The other night, I was talking with Linda Grigg, an organic farmer, about consumerism. Linda said she was kind of glad that she and her husband, Jim Moses, will never make enough money to be tempted to deeds like buying a not-altogether-pleasing million-dollar house with Lake Michigan frontage and then remodeling it to the tune of seven hundred thousand dollars (an actual instance of mega-consumption she’d just heard about from a contractor friend). Unlike me, Linda didn’t get outraged or even righteously indignant about such plutocratic show, being wise enough to see that those lakeside-mansion owners might just be doing what comes naturally to folks in their position. What I might regard as vastly ostentatious spending evidently has its own internal, if hermetic, logic. Similarly, much of my spending makes sense to me but doubtless would seem gross to a real frugality adept. What is luxury to one woman is necessity to another, and most of us define enough as “just a little more.”
For instance, I wouldn’t mind owning a little more land, if only to secure my privacy. The fact that I own any land at all is fluky. There came a windfall just when my neighbor wanted to sell thirty of his acres, so I bought them because I could. I didn’t want to see the smoke from my neighbor’s cabin. Other than diddling with erosion control and making the occasional gesture toward ecological restoration by planting native trees, the only thing I do with my land is inhabit it. For a few years, the cabins were kept at bay. Now, all around me, as in most amenable terrain, there’s a ferocious amount of land speculation going on. In what used to be passable farm country, there are more and more houses on smaller and smaller parcels. Indeed, I’m not morally certain I couldn’t be driven to sell off a few acres to keep myself fed (and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to watch what the new owners would do with the land). At this stage in the ecological game, almost every form of land use is really abuse.
It has become normal to possess and dispose of land as though it were something lifeless, as though a parcel could be dealt with separately from its several contexts, from watershed to bioregion to planet. Consuming not only the sustainable harvest of the land but also its very life may be the current norm, but from the standpoint of neighbors, fellow creatures, and posterity, it’s wrong. As Aldo Leopold wrote fifty years ago in A Sand County Almanac, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” This is the essence of Leopold’s land ethic.
Leopold also observed that “perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land.” Of course, an intense nonpecuniary consciousness of land can be pretty depressing. Leopold himself bleakly wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” What some folks term development looks like mutilation to me.
I live not far from a perfect swimming hole, a sweet little lake that was the first place I set foot in when I arrived in this county that became my new home. After a long flight from California and a long drive from the airport, my host took me to the lake to go swimming by starlight. Back then, in 1984, there was a lone cottage on the lake’s wooded shore whose waterskiing proprietors annually paid it a brief summer visit. The rest of the year, the lake, to which some earlier owners had granted a slice of public access, was a neighborhood commons: an unsung lido for families, who’d bring their kids, who’d bring their inner tubes; for fishermen or -women with low-horsepower boats; and for the occasional translake swimmer. (Me. I confess my vested interest.) In the shallows, there’d be minnows for the kids to chase. Once, I even heard a hidden loon cut loose with its spooky yodel. Occasionally, a great blue heron would stalk the waterside at dawn, preempting the fishermen’s luck. The lake was, in a word, paradise.
Then, a few years ago, at the turnoff to the lake, there appeared a billboard advertising narrow building lots pivoting like the sticks of a Japanese fan on a wee hub of lake frontage, with a cheery sign announcing a future subdivision. By and by, the lots began to sell. Each sale was proclaimed on the hateful map. Every time I bicycled past the sign on my way to the swimming hole, I’d revile the developer. After a year of this, I decided that this cursing was bad for my soul. I asked the developer if he would meet with me. I’m not sure exactly what I was hoping for: for us to talk as human beings; for me to offer amends for my reflexive hostility; for a miracle, maybe. What I got was a shocking encounter that upbraided my innocence and reduced me to tears, which is not all that easy to do. My weeping moved him not one whit. When I told him I cared about what happened to all the life around the lake, he flew into a rage. He hotly deplored the fact that the long-ago owners of the lake had ever granted any public access. Rightly enough, he pegged me as an environmentalist and an Indian-lover. He more or less suggested that I and my sentimental ilk were bent on snatching the bread from the mouths of his babes.
