Learning to Make Do With Less

Charities cite consumerism as the cause of many modern woes

A growing number of non-profit organizations have taken on the daunting task of challenging

a juggernaut that sometimes appears unstoppable: the voraciousness of American consumers.

A motley mix of churches, zoos, think tanks, conservationists, and grassroots activists has concluded that profligate consumption — and the state of mind that encourages it — lies at the heart of most major threats to the environment today, and to a livable world tomorrow.

“At a deep level, people know we have a society that can’t be sustained,” says Dick Roy, a former corporate lawyer who founded and directs the Northwest Earth Institute, a Portland, Ore., group that has prompted people in 140 cities and towns to eat less meat, buy organic food, plant community gardens, build bicycle paths, or take similar steps to sustain a healthy environment. “Behind every problem is excessive consumption. As difficult as it is, it’s got to be addressed.”

The scale of the problem can appear overwhelming — particularly during a period of robust economic growth. Americans make up just 5 percent of the world’s population but consume one-quarter of its oil and one-third of its paper, and lead the world in the per-capita consumption of steel, aluminum, plastics, meat, and many other resources. What’s more, the average American produces twice as much trash as the average European and wastes more energy than people in most other parts of the world consume.

Americans’ seemingly insatiable demand for consumer products and an affluent lifestyle jeopardizes efforts to preserve the supply of such resources as marine fisheries, open farmland, or old-growth timber.

“Most of us have been addressing symptoms rather than the root problems,” says Peter Forbes, who heads the Big Picture Project for the Trust for Public Land, which focuses on saving land from development. “Sprawl, loss of wilderness, endangered species — whatever the cause célèbre is, the root problem is people, including a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives that has led to record levels of material consumption that further degrades the environment.”

‘More Fun, Less Stuff’

Consumption is so huge and multifaceted an issue that few organizations aspire to tackle it in its entirety. One that does is the Center for a New American Dream, which was founded three years ago following a conference at which grant makers, charity officials, and others agreed that an organization was needed to try to pull together the issue’s many threads and point the way to possible solutions.

“A lot of foundations began to see that if they were interested in resource conservation, environmental health, sustainability, climate change, water quality, or biodiversity, an underlying driver in those issues is consumption,” says Betsy Taylor, who left her position as head of the Merck Family Fund to become the center’s director.

The center — whose motto is “more fun, less stuff” — seeks to help people and institutions shift their consumption patterns in ways that protect the environment while enhancing their quality of life. It operates at several levels, offering practical tips to parents for simplifying the holidays and for raising kids in a commercial culture while also working with businesses and institutions to promote the manufacture and purchase of more environmentally benign products and developing a network of groups and activists working in the area.

The goal is not to eliminate consumption — which, after all, is what keeps people alive and employed — but to shift purchases to goods and services that build strong communities and minimize environmental degradation. Such changes may also help eliminate what Ms. Taylor calls the disturbing paradox that even amid great material prosperity many people feel a deep yearning for spiritual connection and a deeper sense of purpose. “We have plenty but we feel empty,” she says.

Aligning practice with principles is not always easy. The center’s decision not to use direct mail, which it considers an environmentally wasteful method of raising money that conflicts with its principles, has forced it to try other methods to recruit the 1,500 new members needed to secure a $250,000 grant from the Town Creek Foundation. It encourages existing members to sign up friends and colleagues. Many other people join after visiting its Web site (http://www.newdream.org), which recorded over 2.5 million hits last year.

Range of Approaches

A wide range of charities are dealing with specific aspects of the consumption issue, choosing what to emphasize based on their program interests as well as their views of what strategies are likely to be most effective.

Some seek to reshape public policy to discourage wasteful consumption and to encourage thrift. Others are working directly with business and industry to come up with products and processes that do less harm to the environment while offering better options and more information to consumers. Still others believe that lasting change will occur only as millions of Americans change their attitudes about what constitutes the good life, and alter their buying habits and resource use accordingly.

Several groups are working with farmers, the timber industry, or businesses to come up with standards for labeling agricultural or wood products or other goods grown or manufactured in ways deemed environmentally superior to their competition, to make it easier for consumers to identify and buy such products.

Consumer’s Choice Council, founded in 1997, seeks to ensure that consumers around the world have the information they need to buy the most environmentally friendly and socially responsible products available. The council, a coalition of some 60 organizations from 25 countries, is focusing on timber and wood products, coffee, and genetically modified foods.

The Food Alliance, set up in 1994 with a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, has been working to develop a seal of approval for food produced in “environmentally and socially responsible ways.” And the Forest Stewardship Council, formed in 1993, has developed a system of independent, third-party certification that wood products were grown in conformance with its standards for responsible forest management.

Some of the major environmental groups are tackling pieces of the problem. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, both offer online advice about issues to consider when shopping for a car, choosing where to live, remodeling a home, or buying major appliances. The Union’s advice was also published last year as a trade paperback: The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices.

Religious organizations are also taking up the challenge. The National Council of Churches is promoting energy efficiency among its member congregations, while also encouraging congregants to examine how their lifestyle contributes to problems like global warming and suburban sprawl. The council’s Eco-Justice Working Group has compiled information and suggestions about the wise use of resources and made it available online at http://www.webofcreation.org.

Aquarium Exhibit

Consumption is also appearing as a theme in exhibits at mainstream institutions like zoos, aquariums, and science centers — which increasingly are trying to educate the public about the effects of human activities on the natural world.

The New England Aquarium, in Boston, is developing a multimedia traveling exhibit that will “present to people in a very engaging way the impact of overconsumption on the environment,” says Susan Dowds, the aquarium’s director of program and capital support. While depleted fisheries and aquatic habitats will be among the themes, so will such areas as meat consumption and energy use — issues not normally featured at aquariums.

