AdduOnline Special Report

AdduOnline Special Reports

Monday May 12, 2003

Effects of Consumerism

Richard Robbins is worth quoting at length on the impact of consumption on the environment and on people.

"William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption levels. [Emphasis Added]

... Our consumption of goods obviously is a function of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is, after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society, obviously, to consume.

However, the production, processing, and consumption, of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood, ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes whose operation creates toxic by-products, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g. automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors environmentalists often point to as responsible for environmental pollution -- population, technology, and consumption -- consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment."-- Richard Robbins, Global Problem and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 209-210

As hinted above, within the current economic system of "perpetual growth", we risk being locked into a mode of development that is:

destructive, in the long run, to the environment

a contributing factor to poverty around the world

a contributing factor to hunger amongst such immense wealth and numerous other social and ecological problems

Furthermore, as also hinted above, as consumption increases (in a wasteful way, which we shall see a bit later), the resource base has to expand to meet growth and related demands. If resource base expands to other peoples lands, then those people don't necessarily get to use those resources either.

On this page are the following sub-sections:

Misuse of land and resources
Exporting Pollution and Waste from Rich Countries to Poor Countries
Obesity due to Excessive Consumption
A cycle of waste, disparities and poverty
Some examples/case studies

Misuse of land and resources

How land is used to produce food etc. can have enormous impacts on the environment and its sustainability. (This can sometimes challenge assumptions on the instinct and common belief that we are overpopulated by sheer numbers and that this is the major cause of environmental degradation. While populations can burden the environment, it is the relative impact of population numbers alone versus why and how resource are used that we wish to consider here.) Take the following as an example:

"Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.... Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world's total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock."-- Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 70-71.

Because industrial agriculture is using more monocultures, rather than a diversity of crops, the loss of biodiversity is leading to more resource usage, as described above. This as well as other political situations such as the motives for dumping surplus food on to developing countries to undersell the local farmers, leads to further hunger around the world.

Consumption patterns in wealthier countries increase demands for various foods, flowers, textiles, coffee, etc. Combined with commercial interests in things like tobacco, largely grown by corporations from wealthy nations, and with input-intensive agricultural practices (including using herbicides and pesticides) the diversion of and misuse of land and the associated environmental damage in unsustainable methods adds up.

As land ownership has become more concentrated in the hands of larger companies, larger agribusinesses and so on, and as things like food dumping, mentioned above, increases hunger and drives rural workers out of jobs, there is an increase in urban migration as people move to the cities in hope for a better chance. These economic policies that are based less on people's sharing and development, but more on acquiring wealth and profit lead to additional stress on the larger cities to provide for more people. It also results in more slum areas, health problems and so on. Many easily conclude that by just looking at the cities that we have overpopulation in the world. While the cities are no doubt facing problems of over population, a variety of political and economic circumstances are leading to such conditions and looking only at cities to determine if the planet is over populated misses out these factors.

But cities aren't the only places that the landless move to. Some, being pushed off their own lands, will move to less arable land to hope to farm that, which may conflict with wildlife. In other cases, many may try to immigrate to other parts of the world if they feel there is no choice left in their own country. In yet other situations, economic growth can also lead to more urban migration. Sometimes this growth of cities can go in hand with decline in the rural areas.

Due to these and a multitude of other complex socioeconomic and political factors, in different parts of the world, there are different proportions of people in urban and rural areas. For example, the World Bank reported in a 1999/2000 report that 74% of poor in Latin America & Caribbean lived in urban areas, while in Europe & Central Asia it was 67%. In the Middle East and North Africa it was 58%. In East Asia and Pacific, 33% while in Sub-Saharan Africa it was 32%. In South Asia it was 27%.

Land ownership for the poor provides mechanisms to ensure sustainable and efficient use, because of the need to care for it for their survival, as detailed for example, by Vandana Shiva, in her book Stolen Harvest (South End Press, 2000). Peter Rosset also shows that smaller farms are more efficient in this interview.

Economic policies of the wealthier nations and their consumption demands mean that more land is therefore used to grow cash crops (bananas, sugar, coffee, tea etc) for export to wealthier countries (primarily), while other land is diverted for non-productive uses (tobacco, flowers etc), while further land is cleared and used to grow things like cattle for beef exports. [These are often economic policies imposed on the poorer nations, through things like Structural Adjustment (SAPs) etc. In the past, colonialism achieved similar things. Geopolitics is also a factor that cannot be overlooked, as well as economics and environment issues.

