Themester Event

From a Culture of Consumption to a Culture of Conservation:

I went to the public lecture where Scott Russell Sanders spoke about one of this books "A Conservationist Manifesto" and about the current consumption of the United States. In Sanders book he talks about underling cultural and economics ideals that lead to our current situation and how lead towards a conservationist future.

Main challenges in US:

            Climate disruption

            Loss of biodiversity

            Loss of arable lands

            Pollution and scarcity of fresh water

            Pollution and depletion of the oceans

            Exhaustion of key material recourses

            Loss of ecosystems services: photosynthesizing, soil fertility, water.  
  Sanders told me of some unsettling facts:
-The loss of 80% of big commercial fishes. 
-There is 10 times as much plastic as much plankton. 
-Species extinction 100 or 1,000 faster then the last mass extinction time of the dinosaurs.

 Is our consumption accidental? That may not be so due to the quote below:

“Our enormously production economy demands that we make consumption our way of life that we concert the buying and use of goods into rituals that we seek out spiritual satisfaction our ego satisfaction in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned, work out , replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate” (Victor Lebow The journal of retailing 1955)

Sanders reply to this quote is a task and target for the US to work towards to change from being an consumptionist to a conservationists. Sander's Key task for the US is to dramatically reduce the rate of extraction of materials from the Earth: oil, coal, metals, minerals, etc. and to dramatically reduce the amount to waste, toxins, and green house gases dumped into the soils and waters and atmosphere. We should aim at zero throughout and zero waste.