The Myth Of Green Consumerism: Consumption, Community And Free Markets Michael Hannis

"The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consum er to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simpl ifies the client." (William Burroughs) Over the quarter of a century that has passed since 1972's flawed "Limits to Gro wth" characterisation of the physical challenges facing the continued expansion of in dustrial societies (Meadows et. al. 1972), it has been recognised that the problem of achieving sus tainable levels of consumption is one not only of prudent use of available reserves of raw material s, but also of operating within the "sink" capacities of the planetary environment. In the case of fossil fuels, for instance, we are now concerned not only with "how long it will be before the oil runs out" but also with the ability of the Earth to absorb the pollution, climate change and e nvironmental destruction caused by their extraction and use, while still remaining an accepta ble setting for human life. This acceptability consists partly in fundamental necessities such a s non-toxic air and water and fertile land, but extends to the continued presence of other species, natural features and processes which are considered to be essential to our world, and on some account s (e.g. Sylvan & Bennett 1994) to have value or "rights to existence" independent of human bein gs. Almost any attempt to quantify these concerns is hotly contested: legal threshol ds for pollutant limits in air or water, "safe" radiation levels, predictions of climate change, estimates of oil reserves, fish populations, deforestation or biodiversity loss, all are argued o ver by competing panels of scientific experts on behalf of their various paymasters. All but the most recalcitrant, however, concede that the present upward trajectory of resource consumption rate s cannot continue indefinitely without, in the words of the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987, p.8) "compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Opinio n diverges sharply, however, at the point of deciding how to calculate rates of consumption and what to do about reducing them. At the 1992 UNCED "Earth Summit" in Rio, the strategy of governmental delegates from Northern industrialised countries was to present the achievement of sustainabili

ty as primarily a matter of global ecological management, technological improvements in efficiency , and demographic policy in "developing countries" with high population growth. (Chatt erjee & Finger, 1994). Southern delegates, however, argued unsuccessfully for the adopti on of per capita measures of consumption, arguing that such calculations are "central for assessi ng the sustainability of lifestyles and civilisations" (von Weizscker et al. 1997, p.219 ). Any such assessment clearly reverses the emphasis of global sustainability policy, sugges ting an urgent focus on the unsustainable consumption patterns of Northern societies. A wealth of statistics shows the massive and persistent inequalities between Nor th and South. Per capita consumption rates in Germany, for example, are fifteen times those in India (ibid. p.218). Calculations of "ecological footprints" (the amount of land theoreticall y needed to produce the resources consumed and absorb the wastes produced by a single indivi dual), while necessarily imprecise, consistently produce well-known results such as those quo ted by von Weizscker (p. 220) showing that if all six billion humans on the planet consumed at the rate of

Canadians or Netherlanders we would need three planets, not one, to satisfy our requirements. Addressing these inequalities is of course a vital issue in its own right, as we ll as a mechanism for achieving sustainability and preserving the natural environment. But as the figures suggest, the answer can never be to bring present Northern consumption levels within the reach of all. Most people in the world probably do, on average, need more resources; but a sig nificant minority, we in the rich industrialised North, on average need to consume much l ess. The "externalised" costs of massive production of goods and services for voracious a nd highly lucrative markets in regions such as Europe and North America are borne by socie ties and environments the world over. I shall therefore begin with the assumption that a very significant proportion of global environmental degradation is directly attributable to what may be legitimately called overconsumption in Northern countries. Given this, a considerable overall reduction in per capita resource consumption in countries like Britain is here assumed to be desirable; I am concerned to examine the social an d political climate in which this might be possible. I shall suggest that the ideology of th e free market creates and maintains a climate in which it is not. Attempts to direct market fo rces towards the reduction of consumption through "green consumerism" vary from the hopelessly op timistic to the thoroughly disingenuous. Furthermore, both voluntary and coercive measures a imed at reducing consumption levels are undermined by forces intrinsic to the emerging g lobalised market economy. Free markets and free people? The resources we consume are traded in markets; these markets are a part of our societies. The relationship between society and market is properly determined by the political decision-making processes of that society, informed by practical considerations and also by mora l and cultural values; for instance, most modern societies officially resist the development of markets in slaves, or in votes. We do not regard the organisation of every sphere of human activity as appropriately abdicated to amoral "market forces". However in recent years the ideal of the "f ree market" has permeated more and more areas of social organisation which had previously been c onsidered to be best governed by more deliberate implementation of specific social priorities ; privatisation and deregulation have become central to the dominant economic orthodoxy at all l evels. Local

authorities must put work out to competitive tender; national utilities and publ ic services must be run as private corporations; companies must be hindered as little as possible in their wealth-creating activities; markets must be self-regulating wherever possible; a nd powerful new bodies and treaties enforce the "right" of companies from one part of the world to conduct business in another on the same terms as their local competitors. The political arguments advanced to justify these developments (see O'Neill 1998 for a comprehensive study of the variations) sometimes rely on a pragmatic logic; the fierce "natural selection" process of the global marketplace is happening whether we like it or not, and woe betide any nation or region foolish enough not to recognise that it must "compet e in order to survive". Often, however, there is a more ideological tone; the freedom of the m arket is presented as intimately connected with the freedom of the people. A free market economy, it is claimed, makes people and enterprises more "efficie nt" at creating wealth, not least by allowing the powerful forces of self-interest to be directe d into entrepreneurial activity. People so motivated are most likely to contribute to t he competitiveness and efficiency which are seen as the engines of growth. Since growth, on this mo del, is the central aim of good economic management, government policy should allow markets to be as free as possible. Governments which do not do this are thus not doing the best f or their people.

