Excess consumption in the absence of affluence

Written on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:38 pm | by benign0

There’s a big difference between merely overcoming challenges and getting into a position of being on top of the situation.

I read the Warrior Lawyer’s blog entry Consumption Factor Key to Addressing the Food and Oil Crises where he writes:

As pointed out by Diamond’s article, yes, population growth is a problem for us, but its not a burden on the whole world, because Filipinos consume so little. This holds true for the rest of the developing world, in relation to the advanced countries

Whilst I agree 100% on the issue of the addiction to unsustainable consumption that afflicts the developed world, I beg to differ to the above specific passage and would assert that Third World overpopulation is still an equally relevant part of the energy and food supply equation with respect to consumption.

The continued irresponsible consumption of the developed world does not necessarily absolve us of the part we need to play — as a backward society — in the environmental scheme of things. We can highlight what the rich world need to do to temper wasteful consumption all we like, but that intiative is within their domain addressing the specific nature of their situation. We have ours, and ours is over-population — to put it more precisely, an excess number of low-producitvity people).

There is further irony in our use of the poverty card to downplay the role we need to play to protect the environment. If our goal as a society is to develop into a First World nation (presumably bumping up our consumption by a factor of 32 in the process as Diamond points out), then our population becomes a burden on the planet when this goal is achieved — the same way the spectre of one billion Chinese people owning their own cars, using electric clothes driers, eating more cardboard-and-plastic-packaged fast food looms ominously in the horizon. It’s an inescapable truth — overpopulation is an issue when poor and is still an issue when rich.

We are poor today, so we say our numbers don’t count. Yet we aspire to be a rich society, which begs the question: At what point then does the issue of our population evolve from one that is in the context of poverty to one that is in the context of the unsustainable consumption with which we regard the developed world with scorn? It’s a question that is relevant to a people that is famous for excess consumption even in the absence of affluence.

The governments of the developed world recognise the issue of wastefulness of their own respective societies in varying degrees. The question is, does our government or, more importantly in our case, our religion recognise our own issue of overpopulation? Whilst the First World have mobilised a signficant chunk of their vast technological prowess towards addressing waste and unsustainable living, can we honestly say we Filipinos are doing our end of the deal and mobilising our own resources (whatever that may be) towards addressing our specific issues with overpopulation? The rich world’s efforts to act may still fall short of expectations. But at least that recognition of the issue is still generally there. Can we say the same of ourselves? Do we at least recognise that overpopulation is a REAL issue?

We can’t even grow the nuts to confront the Roman Catholic Church about it. Go figure.

Tags: , ,
Add to del.icio.us | Digg this! | Yahoo MyWeb | Google Bookmark It! | Stumble It!
About The Author: benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.COM and has once been described as "one of the most enthusiastic hecklers of the politically-passionate" by a respected journalist.

Filed Under Society

Related Entries:

Comments

Leave a Reply