Homo Consumptus 'R US
With the ecological crisis looming on the horizon as brightly as the sun unmediated by the atmosphere, we are thrashing about looking for solutions. Some of us consider how we got to this state, even looking back as far as the birth of Western civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates. We see our society as a powerful abomination, a cancer that has grown without the checks and balances of natural systems and webs of interdependence. No one, to my knowledge has, however considered the process from what we did when we lived "as part of nature" and how that might relate to where we are now. And by process, I mean how we are the final manifestation of the initial condition or species to have had ascribed to it the descriptive term: homo. This is not to ignore Darwin, but to consider our present condition as consumers in relation to the skills of a hunter gatherer.
My position this week is that there is a continuous path from the search for the means of survival to the mindless consumption of our society. I do not intend to describe each step on the continuum, but to point out some of the salient implications of this continuum. Rather than being different animals, the modern consumer human represents the end of a continuum that begins with the hunter gatherer human. Within the web of interactions we are not producers, but consumers, and tertiary consumers at that. To change this orientation is to change both what we are, and to change our natural place in nature. The natural systems that involve carrying capacity, energy utilization, and food cycles all impact on why our role as consumers has changed from benign to destructive.
Face it, humans are omnivorous. We must consume a certain number of calories every day to survive. Unlike photosynthesizing plants and some species of producers hovering around oceanic trenches we do not produce the basic materials of life, but rather we appropriate them from others. Unlike primary producers we cannot always utilize plant energy in its primary form. We must sometimes consume plant energy after it has been processed by a primary consumer, such as game animals. These facts are neither new nor exciting in themselves, but they do place the human species in a particular niche in the natural order; when they've not removed themselves from the natural order.
Our survival as hunter gatherers, that is as a species that lives within nature as opposed to it, was predicated on our ability to hunt (as secondary consumers) and gather (as primary consumers) and then consume whatever we were capable of ingesting. As a species, we had no preset "consuming" limit beyond what was imposed upon us by a number of natural factors. These limiting factors were, among others: the ability of the local environment to provide enough calories of food energy, our ability to relocate to a new environment when the available calories were not sufficient, natural impediments such as disasters, weather, other consumers who saw us as preceding them on the food cycle. Note that none of these are self-imposed nor self-regulating, but rather they reflect the fact that we were regulated by the natural system of which we were part. In such a system, we were both the regulated and the regulating.
What we have done is to remove ourselves from the natural order of the web of interdependence and the food cycle. Homo consumptus is not natural in any sense of the word. We are organic, as are the organo-chlorines with which we pollute our lakes, but not natural. But this step has not released us from or moved us beyond what made us hunter gatherer humans. We have escaped the bounds of nature, but we have not escaped the bounds of human nature. We always though that nature was the enemy, but it is ourselves. As with the Krell in The Forbidden Planet (1956), the destructive force is us-the "creatures from the id." We still act as if we are under the controlling influence of nature. We have opposed nature, and fought it, but we never though to recognize the mechanisms within ourselves that allowed us to function within it. As a species, we act as if there is an external carrying capacity, and that we will be limited by an external force, so there is no need for self-regulation. Also, we are still acting as an external limiting agent for other species, as we did when we were part of the food cycle. Our actions do not match with reality, however. And being removed from nature, our actions have undesired consequences.
Our species presently thwarts the limits of carrying capacity through the transportation of goods, and the appropriation of energy stored in the fossilized remains of dead plants and animals. We destroy species for whom we previously performed an important regulatory function as part of the food cycle, because we have lost our own external limiting regulatory factor. This destruction does not include species we destroy on our search for more energy, or in the manipulation of habitat. Our needs that were previously defined by what was produced by other members of the food cycle and the rocks we found lying around, are now defined by ourselves. The role of this definition of needs has recently been turned over to the advertising industry whose job it is to ensure that our needs are ever changing and never met.
It has been our ability to adapt or indirectly consume energy, rather than consume it by ingestion, that has caused our problems. If we had to ingest all the energy we used we would explode in a ball of incandescence. What homo consumptus does is to utilize the energy of natural sources to effect the change we desire without the intermediate step of ingestion. We do not use our muscle power, but rather we use the domesticated animal, the wind, water, animal and plant products and fossilized plants and animal remains (oils and combustion). This ability has thrown us beyond the control of nature because we have the energy to temporarily withstand it. We have not transcended nature; we have played a trick on it and ourselves.
The path from the hunter gatherer to consumer is informed by the fact that the consumption of basic needs is necessary for survival. Humans did not define those needs, we adapted to what was available. We consumed as much as physically possible based on the fear that what was found today may not be found tomorrow. As hunter gatherers, this was a reasonable assumption that increased the specie's probability for survival, but as homo consumptus it is a fiction that jeopardizes survival.
If we lived with a guarantee that there would be a reasonable standard of living available for all and for all time, then consumption fear would have less power for many. At this point, we would really have escaped the controlling influence of nature and our hunter gatherer nature. The role of advertising, however is to ensure that we will always fear the availability of a reasonable standard of living available for all by changing what is understood as a standard of living.
According to the line of thought delineated here, homo consumptus can only survive if limits are imposed externally. There is no precedent for self-imposed limits; though I hope that such limits are possible for some. Limits can be quietly imposed by the individual or social pressure, imposed by governments and armies, or by nature. The negative impact on the lifestyle that we expect is greater the farther along this list of choices we go. As a species, I think that we will still only recognize the regulatory primacy of nature, and we will continue on this path until nature puts a stop to our ways.