And because food is a commodity, then it is those who can afford to pay, that will get food. The following is worth quoting at length (bulleting and spacing formatting is mine, text is original):

"To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.

Food is a commodity. ...
Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market.

Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.

More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed. ...

The problem, of course, is that people who don't have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don't count in the food equation.

In other words, if you don't have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.
Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM ("Supermarket to the World") to produce food for them.

What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food."-- Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development

When the best agricultural land is used up as described as above, more marginal land has to be used for food and subsistence farming, which may require clearing parts of rainforest, or other forms of encroachment on other ecosystems.

Other uses of the world's resources by the wealthier nations include metals and other raw minerals to produce automobiles, planes and so on. For more details on this, see Richard H. Robbins, as quoted above.

Many wonder why the poor cannot follow the example of the rich and get out of poverty themselves. Numerous mainstream commentators suggest that the poor should follow the example of the rich and that globalization (in its current form) provides the answer. Some may say this because they or their society has followed this ideology to get out of poverty and it worked for them, so it should work for others. Yet, often missed is where the resource base to support the increase in wealth has typically come from. If it comes from other regions then it can (not always) mean that for one society's gain, others may not. This was apparent in imperial and colonial times where vast amounts of the world's wealth was plundered and accumulated in the imperial centers in Europe. Yet, the consumption inequalities of today and the regions of immense wealth and immense poverty, on a global scale shows a similar pattern to those of previous decades and centuries. The U.N. resource consumption statistic mentioned at the start of this section (of 86 percent of the world's resources being consumed by just the world's top 20 percent) is testimony to this.

Hence, the resource base, from which to get out of economic poverty is lacking and so the same process that may have made today's wealthy richer, is not necessarily the best way for all people.

Furthermore, if today's poor attempted to reclaim those resources for their own use and for sustainable development, it will naturally be seen as a threat to the way of life for those who currently use those resources. As described in the poverty section of this web site, wars throughout history have been because of this control of resources. World War II and the resulting Cold War were also such battles. Yet because in the mainstream this is not acknowledged it is easy to just see this as a threat and act on it, without really understanding why it has become a threat. ( it is interesting to note that there are books and insights popping up that predict future wars will be a new kind of war; resource wars. Yet, this is what it has typically been throughout history, but fortified with ideologies and religions. Ideologies and religions offer different ways to live, and hence different ways to use resources.)

The wealthier consume precisely because others are poor -- the rich consume at the expense of the poor. Such a global inequality (and also in the efforts that go into maintaining systems that exacerbate the situation) is very wasteful. As Robbins was quoted above, "someone has to pay for our consumption levels".

Exporting Pollution and Waste from Rich Countries to Poor Countries

Pollution is also related to increased consumption. That is, the consumption itself, plus the production and waste of products used in consumption. Automobiles are a clear example. Other examples include industrial waste (especially when just dumped into the rivers and oceans), waste from the tourist industry (including cruise liners, air travel, etc.), waste from industrial agriculture and so on.

While pollution is increasing in poorer countries as well, it is not solely due to rising populations, because, as the U.N. points out, and as mentioned earlier, 86% of the world's resources are consumed by the world's wealthiest 20%. Hence, even if pollution is occurring in poor countries, a large portion of it is to meet this consumer demand. Structural adjustment policies and the like have imposed such conditions upon poorer nations whereby their governments are weaker to resist policies and pressures from international and multinational institutions, that we would normally not want imposed on ourselves.

In 1991, then Chief Economist for the World Bank Larry Summers, (and US Treasury Secretary, in the Clinton Administration, until George Bush and the Republican party came into power), had been a strong backer of IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Policies, which have proved to be so disastrous to the developing world. He wrote in an internal memo (leaked to the Economist in 1992) that is very revealing:

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?... The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that... Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City... The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand."-- Lawrence Summers, Let them eat pollution, The Economist, February 8, 1992. Quoted from Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000) p.65; See also Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 233-236 for a detailed look at this.

Summers is talking about migrating industries. That is, moving them elsewhere, but to still serve their original purpose -- produce for consumption by wealthier nations and people. That is, rather than have expensive changes in the factories to deal with environmental and other issues that the public and society demand, they have the ability to move elsewhere and continue on without making these costly changes. As a result, we may see a relatively cleaner environment in the industrialized world, but it is not all explainable by using newer technologies, being more efficient, etc (which are no doubt certainly part of the explanations).

