Addict Nation (7 page)

This should have come as no surprise. About two years before this disaster, while Congress was debating the wisdom of expanding oil drilling in coastal waters owned by taxpayers, a scandal erupted over sex and drug use within the Interior Department agency that oversees oil drilling. Reports detailed “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” where government officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”
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So when we talk about government being in bed with big oil, we’re not exaggerating.

Hooked and Cooked on Oil

Big oil is the big elephant in the room when it comes to overcon-sumption. It’s not just gas. It’s plastic. Plastic cups, plastic water bottles, plastic forks and knives, plastic bags . . . they are all made from petrochemicals! Oil—petroleum—is a key ingredient in petrochemicals! 27 The next time we casually toss away a plastic water bottle we should pause to think of the catastrophic Gulf oil spill. If we really look hard into those oily waters, we just might see our own reflection.

Most of the plastic we use is not biodegradable. Some plastics become toxic when burned. Plastic bags from the supermarket take 1,000 years to degrade. But, still, we thoughtlessly accept them because, oops, we forgot to bring that reusable bag from home. A heroin junkie’s home is rarely neat. Similarly, our cultural addictions are making for a trashy nation and a filthy world. In the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between California and Hawaii, there’s a cluster of trash that’s at least twice the size of Texas. Millions of tons of plastic wind up in oceans every year.
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Addictive behavior invariably leads to moral degeneracy, and cultural addictions are no exception. While we’ve become a nation of oil junkies, mired in our own oil-based trash, our oil pushers behave like mob bosses, bullying and breaking anyone who stands in their way. And, like a mob boss, an oil-industry official who was on the rig the day of the Gulf oil rig explosion took the Fifth, refusing to testify at an investigative hearing for fear of incriminating himself. In my mind, the Gulf oil spill marked a turning point and a tipping point. After decades of living in denial, we Americans were finally forced to stare at the consequences of our consumer lifestyle. The oil slick became a metaphor for everything wrong with our materialistic culture. It was as if the whole country was being dragged into an intervention.

But what’s the alternative to our messed-up system? Must we really choose between unsustainable economic growth that’s destroying our environment or the collapse of our entire economy and the prospect of another Great Depression? Perhaps it is time to ask, What’s behind door number three?

“All the data show that increased economic growth in the United States over the last 50 years has not promoted higher levels of well-being among the citizens.”

—Tim Kasser, author of
The High Price of Materialism

There Is Another Way

There are really two challenges here. One is micro, one is macro. One is what we, as individuals, can do to break our overconsump-tion habit. The other is what society and its institutions—including government—must do to revamp our economic systems so they value something beyond just economic growth, which is simply not ecologically sustainable.

A growing chorus of environmentally minded economists are demanding that we, as a culture and an economy, stop measuring ourselves by GDP (gross domestic product), which is the market value of all the goods and services made in the United States every year. GDP is often associated with the standard of living.

There is now a new movement to come up with a less materialistic measuring stick to assess the nation’s well-being. GNH or
Gross
National Happiness
is a concept that has sprung up as a more holistic, more spiritual measure of how we, as in
We the People
, are faring. It seeks to measure not just how many
goods
we’re churning out but how
good
we feel. It would assign values to intangibles like the social and psychological contentedness of citizens and the health of our environment. Supporters describe this new outlook as “measuring what matters.”

In the excellent book
Prosperity Without Growth,
Tim Jackson argues that we need to redefine prosperity, noting “Unraveling the culture—and changing the social logic—of consumerism will require the kind of sustained and systematic effort it took to put it in place to start with. Crucially though, this effort clearly won’t succeed as a purely punitive endeavor. Offering people viable alternatives to the consumer way of life is vital. Progress depends on building up capabilities for people to flourish in less materialistic ways.”
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You have to offer a better alternative
is a fundamental truth of addiction
.
You don’t just stop drinking. You have to replace alcohol with something else that will give you pleasure in a different way, a sober way. Let’s examine sober pleasure versus addictive pleasure. Addictive pleasure creates a rush, a high, and later a crash. For example, there’s the rush of buying something expensive and then the crash of getting the credit card bill. Sober pleasure is more incremental and stretched out. Walking on the beach, visiting a museum, or volunteering for a charity doesn’t provide the same rush, but neither does it wallop you with a crash.

