Consumption is a word derived from the Latin cosumere, meaning “to spend” or “to destroy.” Once something has been consumed, that is, spent or destroyed, to satisfy our needs or desires, that “something” becomes part of waste, garbage and part of a need that has been satisfied or, in the worst and unfortunately most common case, an unnecessary desire has been fulfilled.
Many processes of environmental degradation on the planet have the same cause: excessive and irresponsible consumption.
In the consumer society in which we live, each and every one of us plays a dual role. We are victims and perpetrators.
Each of us, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night, is subjected to a constant bombardment by the advertising industry, encouraging us to consume and trying to create new addictions, needs and desires to create. This essentially forces us to purchase products and services, most of which are completely unnecessary to us.
The industrial-consumerist model has led the economies of the poorest countries to devote a large part of their human and natural resources to satisfying the excessive consumption of the most industrialized societies and the wealthiest strata of these regions, leaving it even to satisfy basic needs their own population.
Consumption consumes us
There is a debt of the developed world to the rest, arising from the historical and current exploitation of natural resources, from the environmental impact of industrial production and from the irresponsible use of environmental space.
Every year and for decades, excessive emissions cause our countries incalculable economic and human losses related to floods, the spread of infectious diseases, droughts, desertification, loss of biodiversity and many other direct and indirect consequences.
The consumer society is clearly not ecologically sustainable. It can no longer be supported even by the inequality between North and South, which for many years served to compensate for the pressure on natural resources caused by the overconsumption of the richest countries. This consumption means a constant increase in the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, which are being depleted, as well as landfilling, which has been filling the planet’s absorption capacity for years.
This gives rise to the concept of environmental liability, the damage to the ecosystem that a company causes either in the course of its normal activities or in the event of an accident. Of course, the costs that a polluting company has to pay as part of its normal activities in a third world country are not the same as in an industrialized country, and in the event of accidents the costs are even lower.
That is why transnational corporations have been locating their plants in southern countries for some time, where in most cases they are not responsible for the environmental damage caused. In this way, industrialized countries acquire even more ecological debt to others.
Reduce
As far as consumption is concerned, we should not try to achieve an upward balance, that is, that the entire planet has the opportunity to consume at the rate that developed countries do, because that would accelerate environmental collapse, but it is necessary to create a downward balance. . First world countries must reduce their consumption if they are truly interested in saving the planet from impending environmental catastrophe.
For the first time we are faced with an environmental problem with planetary characteristics. And the challenge is to act as a species and understand that the decisions to solve the problem must be made on a global scale. Individual and isolated efforts are no longer enough. We are all in the same sinking ship and each of us has a duty to do our part to keep it afloat.
The social and environmental consequences of consumerism are visible to anyone who cares to see them. We have made the planet sick and the symptoms are multiplying every day.