The subdivision proceeded, the developer’s babes were fed, and several very big houses with lawns, set back and up a respectful distance from the water’s edge, now intrude on the lakeside woodland. Docks and modest vessels belonging to those houses punctuate the shore. There are driveways now and grassy clearings. The effect of this new settlement is the usual: fragmentation of the landscape, a reduction in its biotic integrity, stability, and beauty. The everyday suburban conditions — lawns, house cats, septic systems, gaps in the forest canopy, vehicles unpredictably crossing what used to be the nocturnal animals’ paths to the water, rank vegetation flourishing in the sunny paths of disturbance, noise during nesting season, and additional tykes making a pastime of catching frogs and fish, competing with the herons — are disastrous for all but the weediest plants and animals. Regardless of our envirocredentials, we builders of new homes (for I am one) are committing habitat destruction, and not only where we build our homes, but also in the places where our lumber comes from. By this, and by all the rest of our consuming, we play our modest roles in the earth’s sixth great extinction crisis. Owing in large measure to humankind’s long, steadily accelerating career of habitat shattering, the rate of extinction is currently about a thousand times what is normal. That’s how fast the planet’s biotic community is losing member species these days.
Living in the heyday of North American consumerism, being mistress of my own estate, and having my choice of cars, computers, espresso machines, blow-dryers, and designer T-shirts (assuming I can pay for, or charge, them) is no consolation. I can’t get that extinction crisis out of my mind. Extinction is not abstract in the least. It’s the thousands of instances of the desolation of being the last of one’s kind. The birder’s account of hearing what may have been a lone male cerulean warbler, say, singing and singing and singing for a mate, unaware that there may not be a female of the species left, within hailing distance anyway, is well on its way to becoming a genre. As the habitat goes, so go the populations. The interior forest habitat necessary for these and other wood warblers to nest unmolested and so to persist is being shredded. Because birding is a popular pastime, we have more information about the fate of the birds of the forest than about their less conspicuous associates — salamanders, mites, shrews, beetles — but we can reasonably assume that most of them are finding it harder to get a date, too.
Life seems to want to fill in all the niches, and to do so with wondrous diversity. Through the generations, plants and animals shape themselves to place. “Place” could be as small and fleeting as the receding bands of moisture in yard-wide vernal pools, whose annual evaporations make for a quick succession of infinitesimal wildflowers and their insect associates. Bulldoze a few California acres for a housing development, and those fairy gardens are gone for good. “Place” also could be the vast unbroken hardwood forest of presettlement eastern North America, whose bounty of seeds, nuts, and berries could sustain flocks of billions of passenger pigeons. Although it’s an exaggeration to say we’re destroying the earth, human activity has been simplifying and diminishing places, eliminating populations of plants and animals, disrupting intricate relationships, and laying places open to alien invasions (alien meaning not “from outer space” but, in this instance, “foreign to this particular ecosystem”).
Thomas Ford, a local wildlife artist and birder I consulted about the wood warblers, told me the following story of alienation: The brown-headed cowbirds, thanks to the edges opened by roads and clearings, now have forest venues in which to fool other birds into rearing cowbird young. Cowbirds (once called buffalo birds) learned this trick when they followed the bison across the Great Plains, feeding on the grasshoppers kicked up by those millions of hooves. The cowbirds would deposit their eggs in any nests they could find and then roam on, leaving their offspring in foster care. Today, with fields and lawns and roads encroaching on forests everywhere, the cowbirds have access to the nests of warblers and other birds of the interior. Cowbird babies usurp the warblers’ nature — thus, more cowbirds and fewer warblers. It’s a typical weed story, one whose details could hardly have been included in the land-use plan, but that illustrates the unforeseen consequences of actions some refer to as growth, progress, and development. With millions of such disturbances, humanity’s impact on the whole planet is inordinate.
An article in the July 1997 issue of Science quantified some aspects of this impact:
Between one-third and one-half of the earth’s land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined; more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity; and about one quarter of the bird species on earth have been driven to extinction.
Changes of this magnitude weren’t effected all at once, although lately they’ve gone into overdrive. Consumption of the very life of the land is not an American invention; it is the habit of civilization. Yet the European encounter with the Americas, begun a mere five centuries ago, was like a spark to tinder: patterns of land use that, over a couple of millenniums, had domesticated, sometimes desertified, and definitely aged the Old World were recapitulated here in decades. Civilization befell the wilderness of North America and beset a continent peopled by a few million Indians, whose diverse cultures — constituting hundreds of place-specific variations on the theme of subsistence — held them in equilibrium with the land.
