This book is primarily concerned with the pattern of consumption in affluent societies, the potential for its transformation, and the leverage that such change might exert in building a more egalitarian and sustainable global order. It argues that environmental crisis cannot be resolved by purely technical means, but will require richer societies substantially to change their way of living, working and consuming. Green technologies and interventions (renewable energy, rewilding, reforestation and so on) will prove essential tools for ecological renewal, but only if they go together with a cultural revolution in thinking about prosperity, and the abandonment of growth-driven consumerism.
Not all, but many environmentalists would agree with this. A more distinctive feature of my argument is its alternative hedonism: its resistance to viewing the needed changes in consumption as a form of sacrifice and loss of pleasure. I present them, on the contrary, as offering an opportunity to advance beyond a mode of life that is not just environmentally disastrous but also in many respects unpleasurable, self-denying and too puritanically fixated on work and money-making, at the expense of the enjoyment that comes with having more time, doing more things for oneself, travelling more slowly and consuming less stuff. The call to consume less is often presented as undesirable and authoritarian. Yet, the market itself has become an authoritarian force – commanding people to sacrifice or marginalise everything that is not commercially viable; condemning them to long hours of often very boring work to provide stuff that often isn’t really needed; monopolising conceptions of the ‘good life’; and preparing children for a life of consumption. We need, in short, to challenge the presumption that the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today is advancing human well-being rather than being detrimental to it. And that’s quite apart from the effects our consumption is having on the natural world. Rather than hankering after technical quick-fix solutions that might keep labour and consumer spending indefinitely on course (and these, in any case, seem unlikely to be forthcoming or to come without serious risks),1 the developed nations would be better off focusing on the formation of a much needed alternative model of progress, and breaking with current ways of thinking about prosperity and well-being.
Until relatively recently scientific warnings on human-created global warming have gone largely unheeded by the general public. But between October 2018 and May 2019, while I was writing this book, that situation changed dramatically. During these months, the perils of climate change and species extinction received unprecedented publicity. It seems that some affluent nations, including Britain, are finally acknowledging these problems. I had not predicted this. Like so many other academics, researchers, journalists and activists in NGOs and progressive global networks, who for many years have been charting, theorising, reporting and agitating around ecological crisis and its resolution, I had become used to these issues and campaigns being given low priority by mainstream media and politicians. The eruption of attention and concern has certainly been welcome. Nonetheless, I fear it could rapidly dissipate, and I remain sceptical as to whether it will lead to the policy changes needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5° Celsius, the emissions target agreed at the Paris summit on climate change (as I write, the UN World Meteorological Association predicts a rise of 3° Celsius or more by the end of the century).2 Moreover, I suspect – though I hope to be proved wrong – that the reporting of climate change in those parts of the world where it is already having the most catastrophic impact will remain startlingly inadequate: so far we have been more likely to get reports about how air travel is being disrupted by flooding at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, and the 28 million dollars to be spent on barriers and drains there, than on the food crises caused by climate change that have ravaged Madagascar, Ethiopia and Haiti.3
I am above all sceptical about whether the recent high media profile of climate change will encourage more interest in what I shall call ‘the politics of prosperity’. In Britain we are still waiting for mainstream political debate on the purpose of all our labour and wealth production and on whether the competitive and acquisitive society perpetuated by such a system offers a satisfying way of living. Admittedly, the consumerist lifestyle has come in for criticism recently in relation to its ecological impact, particularly for the carbon emissions, air pollution and plastic that it generates. It has also been subject to justified ethical discussion and dissent because of its exploitation of labour and natural resources in the peripheral economies.4 What is much rarer is to find consumerism called into question from an alternative hedonist point of view – from a position that dwells on the inherently negative aspects of affluence and on the pleasures it is denying or removing.
In previous writings on alternative hedonism, I have argued (a touch cavalierly perhaps) that even if there were no environmental or moral obstacles to the triumphant spread of the consumer lifestyle, even if it could be extended to everyone forever, human happiness and well-being would not be enhanced. Today, in view of the latest IPPC and UN reports on the planetary condition, the urgency of checking growth and changing consumption to meet environmental constraints must be stressed in any argument. But if I place more emphasis than hitherto on the environmental – and therefore also moral – case for re-thinking consumption, that is not at odds with the attention I have paid, and still pay in this book, to the gratifications and forms of fulfilment that might be offered by an alternative hedonist rethinking of consumption. On the contrary: the more pressing it becomes for us to change our ways, the more important the hedonist critique becomes. Alternative hedonism makes an integral contribution to the creation of a new political imaginary that we urgently need. The main objective of this book, then, is to strengthen the environmental and ethical case for embracing a post-consumerist (and ultimately post-growth) way of life by foregrounding the pleasures this might bring us.
My argument takes note of indications of existing concern and discontent about the affluent lifestyle. It is grounded in already experienced ambivalence, and seeks to give voice to implicit aspirations for living differently. Rather than railing against the excesses of consumerism, I point to the disenchantments of consumers themselves. I examine the problems of time-scarcity and pollution along with the stress and ill-health of consumers and their lament for pleasures that our work-and-spend mode of existence has eroded or supplanted altogether. Although acknowledging the importance of altruistic motives for shifting to simpler and more sustainable ways of consuming, my argument revolves around more self-interested motives for doing so. This emphasis reflects my sense that appealing to what people could expect to gain from adopting more responsible ways of living may be more effective than instilling further panic over climate change. It also follows from my desire to avoid moralistic assertions about needs (or wants) which have no reflection in the experiences and responses of people themselves. The authors of the now classic The Limits to Growth may well be correct when they claim that ‘people need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy’, and that
To try to fill those needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth. A society that can admit and articulate its nonmaterial needs and find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfilment.5
It is, however, one thing to claim knowledge of what is ‘really’ needed; it is another to justify the claim by reference to the actual experience of people, and another again to demonstrate the transitional means through which the claimed needs might come to be collectively acknowledged and acted upon. Being sensitive to these difficulties, I am reluctant to impute or impose a structure of consumer preferences in the absence of any evidence of its existence. My argument, therefore, moves from expressions of concern to delineating an alternative structure of satisfactions, rather than presupposing unconscious needs for this alternative and then casting around in a theoretical void for consumers who might come to experience them.
That said, I do also argue in a more assertive manner that affluent societies must break with the social and environmental exploitations of money-driven, high-speed ideas of progress and explore less damaging ways of enabling creative and non-monotonous lives. This means opening ourselves to new forms of ownership and control over the means of provision for consumption, to more self-provisioning,