One of my favourite websites currently is The Green Thing. This online community helps engage with a broad public to help them understand quality of life issues. Every month there is a new theme which gives people new actions to green their life. The website was set up by successful advertising and brand entrepreneurs and so is full of fun videos and blogs. This month’s theme is all about sticking with what you got rather than filling your home and life with yet more ‘stuff’. The theme picks up on a very live debate in sustainability which is questioning whether we can ‘green consume’ our way out of problems or whether we need a more fundamental questioning of over-consumption. Why not check out the website and join up by clicking here.
This month’s theme echoes comments recently made by Sir Martin Sorrell CEO of global media conglomerate WPP. Sorrell has this to say about conspicuous consumption – “All our instincts as clients, agencies [and] media owners are to encourage people to consume more – super consumption.” He added that people had become used to: “The aspiration that you should consume more; the aspiration that you should have a bigger car; the aspiration that you should have a number of holidays, bigger houses [and] multiple houses. Our view, which is counter to what you expect our industry to argue, is that conspicuous consumption is not productive, and should be discouraged.”.
We are living through interesting times indeed when someone as close to our materialist lifestyles is recognising that we are suffering from societal affluenza which at the same time is choking our one and only planet. This does not in any way mean we need to return to a pre-industrial Luddite hair-shirt lifestyle (as some would characterise ‘green’) but it does open up a welcome and refreshing societal debate about the nature of ‘the good life’. This is a subject close to QOL’s heart and a debate we hope to play a role in encouraging.
The problem is that we have much in our western democracies that we would be loathe to give up in the material sense. – which means everyone else on the planet has the aspiration to get |” up ” to us. In fact, we should ALL be striving for a simpler less expensive life – and not only in monetary terms.