Setting aside the controversial idea that the Paleo-Indians who crossed the Bering land bridge had a hand in the extinction of mammalian megafauna — big game that would dwarf any terrestrial animal alive today — it is not idealizing indigenous peoples to say that their inhabitation of the Americas wrought only subtle changes. That is a fact. Evidence of the Indians’ deft tending of woodlands, prairies, and deserts is only now being recognized. Today, the globalization of North American–style consumerism threatens to swamp any remaining indigenous cultures that enjoy an ethical relationship with their habitat. Left to their own devices, indigenous peoples might eventually have invented their own ways to mass-produce doodads from the raw materials of the wilderness. We’ll never know. Nevertheless, we’d do well to consider the merits of the animistic world view that fostered their vital sense of community with more-than-human nature and their capacity to experience contentment without possessions.
Subsistence or foraging peoples tended to share their few goods and to diffuse authority. Hunter-gatherers responded to food scarcity by migration or raw endurance, by having fewer children, or by dying in their thirties. Grain storage was not an option. Sustenance came directly from the land through a sacramental exchange; flourishing depended on utter alertness and was the occasion of gratitude. Austerity might alternate with feasting. A Plains Indian might in one sitting have eaten several pounds of buffalo meat fresh from a kill. Hungry people will gorge themselves. It may be that today’s rampant consumerism betokens the soul famine of a society estranged from the living earth.
Even though North American consumerism may be the culminating stage of a lengthy historical process, that’s not to say that consumerism is somehow natural. Throughout human history, the power elite have played a role in steering us away from participation in nature and toward objective materialism.
With agriculture, humanity moved a notch closer to consumerism. Farming produces the storable surplus commodities that permit fixed settlements, centralization, specialization, and social stratification — thus, civilization. Ever since the earliest city-states and theocracies were formed, the power elite have been the leading exponents of the joys of consumption, obtaining their luxuries and leisure by force majeure or by invoking the fear of God or the myths of divine right, profit sharing, or trickle-down. In order to support the kings, khans, pharaohs, emperors, thanes, lords, and chief executive officers in the manner to which these rulers had become accustomed, and to which they claimed to be entitled, the subject populace would exploit the land.
Give or take a few exhausted bioregions (the Fertile Crescent, for example, or the once wooded Mediterranean basin), this agrarian civilization “worked” for about forty-five centuries. With the waning of the Middle Ages, trade began to break the bonds of custom, to desacralize life, and to commercialize human exchange. Land, labor, and capital became commodities. Sustenance increasingly became contingent on the ability to get money to buy the basic necessities rather than the ability to raise or make them. The necessity of maintaining the land’s health became less immediate or practicable to the many.
Early English emigration to North America wasn’t driven so much by a love of adventure as by a massive outbreak of poverty. The wool market was booming in the sixteenth century. To pasture sheep to meet the demand, what had formerly been the common lands of villages were “enclosed” or privatized. Country people who had for centuries allocated among themselves the various, if meager, products of the commons — forage, firewood, stall litter — found themselves displaced from the land by fiat. Now they were “surplus population.” Seeking but seldom finding employment and having to sell their labor cheap, they might drift into the cities to beg. Or, in exchange for passage across the Atlantic Ocean, they might indenture themselves for a stretch of years, hoping thereafter to enclose a bit of the aboriginal commons of North America. Very few poor English settlers realized such hopes, though. In the new country, property would be distributed almost as unevenly as it had been in the old.
Regardless of the colonists’ estate, to a people whose idea of landscape had been formed in England’s green and long-domesticated countryside, the encounter with the vast, somber eastern forest had to be terrifying. The whole seaboard was very likely appalling, having weather of shocking ferocity, being devoid of gold, and apparently being ill-suited to familiar crops. These immigrants from a land long since deforested surmounted their terror and assuaged their poverty or greed in a frenzy of conquest and consumption. In America they saw wood, not forests: boundless fuel, a wealth of ships’ timber, a riot of game and no royal foresters to bar the taking of any of it; a lavish invitation to hunt and hew and feast before the fire.