The implied, and often explicit, conclusion is that to restrict the freedom of t he market is to restrict the freedom of people to live their lives as they please; indeed almost any "old-fashioned" centralised planning of a national economy is damned as authoritarian, even tota litarian, by association with the repressive regimes of the former Soviet bloc. This is the f inal triumphant chorus of old cold-war rhetoric: the "evil empire", it is suggested, was defeate d not by military conflict but by economic collapse and domestic discontent, proving beyond doubt the superiority of capitalism over any alternative economic order. Of course this story is vastl y more complex than Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis (Fukuyama 1992) would have us believe, i f only because the gangster capitalism of the new Russia has yet to prove itself more e thical, durable, beneficial to the population at large or indeed "efficient" than the old order. This point is worth making, not to defend the patently undesirable Soviet system, but simply to ques tion this "guilt by association". It is far from clear that the lack of freedom to engage in unbridled capitalist enterprise was the decisive factor in causing the people of Eastern Europe to withdraw their suppor t for their governments, ending their experiment with planned economies. There were and are other freedoms at stake which more accurately reflect the richness and fairness of a s ociety. It is the restriction of important freedoms of the person, rather than of the market, whic h underpin legitimate normative judgements about the undesirability of the old Eastern Bloc regimes, such as that of John O'Neill: "The rejection of the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe is often conceived of in terms of the "reinvention of civil society". However, the term "civil society" is employed in a number of different senses. Two are of significance here: (a) civil society refers to the market and (b) civil society refers to associations that are independent of the state. (. . .)Where totalitarianism is concerned, it is civil society in the second sen se that is of significance, not the first.(. . .) It [totalitarianism] is born of the disappea rance not of the market, but of independent associations. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian move ments is that they recognise no association or activity that is not subordinate to their own politi cal ends- in Himmler's words "there is no task that exists for its own sake". The possibility of such movements is itself founded on the loosening of other loyalties and associations

in modern society, of the creation of the isolated individual. The market economy itself h as been a major source of the loosening of such ties." (O'Neill 1998, p.32)

O'Neill makes this point in the context of defending an Aristotelian "critique o f the market on the basis of a householding conception of political economy"(ibid., p.33), to which theme I shall later return. I include the quote here to underline the weakness of simplistic h istorical (as opposed to purely economic) arguments in favour of free markets and against more interventionist planning, taxation and regulatory policies. The long-running debate about markets and freedom is crucial to the development of environmental and sustainability policy frameworks in both Southern and Northern contexts; I shall be focussing here primarily on its relevance to the Northern component of the global sustainability conundrum, the need to escape the spiral of ever-increasing consu mption. I intend to argue that this "loosening of ties and creation of isolated individuals" with in the market economy gives rise to conditions conducive not only to repressive regimes but al so to unsustainable, inequitable and environmentally damaging levels of consumption. A coherent but

pluralist society, in which markets are clearly and effectively circumscribed an d regulated, is necessary to escape these conditions. Such a society is characterised by strong communities, thriving voluntary associations of all kinds and, crucially, a high level of pub lic trust and participation in the political process. It is, in general, purely an article of faith that free markets make for free pe ople. One major flaw (among others) in this easy soundbite logic is the fact that what the overwhelmi ng majority of people have to "trade in the market" is their labour. Free market economics decr ees that labour, like any other "commodity", should be bought and sold at prices determined solel y by supply and demand. The desire of the employee to have some influence over wage levels is se en as a force to be resisted. People are urged not to "price themselves out of a job": unionis ation and industrial action of any kind are discouraged, not only by legislation but often as in 1980 's Britain by major mobilisations of physical force. This surely counts as a reduction in freedom. T he old fundamental socialist objections to the commodification of labour (cf. Polanyi 1 957 ch. 14) and the ensuing imbalance of power between employers and employees under capitalism have lost none of their force, despite becoming politically unmentionable. I do not intend , however, to restate this case here. On a more abstract note, questions about freedom raise the issue of what it is t o be free; more specifically, in a political context, about exactly what it is to be an autonomo us individual. The absence of coercion is certainly a necessary condition for autonomy; but it is n ot sufficient. O'Neill argues (1998, p. 73 ff.) that autonomy also requires the possession of a personal identity, a "character" in the sense meant by Mill when he wrote: "One whose desires and i mpulses are not his own, has no character". Identity in this sense is composed not only of c hoices, factors within the control of the individual, but also of family, community and cultural connections and commitments. Thus "The person who shifts his ties to projects, to a community, to ideas and values , with the ease with which an individual changes clothes with the changing fashions lacks an ide ntity. They are in Mill's sense characterless." (ibid., p. 75) "To have an identity involves moving in a mean between two conditions: on the on e hand, allowing oneself to live a life for and defined by others, without reflection; o n the other, of living a life as if it consisted of endless choices, in which one could in the post-mod

ern jargon 'play' with different identities." (p. 76) While market societies have historically been praised as bringing autonomy, due largely to their efficiency in breaking down rigid social roles such as existed under feudalism, their destructive effects on traditions and communities can equally erode individual identity to t he point of rendering that autonomy useless or illusory. Contemporary consumerism takes this to new extremes, encouraging individuals to "play with different identities" through th eir lifestyle-defining purchases of goods and services, while undermining the social and ecological bases of their true identities as physical, social human beings. This fosters no t autonomy but rootless amnesiac conformity. Freedom is not just a matter of consumer choice; it requires the ability to know and express who we really are. In the real world this requires safeguarding identity, community and democracy against the corrosive, standardising commodification of unrestrained market forc es. As our contemporary ecological crisis forces us to rediscover the emphatically physical roots of our identities as individual humans in the fragile natural world around us, the fund amental opposition between the freedom of the market and the freedom of the person is underlined mo re starkly than ever.