“All these issues are linked,” Ms. Dowds declares. “What we do on land has an enormous impact on our coastal aquatic resources and on our oceans.”

The exhibit is intended to help visitors understand how their consumption affects the environment, and what steps they can take to minimize any negative impact.

“We try to do things that are scientifically accurate, but we don’t club people over the head and make them feel guilty,” Ms. Dowds observes. “You don’t want people to think eating fish is bad. It’s good for you, and it’s a resource that’s renewable if you manage it right. But you can’t take it all and not leave anything for the future.”

No Guilt Trips

The argument that Americans collectively consume more than their fair share of the earth’s resources makes little headway with most people during the current economic boom, which has been fueled by record levels of consumer spending on everything from gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles to cell phones and computers.

“An awful lot of environmentalists are uncomfortable with behavioral change,” notes Ms. Taylor, of the Center for a New American Dream. “The parking lots of many environmental groups are filled with SUV’s. And some groups are nervous because they don’t want to offend their members or donors” — perhaps by an implicit suggestion that they might want to reassess their buying habits and adopt simpler ways of living.

The center’s mission is not to induce guilt in people, Ms. Taylor says, but to help them see the connections between cause and effect that often remain hidden. Car trips contribute to global warming, for example, which is having far-reaching effects on the oceans, including the death of fragile coral reefs.

Helping people understand such consequences as “the disappearance of beautiful fish that we love if we keep driving our SUV’s to the grocery store” is a key step in changing behaviors, she says.

Catalyzing personal changes in attitudes and behaviors at the grassroots is the mission of several groups that focus on educating people a dozen at a time, in living rooms, church basements, or company cafeterias.

The Northwest Earth Institute, for example, organizes groups of 8 to 12 people to discuss such topics as discovering a sense of place, understanding the effects of globalization, or living in a more environmentally conscious way. Since its creation in 1993, the institute has enrolled more than 25,000 people in such groups, which meet for 10 sessions and follow a structured discussion agenda detailed in a course manual.

“People get all charged up by the discussion courses,” says Mr. Roy, who abandoned his career as a corporate lawyer to establish the institute with his wife, Jeanne. “Many of them become good friends, and come out and engage with their neighbors and local community in activities that are going to be good for the earth.” Whatever the discussion topic, says Mr. Roy, the emphasis is on “empowering people to take back control of their lives and their future in every way.”

Another grassroots effort with a slightly different focus is being conducted by Global Action Plan for the Earth, which has obtained government contracts to operate its program in seven cities, including Kansas City, Mo., Madison, Wis., and Philadelphia.

Under the program, teams made up of five to seven households attend eight meetings over a four-month period to learn what steps they can take to reduce their impact in areas like water and energy consumption, transportation, and solid waste. When the course ends, they are encouraged to pass on their knowledge by helping to start other teams.

David Gershon, who founded the program in 1989, says its success is now clear. People who participate in the process reduce their solid waste by 40 percent, on average; their water use by 35 percent; energy use by 10 percent; and vehicle miles traveled per household by 8 percent.

The organization initially was supported by foundation grants, but now gets 80 percent of its $1-million budget from government agencies involved in conserving and managing natural resources.

“Our message is not anti-consumption,” Mr. Gershon says. “If you’re encouraging people to become less wasteful and be better stewards, making more efficient use of their resources, you’re not fighting anything, but you’re moving people in the direction they already want to go.”

Changing Public Policy

Other organizations believe that such savings, even if replicated in hundreds of communities across the country, will still not suffice to turn back the tide of overconsumption unless public policy changes in significant ways.

To accelerate that process, Redefining Progress, in Oakland, Calif., is promoting the development of indicators that measure the economic, environmental, and social well-being of communities around the country. It also permits visitors to its Web site to calculate their “ecological footprint” — a measure of how much productive land and water is needed to produce the resources each person consumes.

The organization is among the proponents of shifting taxes from social goods — such as wages or investment earnings — to social ills like pollution, energy inefficiency, or natural-resource consumption.

It is also studying the question of why many Americans say they require more and more money to meet their basic needs. The group’s tentative answer: Common social assets (like public schools) and natural resources (like aquifers used by municipal water systems) have been permitted to degrade, prompting people to feel they must go to the market to buy private education or bottled water, for example.

“We’re already exceeding the regenerative capacity of the planet while expanding our lifestyles through the exuberant global economy, while our populations continue to grow,” says Joanne Klijunas, executive director of Redefining Progress.

Reversing that trend will require millions of people to change their behavior in significant ways, say many observers. A global commercial culture fueled by consumption on a massive scale is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. But despite the magnitude of the challenge, some activists see hopeful signs.

“The good life, a century ago, was about morals and values,” says Vicki Robin, co-founder of the New Road Map Foundation. “Now it’s about consumption.” Consumer culture preaches that growth is good and more is better, she says — “and we’re now trying to sell those ideas globally.”

Her small organization promotes the ideas contained in Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence, the best-selling book she wrote with Joe Dominguez.

Its basic thesis: People can leave the rat race of high-stress employment and lead more relaxed and fulfilling lives by analyzing their true needs and paring back their expenses accordingly. As people stop defining themselves by their incomes and their acquisitions, they consume less, she says, and have more time and energy to devote to friends, family, and community — including volunteer activities.

Says Ms. Robin: “I’m collecting evidence that there’s a turning of the tide. It’s not fast enough; we’re losing ground daily. But there are opportunities that didn’t exist even a couple of years ago.

“There’s a possibility we’re going to be able to pull through this very difficult time with a relatively healthy biosphere. And knowing that we might actually win this thing is very galvanizing.”