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CONSUMERISM
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In
our hectic, fast-paced, consumer-driven society, it's
not uncommon for people to feel overwhelmed, isolated,
alone, and even alienated. Many are re-discovering
the healing and empowering role that community can
bring to our lives. The sense of belonging we feel
when we make the time to take an active role in our
communities can give us a deeper sense of meaning
and purpose.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
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For
the economy I want workers and consumers to have control
over their own economic lives. I want everyone to have
fair conditions that fully utilize their talents and
potentials. I want incomes that accord with the efforts
people expend in their labors. I want what is produced,
by whom, under what conditions, and with who consuming
the result--all determined in accord with enhancing
human well-being and development and all decided by
the people involved and affected. I want an end to hierarchies
of power and wealth and to class division with most
actors subordinated to an elite few. To accomplish all
these ends I favor the institutions of participatory
economics -- worker and consumer councils, remuneration
for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and
participatory planning. If someone should demonstrate
that those institutions somehow fail to accomplish necessary
economic functions or have social or personal by-products
that outweigh their benefits -- I would simply return
to the drawing board. Exploitation, alienation, poverty,
disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating labor,
production for the profit of a few -- much less harsh
homelessness, starvation, and degradation -- are not
like gravity. They arise from institutional relations
established by human beings. New institutions, also
established by human beings, can generate other vastly
superior outcomes. Defining and working to attain those
new institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert |
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"The role of the market place is to be an instrument
of environmental change and policy making. We are
all consumers with a great potential for change. Environmental
protection begins at home."
~ Noel
Brown, Former Director of the UN Environmental
Program
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"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our
advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of
garbage and trash represents not only an attitude
of indifference toward valuable natural resources,
but also a serious economic and public health problem.
-- Jimmy
Carter
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The
ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic
by-product of modern "consumer society." It might even
be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of
generate markets means that disposibility and waste
have become the spine of the system. To consume means,
literally, "to destroy or expend," and in the garbage
crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society
in which enormous productive capacities and market forces
have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard
to the long or even short-term future of life on the
planet.
-- Stuart Ewen |
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"I feel more confident than ever that the power to
save the planet rests with the individual consumer."
~ Denis
Hayes
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American
consumerism is about buying things we don't need,
with money we don't have, to impress friends we don't have
time for.
-- Leo Horrigan
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"But
once we concede that people do care about status,
it necessarily follows that the status competition
that makes people buy expensive consumer goods in
order to impress other people constitutes a failure
of the market economy - a failure as real as traffic
congestion, or pollution, or any other activity in
which the individual pursuit of self-interest leads
to a collectively bad outcome. Suppose that we could
somehow agree to stop competing over who has the fanciest
car; everyone could then work a bit less, spend more
time with their families, and raise the sum total
of human happiness. Or to put it a bit differently,
Americans (or at least the top few percent of the
income distribution) have gotten into a sort of arms
race of conspicuous consumption that, like most arms
races, consumes huge quantities of resources yet in
the end changes little. "
~ Paul
Krugman
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It
is time for a sustainable energy policy which puts
consumers, the environment, human health, and peace
first.
-- Dennis
Kucinich
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I
feel privileged to work at an organization that is
part of a growing movement to help people adopt environmental
and social justice practices into their lives and
helps them encourage these values in the broader economy,
where our consumer and investor dollars can "vote"
for sustainability. At a time when corporations are
exerting increasing power over people's lives and
the environment, it is vital that we work directly
with companies to promote greater responsibility.
-- Todd
Larsen
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"It
is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs
the depiction of reality in the mass media."
-- Christopher Lasch
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"It's
a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that
the death of the planet is not sufficient to break
it."
-- Kalle
Lasn
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...
the aim of development must be neither producerism
not consumerism, but the satisfaction of fundamental
human needs, which are not only needs of humanity...
-- Manfred
Max-Neef
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The essence of globalization is a subordination of
human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental
rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global
trade and investment.
-- Ralph
Nader
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Consumers
have not been told effectively enough that they have
huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve
a moral choice.
-- Anita
Roddick
Since
the governments are in the pockets of businesses,
who's going to control this most powerful institution?
Business is more powerful than politics, and it's
more powerful than religion. So it's going to have
to be the vigilante consumer.
-- Anita
Roddick
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A
key issue in managing globalization is therefore how
we organise the global investmentand labour markets
to meet the needs of flexibility for enterprises,
security for workers and quality for consumers. We
need new proactive policies that focus directly on
how authorities in the public and private sphere can
blend economic and social policies with an enabling
environment for private initiative to create market
opportunities for Decent Work.
-- Juan
Somavia
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“Our
personal consumer choices have ecological, social,
and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine
some of our deeply held notions that underlie our
lifestyles.”
-- David
Suzuki
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Fair
trade benefit many. From farmers in producer countries to
students in a U.S. school studying the environment, the
concept and practice of fair trade connects producers and
consumers in new and powerful ways. It is the nexus for:
meeting both environmental and economic considerations of
indigenous peoples; re-balancing the trading relationship
between North and South; building a link between U.S. policy
and publics to a larger world community that is knocking
at the door
-- TransFair USA, 2002
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