Efficiency, growth and the limits of "consumer power"

Since the advent of "sustainable development" politics, ushered in by the UN wit h the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) and consolidated by the 1992 Rio summit, Northern governments and corporations, and Northern-dominated international bodies, have largely abandoned the previously widespread tactic of publicly dismissing concerns over environmental and resource depletion issues as exaggerated or unimportant. Broadly speaking, t he problems have been acknowledged to exist, but reframed as external challenges to be met b y fine-tuning the process of global "development", measured primarily by rates of economic gro wth, rather than as the direct consequences of that process. (Chatterjee & Finger 1994; Karl iner 1997; Korten 1996). On this "new" model the economics of the free market assumes a cen tral role in identifying and implementing solutions to environmental problems, which are esse ntially redefined as "efficiency problems" impeding growth. Thus what is good for more efficient economic growth is good for sustainability; and what is best for efficient economic growth, according to modern orthodoxy, is a free market. Free markets in the South will lead to increased economic activity and increased wealth, allowin g people to somehow buy their way out of their environmental and social problems.( Holland ( 1997) gives a concise account of the conceptual confusion inherent in this idea of "substituta bility"). Historical parallels are cited to support the claim that increased GDP will also lead to fa lling birth rates. Free markets in the North, meanwhile, will enable people's "preferences for envi ronmental benefits" to influence the trajectory of growth. In the context of consumption p atterns, this translates as the claim that if people (or rather "consumers") want sustainabili ty and environmental improvements, they will not want to buy unsustainable or environme ntally damaging goods and services: it will therefore become unprofitable to produce th em, and hence commercial competition will operate as a benign force, producing more acceptable "environmentally friendly" alternatives. This "consumer power" argument raises the expectation that problems of inequitab le and unsustainable consumption can be solved by the market mechanisms that arguably c reated them. This is not realistic; the prevailing free market neoliberalism of privatisation , deregulation and the "shrinking state" is irrevocably wedded to an ideology of growth, and thus t o increasing

production, trade, consumption and spending. (Jacobs 1991) "Green marketing" and corporate environmentalism may conspicuously aim at altering consumption patterns but will never encourage any overall reduction of consumer spending (Beder 1997 p. 176 ff.; Pla nt & Plant 1991); similarly the message from government tends to be that a growing economy is the central policy goal, and thus monthly "high street spending" figures are almost always p resented in a simplistic context of "more is better". Every August in Britain, in between stor ies about urban smog and lost countryside, we are treated to the standard news item presenting t he year's new car sales figures as a barometer of the country's economic health. "Traditional" green politics, as represented in Britain by the would-be parliame ntary Green Party, has been effectively outflanked; the potential constituency for a more ra dical platform has been narrowed by the superficial greening of the mainstream political parties an d the associated "rehabilitation", since Rio, of certain large environmental NGOs (Porritt 1997). Alongside these developments we have also seen a frenzied "greenwashing" of business and industr y, especially in the case of large transnational corporations who have correctly identified th emselves as vulnerable to being identified as environmental villains. Government, NGOs and i ndustry are presented as "partners" in high-profile initiatives to encourage "sustainable de velopment" while maintaining steady overall economic growth.

We are all environmentalists together now. Nuclear power is "green", and therefo re desirable, because it does not contribute to the greenhouse effect by releasing carbon diox ide to the atmosphere. Unleaded petrol, catalytic converters, lean-burn engines and "recycl able" body panels make cars "environmentally friendly", so we can buy and drive them guiltfree, like the smiling people in the adverts, as long as we can afford the latest models. Genet ically engineered food, "engineered" for resistance to the proprietary herbicides and pesticides m anufactured by the same companies that sell the seeds, allowing these toxic substances to be us ed in much greater quantities without killing the crop, is promoted as a means to make agri culture more efficient, and thus more environmentally responsible. Technological progress, rolling smoothly across the level playing field of the g lobal free market, will bring such gains in efficiency that all our environmental ills will be cure d without having to swallow any nasty medicine of "reduced living standards". And of course, the env ironmental problems of the southern countries will be solved along with their poverty once free trade and "sustainable development" have raised their GDP to the levels which we enjoy in the north. Where do these modern myths come from? Advertisements, PR campaigns and politica l propaganda continually reinforce the message that environmental and "sustainabil ity" issues are no longer a fringe interest but a central concern of all the major public and pr ivate sector actors in our complex national and global economies. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, they imply; if we are worried about such issues, rather than criticise government or business we should look first to our own lifestyle choices, to our shopping baskets, to chec k that we are "doing our bit for the environment" by buying the right environmentally friendly products, by being responsible "green consumers" and thereby sending the right messages to pr oducers by our virtuous purchasing. Of course any substitution of goods or services by more efficient or sustainable alternatives is welcome, and both producers and consumers should be encouraged to make such subs titutions wherever practicable. But market mechanisms can never replace proper regulatory and legislative measures designed to enforce "best practice" in a given industry, or indeed to prohibit those where "best" is deemed not to be good enough. For example, an American company has recently patented a disposable drinks can c ontaining

refrigerant gases which instantly chill the contents on opening the can; they ca lculate that the powerful lure of cold beer on the beach will propel them toward a ten per cent s hare of the massive worldwide canned drinks market. No matter how "efficiently" this product is manufactured, its environmental impact at such levels of production would be pot entially disastrous; yet its "desirability" may well be sufficiently great to overwhelm t he "green" preferences of many consumers. Once such a seductive product becomes widely avai lable, many people will buy it without a thought for the environmental consequences; and eve n of those who objected to its introduction, only the strongest will be prepared to be the only one on the beach drinking warm beer. (Mobile phones provide a good recent example of this "seduct ion of principles" phenomenon.) "Consumer power" will therefore be of little or no use in preventing this essentially superfluous product from having a significant impact on climate change by considerably increasing the amount of greenhouse-aggravating refrigerants in cir culation, and on pollution, resource depletion and energy wastage through the increased amount of aluminium required to make the more complex cans. The only sensible course of action, say American environmentalists, is to ban the product. (Unfortunately, even this might not be the end of the story. Perhaps they will s ucceed in getting its production prohibited in the US; but the company would have little difficult y finding a poorer country with lax environmental regulations prepared to host such a potentially p rofitable export-oriented industry. Once relocated, the company and its new host country m ight well be