It was only in a limited sense a people’s free-for-all. The hellbent consumption of the American land has been largely a matter of business. Joint-stock companies — forerunners of corporations — were chartered to colonize the New World and to profit their investors. The plantation agriculture that produced such commodities as tobacco, indigo, and sugar required that land be cleared and cheaply worked by indentured servants or slaves. Farther north and west, the fur trade reached, in the name of fashion, deep into the American wilderness for pelts of ermine, mink, otter, marten, fisher, wolverine, red fox, gray wolf, black bear, and beaver. It was an enormous enterprise. According to Peter Matthiessen in his Wildlife in America,
A Hudson’s Bay Company sale, in November 1743, disposed of 26,750 beaver pelts, as well as 14,730 martens and 1,850 wolves; that these were by no means the only victims, even among their own kind, is indicated by the fact that 127,080 beaver, 30,325 martens, and 1,276 wolves, as well as 12,428 otters and fishers, 110,000 raccoons, and a startling aggregation of 16,512 bears were received in the French port of Rochelle in the same year. People today who have no reasonable expectation of seeing even one of these creatures in the wild without considerable effort to do so might well look carefully at these figures.
The Lakota people called the whites wasichu, which means “one who steals the fat.” Were there also words meaning “one who fells whole hemlock groves for the tanbark, leaving the logs to rot,” “one who hoses away the soil of the Sierra Nevada foothills in search of gold,” “one who chops down venerable pecan trees to harvest the nuts,” or “one who burns two-hundred-pound Great Lakes sturgeon for steamboat fuel”? All these deeds characterized certain immigrants, too.
Prior to civilization, human groups lived within their ecosystems or watersheds — they inhabited their life places. By our myriad cultures, we have been a diversely niche-adapted species. But the religion of commerce undermines loyalty to place. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, there still were redoubts of rural subsistence in Europe and America. Many of our great-grandparents provided their own food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and entertainment. To pay for the goods they couldn’t make for themselves or do without, they raised cash crops. Excess was seldom a problem.
At century’s end, we’re consumers, not gatherers or producers. We’re at the mercy of dimly understood industrial processes and long lines of supply. Being at such removes — practical, geographic, and technological — from our sustenance, most of us are ignorant of the source of our tap water and the provenance of our food. Unless we live in Nigeria or Kuwait or on Alaska’s North Slope, we lack physical intelligence about what is entailed in fueling the millions of internal-combustion engines on which we utterly depend. If we’re not from rural Maine, northern Ontario, the central Appalachians, or the Pacific Northwest, we’re missing information about the origins of our paper supply and the costs of logging downslope. Because the sources, processing, and manufacture of our goods are so widely scattered, it’s nearly impossible for us to comprehend the effects of our way of life on the biotic community. Today, not just North Americans but the wealthier portion of the world’s people command their sustenance and luxuries from the biosphere as a whole. Those who have the means shop the global marketplace; those who don’t, stock it.
Knowledge of some of the true costs of our consumer goods can induce a miserable consciousness of being stuck in habits that are Life (with a capital L) threatening. “If you eat bananas, you’re in favor of low-intensity warfare in Central America,” declared a young Mexican agronomist at an Iowa conference a few years ago. This is the part that gets left out of Chiquita’s story. “Consumerism is complicity,” says bioregionalist Peter Berg. Although I’d like to think I’m in solidarity with campesinos everywhere, bananas don’t grow in my bioregion, and I eat quite a few.
Even though I do a fairly good job of minimizing my garbage output, I’m participating nevertheless in a system that seizes and wastes on my behalf, not far enough out of sight and seldom out of mind. Because I live a mile north of a regional sanitary landfill, our waste is in my face. The dozen or so times a year I go to the dump to dispose of my bags of trash, I confront the throwaway part of consumerism. But the wads of nonbiodegradable waste are only the gross evidence of consumption: each American could fill three hundred shopping bags a week with the resources she or he uses — the coal, the gas, the grain, the soil that washes away. Still, I can’t conceive of not recycling, even though I know it’s like bailing with a perforated bucket. Diverting a little trickle of the waste stream is a righteous gesture, an effort not to squander the earth, but a trip to the mall — headwaters of the flood of dreck that ends up at the landfill — hints that to recycle may be to approach the problem from the wrong end.