This is a partial explanation of why some of the wealthier countries have cleaner air, water and so on, compared to poorer countries that are facing more pollution, even though they consume a fraction of what wealthier nations consume. Consumption in richer countries can come at a high price for those in poorer countries as well then. (See Robbins, cited above, for a more detailed discussion of this "paradox", who also points out for example, that the "core countries already ship 20 million tons of waste annually to the periphery", or poor, countries (p.235).)

A World Bank spoof site, the Whirld Bank, posted the leaked memo. It also had a postscript which contained a reaction from the then Brazilian minister for the environment. The article noted:"After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil's then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers: 'Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.' Sadly, Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter.

Mr. Summers, on the other hand, was appointed the U.S. Treasury Secretary on July 2nd, 1999, and served through the remainder of the Clinton Admistration. Afterwards, he was named president of Harvard University.

Another trend is to also export waste to other regions of the world. As one example, hazardous electronic waste, such as old computers, old computer monitors, etc primarily from wealthier nations, are also being exported to places like China, India and Pakistan, where they are processed in operations that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment. However, minimal or non-existent environmental and working standards and regulations, old technologies for recycling and processing, etc. is putting a lot of people and surrounding environment at risk due to the sheer amount of waste to be processed.

Environmental News Service quotes Jim Puckett, coordinator of Basel Action Network, and one of the authors of a report titled "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia":

"They call this recycling, but it's really dumping by another name," added Puckett. "Yet to our horror, we further discovered that rather than banning it, the United States government is actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the U.S. daily."

Puckett referred to the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world that has failed to ratify the Basel Convention, a United Nations environmental treaty which has adopted a global ban on the export of hazardous wastes from the worlds most developed countries to developing countries. The U.S. has exempted electronic wastes from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the nation's export laws, because the material was claimed to be destined for recycling."-- Cat Lazaroff, High-Tech U.S. Trash Floods Asia, Environment News Service, 26 February 2002

Obesity due to Excessive Consumption

In the poverty section primarily, but also in other parts of this web site, much has been written about the causes of hunger (in things like land use, politico economic causes etc), in the face of abundant food production. However, there is another side to this emerging as well. That is growing obesity. The World Watch Institute is worth quoting at length:

"For the first time in human history, the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people. ... While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.

... the population of overweight people has expanded rapidly in recent decades, more than offsetting the health gains from the modest decline in hunger. In the United States, 55 percent of adults are overweight by international standards. A whopping 23 percent of American adults are considered obese. And the trend is spreading to children as well, with one in five American kids now classified as overweight. ... Obesity cost the United States 12 percent of the national health care budget in the late 1990s, $118 billion, more than double the $47 billion attributable to smoking.

... Overweight and obesity are advancing rapidly in the developing world as well ... [while] 80 percent of the world's hungry children live in countries with food surpluses.

... technofixes like liposuction or olestra attract more attention than the behavioral patterns like poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyles that underlie obesity. Liposuction is now the leading form of cosmetic surgery in the United States, for example, at 400,000 operations per year. While billions are spent on gimmicky diets and food advertising, far too little money is spent on nutrition education.

-- (Emphasis added) Chronic Hunger and Obesity Epidemic; Eroding Global Progress, World Watch Institute, March 4, 2000

Note also in the above, the resources that are "wasted" or diverted to either deal with the ramifications (such as health costs), or to deal with the symptoms (via techniques such as liposuction). Of course, that is not to say that resources should not be spent on these things at all, but that it is far more cost effective and more desirable to treat the root causes, as treating symptoms only leaves underlying causes in tact. So we see that not only are more resources consumed here, but to deal with its effects, even more resources are further consumed. A cascading, or "snowball effect", so to speak.

This is an example of "hidden" costs of consumption on top of the "visible" costs. The World Watch Institute article, quote above, goes on to further show that comparatively less expensive measures that deal with causes have been very effective at reducing obesity problems, such as teaching nutritional literacy in schools.

(Also note that in some cases obesity can affect the poor as well, due to things like marketing of unhealthy foods. That is, as the previous link highlights, "Restrictions in access to food determine two simultaneous phenomena that are two sides of the same coin: poor people are malnourished because they do not have enough to feed themselves, and they are obese because they eat poorly, with an important energy imbalance... The food they can afford is often cheap, industrialized, mass produced, and expensive.")

