Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’
Christmas shopping – why Zhu Zhu Pets will crap all over altruism
You can just stop buying stuff to save the planet.
But the problem is that you can’t really stop mankind making it.
And once it’s made, the genie is out of the bottle.
This line of thought was sparked by a post by Tim Kane, from the Kauffman Foundation, in the foundation’s Growthology blog.
Kane asks: “Why do I covet the consumption of new goods?
“First, I dream of a longer, healthier life for my children and nephews and nieces. That alone: the prosperity of an innovative economy, is all I need to justify the irrationality of entrepreneurial capitalism.
“Second, a world without invention would limit my appreciation of beauty. How else can I explain why I enjoy snow skiing (and the invention and sale of ski lift tickets)?
“Third, I never let myself forget how dreary life as mere survival can be. Thank SERE [Survive, Evade, Resist, Extract ] for that. And thank memory and imagination.
“Have you not heard the elders speak of working the fields, working the mines? Those fields, and those mines, dangerous, hard, incessant. If we imagine and strive for a world where even the poorest humans can labor without pain, we are entrepreneurs.”
(BTW – the Kauffman Foundation is a think tank on entrepreneurship).
What’s going on here, in the words of Tim Jackson, is the creation of a system that locks economic structure with social logic.
“Now you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the net book, the ipad…”
Humans are hard wired to love new stuff.
But Jackson is not so sure this is a problem. The alternative sustainable future, he says is not about restricting human innovation, but channeling it into new directions.
“It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.”
And this is happening (like here), but this Christmas I’d back Zhu Zhu Pets. (If you open this link, I’d advise you to turn the sound off, unless you are three years old).