A Society Built on The Need For Endless Material Consumption Is Not Sustainable

Following this is a "Rall" comic strip out of a Pittsburgh, PA, newspaper from 2003. It is a nice accompaniment to my following thoughts about what irks me about most major news media. 

Often the conversation on network and cable television, radio (even NPR) etc. is related to how much we as a society are spending. Are we spending enough? Are we consuming enough? Are we building enough? Are there enough construction jobs? Is the stock market high enough? Were enough cars bought? How much did retail spending climb? Are investors scared? Did the stock market go down? etc. 

This is a model that is not sustainable. Yes, of course I understand that populations will grow and therefore so will consumption. But the way we consume is what I have a problem with. I am not happy with how most of the system currently works in industrialized nations. 

A society built on an inherent need to consume needlessly more and more, is not sustainable. Especially when a majority of those products are not being consumed in a way that makes sense. For example, the demand for beef across the world causes valuable rain-forests to be cut down to make room for grazing land. At the same time in other places, many cows are raised using hormones and kept in mercilessly tight spaces. It is a funnel of corporate, industrialized consumption built to enrich those at the top. 

What can I do? Support companies that have proven fair-trade practices, eat produce from local farmer's markets, ride my bike and carpool, invest in solar and wind energy, buy from my local small businesses, use cloth grocery bags, buy bulk foods instead of packaged products. Check out more links after the strip for more ideas.

 

http://www.kawpermaculture.org/

http://newint.org/features/2007/07/01/tips/

Notifications Pending: 1984 in Kansas?

If you use Facebook you may have noticed some spam-like e-mails in the past couple months or so in your in-box. The subject line is something like 'John Doe You have notifications pending'. Am I the only one that thinks there is something wrong when your social media site is sending you messages akin to what you might see in debt collection notices?


It reeks of a spammy e-mail that should be in the junk folder, right? Notifications pending? It sounds so official and important; urgent even, and of course none of the 'notifications' are urgent at all. I do not like it when companies or institutions or web-sites are trying to lure you in with manipulation, important sounding keywords, aggressive over-marketing disguised as something vital, etc etc. Only to get you to come back and use their site, product, or whatever, more. Facebook sounds desperate and manipulative and a long way from it's original attempt at being trendy.


Maybe I am just over-sensitive because I have been reading,.. err listening to the audio-book of 1984 by George Orwell. I never read it,  unlike some students who had to in high school classes, so it was a first for me, although I knew the basic themes.


It is a fascinating book on at least a few different levels - social science, politics, futurist,.. Getting into the book and then listening to the news for example, I noticed many parallels to things in the story. Things like the struggle between the elites, the middle class and the poor, or the effort to control thought through information manipulation. The latter especially relates to the here and now, the information age. For example celebrities, athletes, politicians, get into Twitter Wars and try to define recent major events with their own 'spin'.


Another recent example is the Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and a high school senior who had visited the capitol and tweeted something negative about the governor. The governor tattled on her to her high school, and she was urged strongly to write an apology letter. Pulling a tweet out of cyberspace from a girl whose major tweet topic was Justin Beiber and making a fuss over it? REALLY? This is what our tax dollars go towards? This is how they spend their time? Trying to coax an 18 year old woman into respecting someone she does not? Scary.  


A reason this is scary to me is because it is akin to another story that is in the headlines recently. It's about a Thailand citizen who received twenty years in prison for sending four sms text messages that were considered insulting to the Queen and the monarchy. The situation is not exactly the same as with the Kansas Governor obviously, but both are situations in which people in power over-reacted to citizens who were communicating privately their opinions about government; in an effort to control those citizens' self expression.


Social media and the internet has allowed information to spread to many parts of the world and allowed quick communication between the people. In many ways these open, international, informational tools and the freedom it brings people is the opposite of 'Big Brother' government in 1984. In the story, the government changes history books, photos, newspaper stories, etc. to suit their own current political needs. Which is not dissimilar to what many current dictatorships try to do by controlling the flow of information in their country with things like pro-government propaganda, internet censorship, even banned phone text phrases, in an attempt to try and control the people from understanding true reality.


So if the book 1984 teaches me anything, it's that keeping information open and free and truthful and available to all the people is a very powerful thing. The ability to freely express one's self is a powerful thing.


As our world jumps every day further into the cyberspace information age, and as the control of that information becomes more of a political and economic issue; I urge us all to always defend the ability for all people to have free and open access to information, and the right to express one's self freely.

Politics and Indifference

The following thought from Plato isn't exactly a modern art quote but I think it's vitally important. It's a lesson that many of us gen-x-er's (do people still say generation x?) learned the hard way:

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

- Plato

I'm on the tail end of gen-x (30 yrs old), but anyway, The youth culture of the 90's has you know was this jaded cynical view of the world with lots of indifference and non-motivation. Then we learned things can get a lot worse when you don't care and then George W. gets elected president twice. Now the indifference has turned to anger and interest in politics. The youth vote coming out in support of Barak is something no one really expected, but is now going to be a demographic catered to more carefully.