able to use the new "free trade" rules of the World Trade Organisation to make i t difficult for other countries to resist the importation of its products. As I shall later show , a number of national environmental regulations have already been undermined by these means.) This example highlights the inadequacy of simplistic "consumer power" arguments which fail to recognise that many other competing factors and preferences, as well as "greenne ss", also condition consumer behaviour; it can never be assumed that green preferences are more fundamental or dominant. It also, however, illustrates the navet of the unquestion ing faith in technological advance to produce improvements in the efficiency and sustainabili ty of goods and services. Technology certainly can and does do this; but it is also continually used to produce seductive new gadgetry and facilities which we never realised we needed or wante d until they came along. The pace of technological advancement is closely connected with the deliberately short life span of modern consumer products of all kinds, which in turn is a decisive factor in their total environmental impact. The commercial imperative to maintain and increase sales o ften dictates planned obsolescence- tyres, batteries or cars that last too long are not good f or business- and continual technological improvements can make this process publicly acceptable, as it does for instance in the field of consumer electronics. Even the benefits of technologica l improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency can be reduced, or even cancelled out, by the wasteful r ush to buy the new model with all its attendant production costs rather than see out the life span of the old one. The latest report to the Club of Rome listed fifty impressive examples of cuttin g-edge technological developments yielding fourfold improvements in efficiency, pointin g out that this "efficiency revolution" if sufficiently widespread and well-funded could allow u s to "double wealth while halving resource use" (von Weizscker et al. 1997). This, the authors suggest, is the way to reduce consumption without affecting our material standards of living. Ho wever even these optimistic writers calculate that a universal fourfold increase in resourc e productivity would be cancelled out in less than thirty years if present growth rates continu e. (ibid., p.258) The point is not the exact figures but the fact that even the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic advocates of efficiency cannot deny that continued growth will eventually catch up with any such gains. Indeed in specific industries, as well as overall, market mechanisms

will eat away at the resource savings stemming from the "efficiency revolution", wherever they oc cur: quadrupling the amount of consumable goods a given industry can produce per unit of resource input is likely to be very good for profit margins in the industry in question. In the absence of strong regulatory restraint, this is likely to cause the industry to expand rapi dly as investors see it as an increasingly attractive proposition. Information, persuasion, and virtue In some cases, comparatively greener products may even increase overall consumpt ion levels; faced with products such as "environmentally friendly air fresheners" and "susta inable forestry" paper towels, conscientious people may buy things they might otherwise avoid. Bu t a marginally "greener" version of a superfluous product is only marginally less destructive t han its competitors; and if its success increases the total number of such products prod uced then its net effect can only be detrimental to the overall objectives of sustainable resource use. Activists (London Greenpeace 1998) point out for instance that the Body Shop, although und oubtedly considerably "greener" than its competitors, is still a major multinational cosm etics company, using vast amounts of industrial chemical ingredients as well as small quantitie s of highly-publicised botanicals. It is committed to creating and maintaining demand for a huge range of unnecessary luxury products, especially among those who might have prin cipled objections to purchasing similar products from firms with less of a green image. It has even been argued that the success of the Body Shop and of the imitators of its strategies actually reversed a

general decline in the cosmetics market (Beder 1997, p.179-80) The early success of the Body Shop did undoubtedly hasten the reduction in anima l testing of cosmetics and established green credentials and "natural ingredients" as a major advantage in the cosmetics market; this ensured that other players in this particular market beca me pioneers of the now widespread art of "greenwashing" their products. In 1996, MORI categorised 36% of its British poll respondents as "green consumer s" on the basis of their claim to have "selected one product over another because of its e nvironmentally friendly packaging, formulation or advertising" (Worcester 1997, p.166). This co mpared with 19% in 1988, (although it continued the steady decline from a peak of 50% in 199 0). It is fair to assume that no-one watches these trends more closely than marketin g and advertising professionals, and that given the emergence of an important new desirable attrib ute ("environmental friendliness") for products to possess, they would have worked h ard to present their clients' products as possessing it. In some cases this will certainly have been achieved by genuine improvements to the products; but in many instances it will have been ea sier and cheaper to focus on changes in its presentation. In the absence of any coherent or respected "eco-labelling" scheme, shoppers are, as ever, entirely at the mercy of producer s' and advertisers' cleverly-worded and often spurious or misleading claims. Nobody expects the aver age shopper to be able to perform a full life-cycle analysis and environmental impact assess ment of their prospective purchase in the supermarket aisle: it is equally unrealistic to expe ct consumers to be as linguistically and psychologically sophisticated as the highly-paid professio nals whose entire career is built on their ability to persuade others to buy things. This problem of persuasion and misinformation goes to the heart of the question of "consumer power". The neo-classical economic theory behind the claim that consumers' choic es will lead producers by the nose to produce greener products relies, among other conditions , on a free flow of information. The principle of informed rational choice is, as a general rule, essential to the "efficient" operation of markets. Yet the flow of product information to the consumer in societies like modern Bri tain could hardly be said to be free. It is the most highly conditioned, mediated and psych ologised stream of messages that our state-of-the-art "creative" industries can produce. Conditions of obsessive

