dillman J J 1983 Lifestyle and home energy conservation in the U.S. Journal of Economic Psychology 3: 299–315
4. Duchin F 1998 Structural Economics: Measuring Change in Technology, Lifestyles, and the Environment. Island Press, Washington, DC
5. Duchin F, Lange G 1994 The Future of the Environment. Oxford University Press, New York
6. Fishbein B K 1994 Germany, Garbage and the Green Dot: Challenging the Throwaway Society. Inform, New York
7. Fiske A P 1991 Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations. Free Press, New York
8. Friedman J (ed.) 1996 The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
9. Goodwin N R, Ackerman F, Kiron D (eds.) 1997 The Consumer Society. Island Press, Washington, DC
10. Rathje W L, Hughes W W, Wilson D C, Tani M K, Archer G H, Hunt R G, Jones T W 1992 The archeology of contemporary landfills. American Antiquity 57(3): 437–47
11. Schipper L 1996 Life-styles and the environment: the case of energy. Daedalus 125(3): 113–38
12. Stern P C 1992 Psychological dimensions of global environ-mental change. Annual Review of Psychology 43: 269–302
13. Stern P C, Dietz T, Abel T, Guagnano G A, Kalof L 1999 A value-belief-norm theory of support for social movements: the case of environmentalism. Human Ecology Review 6: 81–97
14. Weiss M J 2000 The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Say, and What It All Means About Who We Are. Little, Brown & Co., New York
15. Wernick I 1996 Consuming materials: the American way. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 53(1): 111–22
16. Wilk R 1998 Emulation, imitation, and global consumerism. Organization and Environment 11(3): 314–33