Of course, it is not an easy challenge to overcome, as today's commercial markets include a very wide variety of foods that are unhealthy, but attractively marketed to kids, as also mentioned in the children section. And many resources are deployed to support that industry. This is another example of a hidden "waste"

In Britain for example, a Centre for Food Policy and Thames Valley University report, titled Why health is the key for the future of farming and food says that far more people are affected by diet-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and nutritional deficiencies than diarrhoeal diseases (salmonella, campylobacter, etc) -- some 35% compared to 0.2%. As the report says bluntly, "food safety may scandalise the country and attract political attention, but it is the routine premature death by degenerative disease that extracts the greater ill-health toll" (p.15). This phenomena is seen in many rich nations, though Britain comes out worse than most on many such indicators, as also mentioned (p.16).

The report further highlights that the costs of coronary heart disease alone are around £10 billion a year (approximately 14 billion in U.S. dollars.). These costs are made up of £1.6 billion in direct costs (primarily to the tax payer through the costs of treatment by the British National Health Service) and £8.4 billion in indirect costs (to industry and to society as a whole, though loss of productivity due to death and disability). (p. 38). As they point out, this doesn't include costs from other diseases, or effects of wider industrial agricultural policies that have given rise to BSE, Foot and Mouth disease, or the cost to the environment, etc.

Other issues and problems they point out include importing and exporting foods that can be produced locally, encouraging/advertising unhealthy diets and foods (especially to children) and generally putting low priority on health, industry-dominated food policy at the expense of local grocery stores, deteriorating health of children in poverty, and so on. This is another example of how all this can have all sorts of knock on effects to society and to resource requirements to deal with these issues. And that means more expenditure and consumption of resources which, from this perspective can be seen as costly and wasteful.

A cycle of waste, disparities and poverty

Poverty, land control and ownership, pollution and so on, are largely parts of economic and ideological systems too. As exemplified by the Lawrence Summers quote above, a "value" is placed on the environment, on life, on different cultures and so on.

This is so engrained into the cultures of the wealthy nations, that the thought of massive adjustment of lifestyles and economic systems to a more sustainable consumption seems too much to consider. Instead the system is continued and maintained. As mentioned earlier, built into the system itself are mechanisms that encourage this, without realizing the costs. That is, as dealing with these costly ways employs more capital and provides more jobs, these all get counted towards GDPs and other indicators of economic health!

It is easy to blame consumers from wealthy countries as the sole cause of these problems elsewhere though. However, as mentioned in the initial pages on this section, much of this mass consumerism culture in the "north" has not been based solely on natural demand, but a created demand. That is, from large businesses and industry wanting to sell more products and make more profits. Politically this has also been encouraged as it helps create a more conforming populous satisfied by material needs. As an effect of this, as such businesses also strive to eliminate competition by becoming bigger and bigger, this has become more destructive than what we might actually realize, and on a wider scale.

Even as the United States began to feel the onset of a recession (due to crisis of overproduction) coming on in the middle of 2001, the economic and political leaders respond by attempting to encourage people to spend more. (Although, when this is not successful, because the economy hinges on this, economic depression is the risk). The Economist is worth quoting to highlight that:

"SHOPPING: it's long been one of America's favourite pastimes, but more recently it has taken centre stage in the battle to prevent the world's biggest economy from sliding into recession. As share prices have plunged along with profits, and layoffs have soared, it has sometimes seemed this year as if the American consumer's addiction to retail therapy was incurable. That's just as well, because consumer spending has been the main reason the economy has not dipped into recession this year. But now there are signs that even America's heroic spendthrifts may be losing heart."-- Spend, spend, spend, The Economist, August 31st 2001

This over-production and over-capacity (due to over-estimating the expected demands) partly due to "under" consumption leads to dominant companies attempting to consolidate losses and maintaining profits via things like mergers, layoffs etc. However, even in wealthier nations, it cannot be a guaranteed success. If people have enough computers, and don't want any more for a while, they won't buy them! Layoffs are a risk.

Some industries have also become immensely efficient at making profits, that they cannot adapt to it (that is, as we shall see later, the way to adapt to this is to share the wealth that is gained through such efficiency, not squander it through further layoffs, and hence increasing concentration of wealth, buying power, political power, etc).

Income distribution disparities further highlight the issue of limited demands.