secrecy surround the precise ingredients and composition of many present product s, and the design of future ones. Billions of pounds are spent on persuading people to see essentially identical products as different, and essentially different ones as identical. We are continually cajoled and exhorted all our lives to want more, newer, better, bigger, smaller, whiter, sweeter, faster...every human drive and desire is targeted by those who aim to turn it in to a purchase. As we go about our daily life, we are continually and involuntarily exposed to an i ntense barrage of sophisticated commercial messages of all kinds. Every age, class, ethnic and soc ioeconomic group is analysed for its potential weaknesses and targeted accordingly. In this context, that 36% of the population that allegedly constitute "green consumers" represent a great marketing opportunity; an easily targeted group whose susceptibilities are unusually welldefined. Informed rational choice under these conditions is quite simply impossible. Studies show that while almost everybody denies that their consumption choices a re influenced by advertising, almost nobody is in fact immune to its blandishments. Advertiser s manipulate and enlarge existing markets, and create others from scratch, by convincing us t hat their products are the answer to all our problems and needs, from those which dominate our live s to those which we didn't even know we had. To claim that producers simply respond to cons umer power is to seriously distort the true picture.

This raises the deeper issue of the legitimacy of shifting responsibility for ex cessive production and consumption from producers to consumers. Once "green consumerism" is enshrin ed as the means to our ecological salvation, producers of less than green products can sim ply "throw up their hands and say 'the consumers made me do it!'"( Luke 1993). Industries are presented as simply responding to people's purchasing decisions. They just produce what peopl e want; by exercising consumer choice, for good or bad, we as economically active individua ls can gradually recreate the world according to our preferences. If you don't like som ething, don't buy it and it will go away. One of the holes in this argument is that we don't alway s have a choiceconsider for instance agrochemical-contaminated food, nuclear power, or cars whe re public transport has disappeared. More fundamentally, even where there is a choice it seems bizarre for the respon sibility (and often moral censure) to fall on the purchasers of a superfluous or damaging prod uct rather than on its producers and marketers. To take a contentious analogy, although we do pr osecute those who knowingly purchase stolen goods, this is usually seen as a lesser crime than the original theft; but in the case of excessive or environmentally damaging consumption we t end to reverse this logic. Suppose a man goes out and buys a big shiny new car to drive to work in, when a smaller one (or perhaps even a bicycle or a train season ticket) would have sufficed. Now suppos e when he gets to work he meets an environmentally concerned colleague who is affronted by this extravagance. He will probably be exhorted to think of all the extra petrol he will be burning every day, all the extra pollution (and perhaps climate change) he will be causing by using the car , and perhaps the even greater amount of pollution and resource depletion caused by its manufactur e. He may also be held responsible for traffic congestion, pedestrian fatalities, and the destr uction of the countryside. His colleague may call him reckless, selfish and irresponsible; the basic message is that had he been virtuous, he would not have bought the car. Now let us add a little background detail. Suppose our driver works long hours i n a highly stressed job which he does not enjoy, to pay the high mortgage on the house he n eeds to be within reach of his work. Suppose his wife also works and is equally stressed; t heir teenage children see them as the enemy; their marriage is in serious difficulty. His hal f-hour drive to and from work is the only time he has to himself. For the past six months every even

ing on television he has been seduced by visions of gleaming metal and soft leather upholstery, co axed into believing that this particular purring cocoon can turn that frustrating half-hou r drive through the rush-hour traffic into the oasis of calm and tranquillity he so desperately want s in his life. Cleverly targeted and wooed by the advertisers, he finally succumbed and bought the car. Where is the real lack of virtue here? Should the driver have been stronger? Should he, like Jesus in the desert, have had the supreme willpower to resist the temptations whispered in his ear by the forked tongue of General Motors? Isn't that asking rather a lot of him? To the charge of "ungreen consumption" he might well be advised to plead "guilty- but with extreme mitigating circumstances". (Perhaps a more adventurous lawyer might even attempt a plea of innocence on the grounds of dimi nished responsibility...) If this "defence on the grounds of mitigating circumstances" is persuasive in th e case of the purchase of a new car, perhaps the most environmentally damaging single item mos t of us will ever buy, then it is surely more so in the case of smaller purchases whose envir onmental impact is less obvious; and yet more so where the products have been advertised as vagu ely "greener" than their competitors. Certainly a significant minority does resist the diabolical temptations, either because their

income simply does not allow for non-essential ky enough to have sufficient other sources of happiness and e them less susceptible. But the unfortunate truth is that stic societies the offer of sensual gratification or social kudos , for many, often sufficient to outweigh the urge to be a "green

purchases or because they are luc contentment in their lives to mak in our fragmented and individuali in exchange for a little money is consumer".

Under existing social and commercial conditions, then, it is entirely unrealisti c to expect consumers to be ecologically virtuous on behalf of the corporate forces of produ ction and marketing. For this is what the ideal of change through consumer power demands; that people as consumers should act (i.e. consume) according to their beliefs about the rightne ss and desirability of sustainability and environmental responsibility, while accepting that other people, as businessmen and advertisers, should be guided only by the amoral profit-maxim ising rules of the market. Even if they could be persuaded to shoulder this unequal burden, individuals wil l still never change the world significantly by going shopping. To have real and lasting effec t, "green" principles (like any others) need to become widely-shared normative social value s, which guide not only private individual behaviour but also the policy-making and daily pract ice of governmental, legislative and regulatory bodies. Just as the existence of consum er choice does not constitute freedom, so the exercise of consumer choice is no substitute for political engagement. For instance, isolated individuals are unlikely to be able or willin g to resist the consumption-driving influence of advertising; but their communities and societie s potentially can, both by cultural support for citizenship and responsible action, and where necessary by direct regulation and/or taxation of production, investment, and indeed advertis ing itself. Consumption and "Quality of Life" Where mainstream piety and more radical green thinking about consumption diverge is at the point of recognising/ countenancing the necessity for the dreaded "reduction in living standards"; a real net decrease in personal consumption in Northern countries, with signific ant changes in material prosperity as we presently measure it, and a renunciation at the person al as well as the institutional level of the goal of ever-increasing monetary wealth. To advocate this is to deny the primacy of simple GDP (Gross Domestic Product) g rowth as the