In order to break our addiction to materialism, we need to cultivate more nonmaterial pleasures. What are some of the nonmaterial things we value?

We value our time.

We value our experience of nature.

We value our sense of spiritual well-being, which comes from being of service to others.

We need to start giving currency to these intangibles, so they can be measured and traded on the open market.

Let’s address time. If our culture valued time more, we could create a system that would give people more free time, more vacation time, more time to work from home. Perhaps a four-day work week, more part-time jobs, more staggered commuting hours, more opportunities to work from home, and more telecommuting. With conference calling, Skype, and Internet interconnectivity, plenty of people who endure grueling commutes could instead work from home. This would automatically reduce our gas consumption and our total carbon footprint. Spreading out the workload would allow us to employ more people, thereby reducing the fear of widespread unemployment due to lower GDP. Tax breaks could encourage corporations to embrace flextime and part-time strategies.

Let’s tackle nature. A big part of our dilemma is that we have not assigned a negative value to the destruction of our ecosystem in the calculations we make to assess the nation’s economic well-being. We need to hold industry much more accountable for environmental wreckage, exploitation, and cruelty.

One innovate way to do that would be to assign “rights” to certain entities in our world which have heretofore been denied them. If natural entities, like bodies of water, such as the Gulf of Mexico, were assigned “natural rights,” there would be a total prohibition on the kind of disastrous pollution that is now occurring. It simply would not be allowed because it would be a violation of its natural rights. We’d be forced to come up with alternatives to gas and oilbased plastics. Innovative, ecologically minded entrepreneurs could devise such alternatives, spurring a new wave of ecologically minded economic development. In fact, there are already completely biodegradable plant-based water bottles, but—thus far—there has been no incentive for major water bottle manufacturers to switch to them. This new “rights” system would provide such an incentive.

Similarly, if we assigned natural entities, such as forests, natural rights, we would drastically limit the amount of trees used for paper products. Tough, new criteria would be established to justify the destruction of a tree, which would make wanton use of virgin wood economically unfeasible, forcing paper companies to switch to recycled paper en masse. If
Seventh Generation
can do it, why can’t all the other companies? The answer is: they can. They just won’t do it until they’re pushed, either by a new economic system or by consumer demand.

Similarly, there are many products that are made from animal skins and parts for which there are compassionate alternatives. If we formally recognized that the millions of animals raised and killed for fashion in America every year had “inalienable rights” to humane treatment, it would effectively put the fur industry out of business. Ditto for many of the food products we consume. The elimination of massive industrial farms would reduce our carbon footprint enormously as meat production is the single biggest cause of global warming, far beyond transportation, according to an in-depth United Nations study. The assignment of such rights would require giving cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and other farm animals room to move, access to the outdoors, and opportunities to socialize. This would make meat more expensive, which would encourage people to eat differently and incorporate more varieties of vegetables, grains, and legumes into their diet. Different kinds of private enterprises would spring up to meet these new demands. Food cooperatives would flourish. Fast food would decline and perhaps cease to exist. Obesity would plummet. The health of Americans would improve. Our GNH (gross national happiness) would skyrocket.

Some might call this compassionate capitalism. While many of the suggested environmental reforms, like cap and trade, are extraordinarily complex, the assignment of rights to animals and nature is an extraordinarily simple way to achieve the same results. “Natural rights” could be assigned to land, water, air, domestic farm animals, and wild animals. That would instantly criminalize much of the rapacious destruction of the environment occurring by private industry today. For those who say this would wreak economic havoc, well . . . that’s what critics said about the elimination of slavery too.

Beyond that, America needs to start being of service to the rest of humanity, making goods that people around the world desperately need, like systems to produce drinkable water, promote birth control, and improve sanitation. The list is long. It’s incomprehensible that we Americans are drowning in material items while a good percentage of the world’s population barely owns a toothbrush. At least 3 billion people—almost half the world’s population—live on less than $2.50 a day.
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It’s true that Third World consumers don’t have much to spend. But that’s where recovery principles come in. We, in the developed world, need to make
amends
for the destruction we have wrought on so many developing countries. We need to start producing not to profit, but to satisfy real, pressing needs of those half a world away. Ironically, this may boost our Gross National Happiness like nothing else.