I was chatting with my internet friend Alec Morrow the other day. He’s currently traveling Asia, volunteering at permaculture projects. He asked me this question:
With respect to your individual ecological sustainability, how do you decide where to draw the line? Should the goal be to always [level up] to eventually never use fossil fuels or industrially manufactured goods? Or do you think there is a point of diminishing returns that determines where you want to sit?
I think a lot of people struggle with this question. I sure did. I don’t have the answer to the question because I don’t believe there is one answer… but this is an answer.
I don’t think it’s possible to pin down a precise line from a moral perspective. And to attempt to do so might do more harm than good. Utilitarianism Doesn’t Work, and attempts to measure eco-sin is just part of the shame and guilt narrative partly responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.
It is important to remember that this shit isn’t our fault. But it is the predicament we were handed. It’s a matter of character how we respond to it.
To answer the question directly, I’m a fan of the global gdp / (ecofootprint *population) = spending ceiling as a rule of thumb for personal consumption. It’s a rough calculation that gets you in the neighborhood of FairShare ethic from permaculture without having to get into details like greenwashing, green consumerism, etc.
From that point it’s a matter of style. You can live a fairly conventional life at super low expenses if your skills are high enough. But maybe you don’t want to live conventional at all. Maybe you want to go neo-primitive, or low-tech, or cottagecore, solarpunk, wildpunk, eco-anarchist, rewilded, or any number of things. That’s a matter of personal creative expression as far as I’m concerned, not ethics.
The GDP per what?
Imagine you are in line at a buffet table. The table is heaped with food. People in front of you are loading up their plates, grabbing multiple plates, taking off with whole trays full of food. There’s a lot of food out.
But then you turn around and see about eight billion people behind you in line. The table doesn’t look so full anymore. You wonder: how much should I take?
This is the analogy that Jim Merkel gives in his book Radical Simplicity, which I highly recommend. He’s a former defense contractor turned sustainability and simple living advocate.
Global GDP is a measure of goods and services produced, and it is very tightly correlated with energy and materials use. (As GDP rises, so does energy and materials use.)
And the global economy consumes about 1.7 earth’s worth of resources. World overshoot day in 2023 was August 2nd.
So the sustainable Global GDP level is GDP/footprint.
The sustainable consumption level per individual is GDP/(footprint*population).
With rough 2023 numbers, thats $101.33T / (1.7 * 8.1B) = $7,360.
The rough equitable and sustainable consumption level per person in the world is $7,360. At the buffet table, that’s how much food it is fair to take for ourselves, leave enough for those behind us, and not light the table on fire.
Now, obviously, this is a very rough and simple calc. It leaves out a lot of details. The world system is not this simple.
But as a rough guideline to what a globally equitable and sustainable consumption level looks like, for those interested in such questions, there’s your figure.
If everyone only consumed $7,360 worth of resources, would we be saved? Nah, probably not.
I mean for one thing we’re already locked in to some pretty gnarly climate destabilizations and ecosystem collapses which is going to throw the math off.
For another thing, we’re using stuff that isn’t getting replaced, like fossil fuels and soil fertility and all the like. So we’ve got to fundamentally restructure the biophysical nature of human production and consumption, not just decrease the magnitude of it.
It’s important to remember that what we have is not a problem. Problems have solutions.
We are in a predicament. You don’t, you can’t, solve predicaments. You can only respond to them.
One smart response to the current predicament we’re in is to consume way less. Taking our foot off the gas pedal of this machine can only help.
It’s not all we have to do, but it’s one of the things we’ve got to do sooner or later so we might as well get on with it. It’s better to figure out how to get personal consumption levels down low now, while there are plenty of safety nets (for most of us first-worlders) rather than when our consumption levels are forced down to unfolding catastrophes associated with overshoot correction of the world system.
Of course, the error is in thinking that Quality of Life is linearly proportional to consumption level. It isn’t. It is possible to have an excellent life while spending way less than what advertising implies we need to in order to not drown in misery.
Every sage ever says this. Every holy book has something to this effect. The only people trying to convince us to spend lots of money are the people we’d be giving that money to. It’s an obvious trap.
Q: But $7,360 per person is insane!
A: Yes, duh.
Q: It’s totally unreasonable to expect people to reduce consumption to those levels!!
A: Also yes.
Q: There’s no way it’s going to happen!
A: It’s going to happen, the only question is how. The amount of suckage associated with overshoot correction is up to us.
Q: I think this whole approach is fallacious and useless.
A: That’s fine, use some other approach.
Q: I mean for one thing houses and stuff cost more in the Bay than in Ohio, for example.
A: True. That’s why it’s a super rough calc. A 20k Cost of Living in Oakland might have a lower footprint than a $10k Cost of Living in, I don’t know, Dayton. You have to use common sense when applying it to your own situation.
Q: But oil companies invented the whole idea of ecological footprint in order to shift blame away from themselves so that means we shouldn’t use it.
A: No, they boosted the concept in order to shift blame, they didn’t invent it. Yes, we should still dismantle the oil companies and break their stuff because they lied and fundamentally broke the social contract of ethical behavior at a global and deep time scale, but that doesn’t mean that the footprint concept isn’t useful.
Look, like I said, this shit isn’t our fault, but regardless of what the oil companies say, our global footprint has got to come down.
Begging governments to force corporations give us more ethical consumption options is entirely missing the point of what sort of situation it is that we are in.
This century is not a good time to be playing the helpless victim game. The unfolding environment of the next few decades will be only too happy to show us what it really means to be a helpless victim.
Now is the time to assume responsibility for our actions, as a matter of character, and to practice resilience, ruggedize our communities, decouple our needs from the flows of industrial consumerism as much as we possibly can, support each other, and chase stoke to the end of the world.
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So to directly answer Alec’s question, I use the global sustainable consumption level number as a rough cost of living target to to aim for and then I don’t worry about it. I spend my attention on other things like learning permaculture, being a good friend and son, enjoying adventures in the mountains with my ride-or-dies, and making beautiful things wherever I can.
As a matter of fact, I’m over the limit. For the past two years I’ve spent about $10k/yr. An ongoing project is to hit $5k. Maybe 2024 is the year!
(Yes I know I have strange hobbies.)