State of the World 2010

Van de week was op mijn werk de presentatie van het boek
State of the World 2010 van het gezaghebbende WorldWatch Institute door de auteur Erik Assadourian. Het gaat onder andere over hoe het komt dat wij in onze consumptiemaatschappij het normaal vinden om zo veel te consumeren en waarom we daar niet mee door kunnen gaan. If everyone lived like Americans, Earth could sustain only 1.4 billion people.

Een klein stukje uit het eerste hoofdstuk:

Driving cars, flying in planes, having large homes, using air conditioning…these are not decadent choices but simply natural parts of life — at least according to the cultural norms present in a growing number of consumer cultures in the world. Yet while they seem natural to people who are part of those cultural realities, these patterns are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature. They have developed over several centuries and today are actively being reinforced and spread to millions of people in developing countries. Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism — the cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume — as taboo and establish in its place a new cultural framework centered on sustainability. In the process, a revamped understanding of “natural”
would emerge: it would mean individual and societal choices that cause minimal ecological damage or, better yet, that restore Earth’s ecological systems to health. Such a shift—something more fundamental than the adoption of new technologies or government policies, which are often regarded as the key drivers of a shift to sustainable societies — would radically reshape the way people understand and act in the world.

En een link naar een artikeltje in de krant de volgende dag. Merk op hoe het artikel omgeven is door talloze advertenties die ons aanzetten tot juist nog meer consumptie, schokkend...

Martijn