I do bear moral responsibility for the consequences of my consumption, but we consumers didn’t originate the lifestyle. It has taken relentless, well-crafted persuasion — and occasional coercion — to override the common values of frugality and sharing. Over the course of the twentieth century, by means of mass production and global transportation, an ersatz version of the gluttony of nineteenth-century financiers has been democratized. The process feeds itself: as commerce reduces the beauty, abundance, and complexity of the land, nature compares ever less favorably with the bazaar. But even Muzak and designer athletic shoes can’t make up for ecosystem collapse. As earth’s wildness and human cultural diversity are rendered down to feedstock for the global economy, we do begin to notice. This rendering, having about gone the limit, is becoming harder to sell.
On the buyers’ part, consumerism may seem mindless, but sellers take premeditated aim at spots in the ego or unconscious mind, making amoral, if often clever, symbolic equations: liquor and sex, tobacco and virility, automobiles and freedom, cosmetics and allure, soft drinks and happiness, pharmaceuticals and health, cellphones and family ties. Double-page magazine spreads of sport utility vehicles perched alone and splendid atop some red-rock mesa beckon you and the kids to undertake the next Lewis and Clark Expedition, hassle-free as long as you stay within range of a filling station. Alas, painted cakes do not satisfy hunger. We cannot buy our way out of this situation, and the market will not lead us. To arrest the final consumption of the earth, nothing short of epochal, devolutionary change of the political economy is called for.
If, say, by prodigies of conscience, frugality, cooperation, and peaceful transformation, America bends its way of life toward preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community — even if all of us reduce our consumption to the barest of minimums — one other great change will be necessary. Per capita consumption is a ratio. In considering such ratios, it is, of course, important to take class differences into account. People who consume their grain in the form of meat, milk, and beer, who subscribe to the daily newspaper, who have second homes and third cars and travel by jet, are devouring a greater share of the planet’s substance than are vegetarian homebodies who read their news at the public library, assuming these herbivores travel on foot or by bicycle and not in ethanol-powered vehicles. Nevertheless, if the human population continues to burgeon, at some not-too-distant point even the most parsimonious lifestyles will become unsustainable. Therefore, one of the most obvious (if not one of the easiest) ways to rein in consumerism is to refrain from bringing more consumers into existence.
“By every conceivable measure,” observes Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life, “humanity is ecologically abnormal. Our species appropriates between 20 and 40 percent of the solar energy captured in organic material by land plants. There is no way that we can draw upon the resources of the planet to such a degree without drastically reducing the state of most other species.”
Despite the vast pollutions, extinctions, and privations we have wrought, Homo sapiens might persist. But will human beings?
The cure for our ravening estrangement from, and destruction of, the rest of the biotic community is reinhabitation. Being organisms, we might reestablish our creaturely reciprocity with our diverse habitats, our life places. Summoning our wit and will and capacity for invention, we need to develop the technologies, economies, and cultures that will allow us to dwell in our ecosystems in perpetuity. We can certainly learn enough about our life places to discern what kinds and sizes of human communities they will support without diminishing the future prospects of all our relations — furred, feathered, finned, fanged, and fungal.
As we exercise reproductive responsibility along with our rights and human populations dwindle to just proportions, as we revere and preserve what remains of free nature and wild land, as we set about restoring damaged land, we may regain our gut sense of the wonder and revelation in more-than-human life. It’s time to ditch the home-entertainment center and break the consumer trance, time to roll up our sleeves and learn the plants.
We have not made ourselves; we were made by the necessities of foraging and flight, informed by stories told and told again around the wandering band’s campfire, by movement with the seasons. Human beings coevolved with forests and savannas, with rivers teeming with fish and skies blackened by fowl; we came into being in the company of thundering herds of ungulates and the omnipresent threat of pitiless predators.
Extinction is forever, but where there are life-forms, there is hope. Enough biological diversity may remain that we can reanimate our landscapes. We may even rescue the wildness within us from the extinction threatened by credit cards, muscle wagons, and trips to the mall. By working to restore our life places from the soil on up, we can renew our membership in the biotic community.
The good life, incarnate, is a birthright. It’s about being and doing, not having. “Every cup of water is a prayer,” says a friend who pumps his own from a hand-dug well. Every trip to the swimming hole is a pilgrimage, a baptism in the waters of life. And the nature of life is enough.
“The One Who Steals the Fat” is excerpted from the anthology Consuming Desires, edited by Roger Rosenblatt. © 1999 by Island Press. It appears here by permission of Island Press/Shearwater Books, Washington, D.C., and Covelo, California.