objective of macro-economic management; a nation of people individually consumin g less is unlikely to have a rising GDP for long, notwithstanding the optimistic claim tha t improved efficiency can achieve both simultaneously. As has often been shown (von Weizscke r et al. 1997, pp. 271-274; Douthwaite 1992; Daly & Cobb 1989) there is no necessary conn ection between GDP, which measures capital turnover, and levels of human well-being. GD P figures are, to begin with, blind to inequitable wealth distribution patterns within soc ieties. They also include as "positive" increases in economic activity the costs of accidents, inj uries and environmental disasters while excluding the value of unpaid "informal" work such as childcare; and as economic statistics they obviously cannot reflect non-economic "goods" su ch as family and community cohesion, public safety, job satisfaction or environmental quality . Considerable work has been done in the field of developing more sophisticated indicators of " quality of life" to guide economic and development policy-making (e.g. Max-Neef 1991; Daly and Cobb 1989); but these have yet to supplant GDP in any significant national or international policy-making arena. Economic growth remains the fundamental goal of national and internationa l economic policy; this translates into a perceived need to encourage continually increasin g economic activity on the part of individual producers and consumers. In this context, it is no surprise that governments join with business interests in implacable opposition to any "extremist" policy suggestions that threaten GDP growth. Altho ugh powerful

corporate lobbying certainly encourages this opposition (Korten 1996), it also e merges as a consequence of quite legitimate concerns about the alleviation of the relative p overty and massive inequalities that exist within affluent industrialised countries. Those arguing for a bigger slice of the pie to go to the poor are often understandably wary of anything tha t might result in a smaller pie. This is also why environmentalists looking to make common cause wit h social justice groups tend to have to tone down or abandon their calls for reduced cons umption. Describing the creation of the Real World coalition of NGOs formed in 1996 "to f orce sustainability issues onto the agenda of the [1997] general election", Jonathan Porritt observes that: "Many environmental organisations are uneasy that it has proved almost impossibl e, against a backdrop of widening disparities in income, to confront the whole issue of overc onsumption in countries like the UK. Just so long as the discourse remains fixed in the reassu ring domain of more ethically-responsible, environment-friendly consumption, it is all sweetnes s and light. Head off into the territory of less consumption and down come the shutters." (Porritt 1997, p. 72-3) As Michael Jacobs points out, the objective of reducing overall consumption leve ls in Northern industrialised countries such as the UK could hardly be "further from the politi cal mainstream"; "Personal consumption has become a dominant, even a defining feature of contempo rary society, and its promotion probably the single most important objective of modern politic s, more or less unquestioned right across the political spectrum." (Jacobs 1997a, p.47)

This does not of course make the message misguided, but it does tend to marginal ise its appeal; and as an appeal to individuals to change their behaviour it will remain ineffec tive if it cannot influence the bulk of the population. There are however more fundamental problem s with the strategy of appealing to individuals to be righteous, especially when the righte ousness being urged is of a kind that is at odds with prevailing social practice. Any new mora l injunction which conflicts with an existing framework may be quite properly weighed against other moral considerations (for instance, doing the best for one's children), and also again st practical considerations. If I have reason to doubt that my personal sacrifice will have any meaningful ef

fect on the global problems whose solution I am being urged to share responsibility for, it is far from clear that I should make that sacrifice. I will need further convincing; and on the face of i t this can take one (or both) of two forms. Either I must be persuaded that the apparent sacrifice i s in fact illusory since I will actually feel better off, not worse, once it has been made; or I mu st be persuaded that such large numbers of others will be following a similar course of action that o ur apparently insignificant individual actions will after all add up to a meaningful total eff ect on the problem, bringing benefits which make our sacrifices worthwhile. Jacobs argues convincingly that the first of these options will not work on its own. Firstly, to claim that people will feel individually better off if they consume less is "alm ost certainly not true", since it ignores the fact that for all but the highest income groups even relatively small increases in consumption ( for instance, spending a little extra disposable inco me on goods such as books, music or sports) can and do bring about a genuinely increased sense of individual wellbeing, through the personal development such goods can facilitate. Furthermo re, even apparently superfluous goods acquired purely because of the "competitive consump tion" phenomenon (ever-faster cars, or 100 trainers for teenagers) do undeniably contri bute to their purchasers' sense of wellbeing, whether or not we think they should. Increased c onsumption leads to increased social status (or indeed simply to maintenance of one's exist ing status if others'

consumption is equally increased) and thus to increased self-worth and increased wellbeing. In attempting to break this cycle "...it is surely useless to ask individuals to reduce their consumption voluntar ily or to see themselves as better off if they do not play the comparative game. This is to vi ew people in isolation from the society to which they belong; or to ask them to break from th is society to join another, minority one of low-consumers. As studies of "downshifting" show, very few people are able to do this: the pres sures of social conformity (indeed, of "belonging") are too great. The mistake here is to adopt the neo-liberal assumption that the consumer is a sovereign individual, making autonomous choice s in free markets. In fact, contrary to appearances, consumption is not a purely individua l form of behaviour. It is a social force in which individuals are bound up, and only thos e with strong will and alternative social networks are able to escape." (ibid., p.51) (Green activists, theorists, and ideologues, of course, usually do have strong w ill and alternative social networks to support them in their low-consumption lifestyle choices. Thei r own well-being is also increased by the satisfaction of knowing that they are at lea st attempting to live according to their principles. This may explain why they have arguably over-esti mated the appeal to the "unconverted" of the individual well-being argument for reducing p ersonal consumption.) Any convincing account of the benefits accruing to the individual through reduce d consumption must recognise the social nature of the consumption behaviour at issue. It must address the question of what others in society do and why, not attempt to treat the individu al as an isolated single agent. This is true not only for the practical reasons Jacobs gives but a s an instance of a more general point. Quality of Life and Community To attempt to persuade an individual to act as a good citizen purely by appeal t o their individual self-interest, with no mention of the virtues or benefits of citizenship or soci ety as such, is sophistry; it lowers the standard of political argument and treats the individua l as a malleable recipient of propaganda, or at best a potential ally in a strategic coalition, r ather than as an enfranchised participant in a deliberative process. It is also hopeless as a mea ns of building a coherent and resilient society; an association whose members are bound together