Yet poor countries suffer immensely. For example, when the financial crisis hit Asia around 1997, at a time of enormous production, collapse meant that western corporations were able to pick up almost entire industries on the cheap. This was to destroy the competition, as the situation was getting so competitive and fierce, that the best way (for those who can) to ride through this was to buy out others, merge or consolidate. While capital fled to the West and there was a temporary boom, as exemplified by the hi-tech sector in the U.S., overproduction was likely to catch up, as it seems to have now. Hence the West were consuming on "borrowed" time and resources from the poor. As Robbins said, "someone has to pay".

Another way then, for industries to continue growth and profitability etc, is to try and create demand. Markets may have to be created where there were none before. But, as a result, the following effects can occur:

Demands need to be created where there may have been none previously, or may be minimally.

Luxuries can therefore be encouraged to become necessities.

The commodification of food and political influences on economic policies such as structural adjustment policies have led to mass production of the same commodities from many regions, mostly exported to the wealthy nations.

But the huge "price war" leads to price depressions.

Mass consumption increases in the wealthy nations that receive these exports at cheap prices and demands are further increased.

Poor producers are further marginalized as the wealthy export producers use even more resources for the drive for further profits to meet this demand.

Additional requirements are made on the environment to produce even more.

Boom and bust cycles lead to various dynamics, such as

During booms, encouraging migration of workers, more consumption etc.

During busts, further poverty, increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in poor countries especially, pushing the already marginalized onto additional lands because the best lands are already owned and controlled. In worse cases, conflicts can also result.

(Of course, there are many other complex factors, both causes and effects. For more examples, see various sections within the causes of poverty part of this web site.)

When looking at the destruction of rain forests in Central America, a similar pattern to what is mentioned above was observed by John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, in their book Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth About Rain Forest Destruction, (Food First, 1995), and also highlighted by editor Douglas H. Boucher, The Paradox of Plenty; Hunger in a Bountiful World, (Food First, 1999), pp. 86 - 87. Summarizing that here:

The patterns of inter-related issues that would affect forest destruction could be seen in many different reasons, such as banana production, citrus and other fruits, rubber tree plantations, and other commodities. Yet, these were "similar politically if quite distinct biologically", and would typically include the following stages:

"Visionary capitalists identify an economic opportunity for the market expansion of an agricultural product"

"They purchase (or steal, or bribe into a government concession) some land, including land that may contain rain forest, which is promptly cut down."

"They import workers to produce products"

"After a period of boom the product goes bust on the world market" which leads to cut backs, layoffs, etc.

"Those laid off must seek other means to survive, and in poor countries and rural areas that may mean growing subsistence crops on marginal lands"

"The only place the now unemployed workers can find land no one will kick them off of is in the forest, which means yet more forest is converted to agriculture"

They continue to point out then, the flaws in the accepted Malthusian theories of population growth placing demands on natural resources.

Some examples/case studies

There are many products and industries where one can identify such patterns. We will look at some of these next.

To start with, on the next few pages, we will have a look at two stark examples that we may not often think about: sugar and beef consumption.

The consumption of these have not historically been as high as they are today.

Yet, sugar plantations during colonial times, for example, was a major employer of slaves and continues to be a major contributor to environmental degradation, poverty, health costs and all manner of wasted and diverted wealth.

Cattle raising has often led to clearing of rainforests, such as parts of the Amazon -- not to feed local people however, but for fast food restaurants, such as McDonalds. Such demands then serve to meet the "needs" of producers.

The above example of bananas, and how that has affected forests, environmental sustainability, economies of entire regions, etc. is also discussed.

There are also numerous examples of how conflict and war can be fueled partly because of demands placed on resources, the want to maintain a certain way of life, even if it is wasteful, etc. Examples include, but are not limited to:

various conflicts in Africa (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, etc) for resources to be exported to the west, such as diamonds, wood, coltan (without which computer chips can't work), the historic domination and influence of the Middle East for oil, for the support of dictatorships by the west, such as previously in Indonesia to support massacres and invasion of East Timor (also for oil and other resources) of oil multinationals being accused for killing local and indigenous people, and so on.

Even the Cold War (which we often just dismiss away as an ideological battle, but behind the ideology was access to resources) was such a battle.

Looking at some of these examples next will further highlight the enormous waste structured within our system of the current form of "corporate capitalism".

Next Page - Turning Luxuries into necessities-example sugar

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