{"id":28221,"date":"2017-11-23T07:46:02","date_gmt":"2017-11-23T12:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28221"},"modified":"2017-11-23T07:46:19","modified_gmt":"2017-11-23T12:46:19","slug":"too-right-its-black-friday-our-relentless-consumption-is-trashing-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28221","title":{"rendered":"Too right it’s Black Friday: our relentless consumption is trashing the planet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Too right it’s Black Friday: our relentless consumption is trashing the planet<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Growth must go on \u2013 it\u2019s the political imperative everywhere, and it\u2019s destroying the Earth. But there\u2019s no way of greening it, so we need a new system<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Illustration<\/picture><\/div>
Illustration: Sebastien Thibault<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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E<\/span><\/span>veryone wants everything \u2013 how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon<\/a>: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative. And we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy and choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to break down our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the Simple Lifers in Brave New World, be silenced \u2013\u00a0in this case by the media.<\/p>\n

With every generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish festival of destruction<\/a>. Among the snow saunas<\/a>, portable watermelon coolers<\/a> and smartphones for dogs<\/a> with which we are urged to fill our lives, my #extremecivilisation prize now goes to\u00a0the PancakeBot<\/a>: a 3D batter printer that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa, the\u00a0Taj Mahal, or your dog\u2019s bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your kitchen for a week until you decide you don\u2019t have room for it. For junk like this, we\u2019re trashing the living planet, and our own prospects of\u00a0survival. Everything must go.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Too right it’s Black Friday: our relentless consumption is trashing the planet Growth must go on \u2013 it\u2019s the political imperative everywhere, and it\u2019s destroying the Earth. But there\u2019s no way of greening it, so we need a new system Illustration: Sebastien Thibault Everyone wants everything \u2013 how is that going to work? The promise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[161,6112,391,6917],"class_list":["post-28221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-consumerism","tag-george-monbiot","tag-growth","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28223,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28221\/revisions\/28223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}