not by any sense of community, fellowship or shared values but only by expediency may disso lve at any moment as either circumstances or members' individual interests change. Converse ly a society knitted together by diverse threads of loyalties, commitments and associations, connecting each individual to many others in rewarding relationships based on values outside the sphere of the market, is both more resilient as a whole and more conducive to individual happi ness. From an Aristotelian perspective such as that of Bronislaw Szerszynski, thriving volunta ry associations not only serve to foster the non-materialist values essential to reducing consum ption and creating a more sustainable society, they are: "valued in their own right as forms of human flourishing; or, in language more f amiliar to sustainable development debates, as contributions to the 'quality of life'." ( S zerszynski 1997, p. 158) It might seem then that exhortations to consume less might be rephrased to refer to the benefits to the individual of belonging to a society in which we all consumed less and ye t our lives as a whole were better, not worse. This is to make a step beyond purely economic meas urement of well-being and to introduce the wider concept of "quality of life". The concept includes both

monetary and non-monetary components of well-being, such as physical and mental health, strength of family and community support, levels of both actual personal safety and of the fear of crime, and the availability of facilities for one's chosen pursuits. "Consumable " environmental goods such as clean air and water, green open spaces in cities and beautiful uns poilt places to go to on holiday are evidently an important part of the quality of life; but other less tangible benefits, such as an alleviation of the widespread sense of gloom and powerlessn ess about the state of the global environment, or a reduction of relentless competitive pressu re at work, are arguably also among the improvements in the quality of life that could be claime d to result from a general reduction in consumption levels. To these may be added better personal health through improved diet and reduced stress, continued availability of many resources which are presently heading for exhaustion, and so forth. Arguing in this way allows all the projected benefits of sustainability to "show up on the balance sheet" to counteract the loss individuals stand to feel from reducing their cons umption, thus combining the two forms of argument originally suggested above; for instance, cl eaner air and reduced traffic congestion due to a widespread reduction in car use may effectiv ely compensate me for my sacrifice in reducing my own car use. However this is still an asymmetrical appeal to individual interests; if we all use our cars less I stand to gain an increase in my quality of life. The most obvious problem with t his is that I still stand to gain this benefit even if I do not reduce my own car use, as long as ma ny others do. Indeed in this situation I can enjoy the benefits of my own car use as well as t hose accruing to me from others' non-use; if most people are taking the bus to work I can drive q uickly and easily along the uncongested streets, then step out of my car and breathe the cleaner a ir. From a purely self-interested perspective this may in fact be a more attractive option; and I may not only be tempted to take it myself but also rationally expect others to come to the same conclusion. This expectation may well cause me to doubt the feasibility of the whole project and thus further reduce the likelihood of my complying with the appeal to use my car less. This is hardly news; arguments of this form are routinely advanced in an attempt to make the point that such voluntary measures cannot work. But this is not the whole story. Although it may often be true in practice that such "free rider" problems are fatal to policies of voluntary restraint, the idea that there is some logical inevitability to this is clearly mistaken. T

he argument relies on strong assumptions about the social and political background to the individual's deliberations; specifically, it is assumed that there are no constraints or benefits of moralit y, community or citizenship strong enough to outweigh or even moderate the narrow self-interest served by disregarding a voluntary code of behaviour. Garrett Hardin (1977) famously illustrated a similar argument by reference to a hypothetical piece of common land on which local herdsmen all keep their cattle. Recognising the possibility of overgrazing they agree a limit to the number of cows each may graze on the co mmon. Each then calculates that they stand to gain by adding extra animals over and above t heir quota while others abide by the agreement; thus all (or at least many) of them will overgraz e and the common will eventually be irretrievably degraded. In fact, in contexts such as medieval Britain which approximate most closely to Hardin's fictional situation, the commons were usually well-managed over long periods. The commoner s were often embedded in close communities with strong moral and religious traditions, and practical codes of acceptable behaviour stemming from generations of intimate local knowle dge; if indeed they were tempted to act as Hardin suggests these social bonds restrained them f rom doing so. The historical evidence may be inconclusive; but even as a hypothesis, it is cle ar that such social factors can invalidate Hardin's claim that "the tragedy of the commons" is the i nevitable outcome of such a situation.

