Environmentalism as Consumption

Last week, at Andrew Sullivan’s, I wrote a longish post on environmentalism and the politics of meaning. Over at the Spiked Review of Books, Frank Furedi has a smart piece on the rise of green capitalism that works as a great follow up.

Capitalist society appears to be restructuring according to an environmentalist imperative. Even hard-headed capitalist entrepreneurs have opted for business plans underpinned by an environmentalist ethos. Of course, some entrepreneurs have a healthy cynicism about the merits of fashionable envirobabble, but nevertheless they understand that they cannot thrive unless they talk the talk.

… The strength of Heartfield’s Green Capitalism is its critique of green consumerism. In a well-argued section, Heartfield argues that the outward expression of anti-consumerism tends to coexist with a new obsessive fixation on the act of consumption. So although green consumerism appears to represent a rejection of materialism, in practice it is no less preoccupied with buying things than are those brand junkies chasing the latest fashionable product. Arguably, as Heartfield implies, shopping means more to green consumers than it does to the shallow brand-fixated consumers they so despise. For a start, green consumers imagine that their purchases are meaningful ethical acts. ‘Ethical shopping flatters us that our everyday buying is doing good’, argues Heartfield.

This is, I think, a very astute point.  Modern environmentalism isn’t just an expression of the desire to find meaning and fulfillment, it’s an expression that does so explicitly through conspicuous, obsessively-curated consumption — exactly what it purports to be against.

None of this is to say that caring for the environment is a bad thing in and of itself; certainly even the most purely self-interested individual recognizes that wise use of one’s resources is a good thing.  (Though whether mandates actually promote wise use is another question entirely.)  I do think it suggests, however, that environmentalism can, in some forms, be as shallow and narcissistic as the consumerism it ostensibly rejects.