In fact, despite the misleading title of Hardin's paper, the situation he descri bes is not one of responsible common ownership of a resource, but of no ownership at all, and no c ommon morality either; it might be more accurately called "the tragedy of the wild fro ntier". The "prisoner's dilemma" models from game theory, of which Hardin's scenario is an e laboration, refer explicitly to the rational choices of self-interested individuals who not only have no concern for one another or any shared community values, but cannot even communicate with each other. The apparent intractability of such "free rider" problems is thus due in no smal l measure to a particular atomistic conception of the individual, and an associated picture of a society of expedient associations with negligible coherence. The evidence surely supports a more optimistic view of the coherence of at least some human communities within every society, s ometimes despite the fragmenting influences of surrounding culture. This coherence is arg uably being destroyed by modern market societies; but it has not yet vanished entirely. View ing, analysing and governing our societies as if it had already disappeared will only hasten it s demise. Nurturing and celebrating community is a central part of any meaningful progress towards sustainability. To be effective, then, arguments attempting to persuade individuals to consume l ess by holding out the promise of increased quality of life must appeal to them as part of a co mmunity, to a sense of shared or collective interests rather than purely personal ones. Some s ense of what we stand to gain from our actions, which include all our individual actions, is ess ential. Obviously this in turn requires that the individual has a meaningful sense of "we" which c an be appealed to. Determined individualists who refuse to see themselves as part of a community ar e simply not amenable to these arguments; not only because they resent the interference with their "right" to consume as they please, but because their picture of society does not allow them to see how such measures could ever work. Equally those who simply do not feel part of a communi ty, even though they would like to, will not be persuaded by such arguments for the benef its of voluntary restraint. This sense of community, of citizenship, implies a feeling of being genuinely in cluded, both as someone whose interests matter and as someone who has a meaningful voice in the political process. It also requires that the community in question is readily definable, o f a comprehensible

scale and capable of acting on the will of its members; for all these reasons, v ague and idealistic notions of the "global community" cannot fulfil this role. A sense of connection and "common destiny" with the human species as a whole is probably desirable in its own righ t, and indeed essential to a clear understanding of our ecological predicament; but it is no s ubstitute for cohesive local communities, or for just and inclusive societies. In fact, ironic ally, at this point in our history it is at the level of global bodies claiming to act for "all of huma nity" that the greatest threat is posed to such societies, and to the sustainable lifestyles which they alone can foster. The global picture- "free trade" versus democracy and environmental regulation Voluntary reductions in consumption, then, tend to require a feeling of membersh ip of a community; a "belief in society", specifically including a more general belief i n and identification with the ends of environmental and "sustainability" policy. These conditions are equally necessary for more coercive legal and regulatory en vironmental measures to be acceptable and effective. As I have suggested, voluntary measures alone are unlikely to be effective in bringing production and consumption within the limit s of sustainability; and it is extremely difficult for a government to successfully i ntroduce and operate coercive environmental legislation unless it is clearly mandated to do so. This in turn requires that such policies and their enforcement mechanisms be seen to issue from clearl y just and democratic sources, and therefore to be perceived as embodying and implementing the will of

citizens. Such public identification with the aims and methods of local and national gover nment environmental policy-making is widely seen to be lacking at present and in Brita in, as elsewhere, considerable practical and theoretical work is underway on improving and increas ing public awareness of and participation in environmental decision-making processes, parti cularly through "Local Agenda 21" programmes (Young 1997). Public participation, however, is of little practical use, and may even produce only disillusionment, unless decision-making bodies are both willing and able to implement the publicly held priorities which emerge. In the environmental sphere, as in others, anything which reduces the ability of democratic institutions to legislate and act in pursuit of popularly supported objectives w ill undermine public confidence in those institutions as effective, responsive and representative cha mpions of the public interest. Thus any restriction of the powers of such institutions not onl y has a direct primary effect (for instance a relaxation of regulatory standards) but an aggrav ating secondary effect of further reducing the sense of empowered citizenship which encourages i ndividuals to act in pursuit of wider public goods. When forces producing or urging such restrictions come from within a sovereign n ation state, they are at least in theory capable of being moderated, appeased or overruled by government, on behalf of the electorate, as part of the normal democratic process. However we a re now increasingly seeing restriction of the legislative and regulatory capabilities o f nation states themselves, irrespective of the wishes of their citizens or of their elected rep resentatives, issuing from the powerful bodies created by international "free trade" agreements. Informed commentators agree, whether they welcome (Ohmae 1996) or oppose (Korten 1996) the trend, that national sovereignty in the sphere of trade and economic policy is receding fast. Nation states can no longer maintain control over exchange rates and protect the ir currencies, as the volume of "private" money traded in foreign exchange markets dwarfs the rese rves that used to permit effective governmental intervention (Ohmae p.152; Korten pp. 183-226). Nor can they effectively resist cross-border flows of capital, investment, goods, services or people. To a large and growing extent, they respond to, rather than shape or initiate, changes in g lobal market conditions. Since the demise of the Soviet bloc and the "opening up" of China to foreign inv

estment, only a few "maverick" states have made any serious attempts to resist this encroachment on their economic sovereignty. Although, as recent events in South-East Asia have shown, the strategy is immensely risky, the standard aim of macroeconomic p olicy is now to create conditions favourable to "inward investment", to attract capital from the global markets to finance domestic projects, and to curry favour with the prime movers of econo mic growth, the transnational corporations. A 1996 study (Anderson & Cavanagh) showed that of the 100 largest economies in t he world, 51 were global corporations- only 49 were countries. Mitsubishi was larger than the fourth most populous nation on Earth, Indonesia. General Motors was bigger than Denmark, and Toyota bigger than Norway. The same study cited UN figures revealing that one third of recorded world trade actually represented transactions between different units of the same corp oration. By a combination of political pragmatism, commercial persuasion and shared econo mic ideology, the trading conditions preferred by transnational corporations have be come the principal aim of most national and international economic policy-making. (Korten 1996) Even governments such as the New Labour administration in Britain, which ostensibly s ubscribe to

other ideals in their social policies, continue to implement the neoliberal "fre e market" economic policies which favour the continued flourishing of major global corporations. Wh ere economic and social policy priorities come into conflict, as they increasingly do, the "a rgument" (or more accurately the blind faith) that economic growth, whatever its short term costs, will bring the desired social benefits in its wake, usually ensures that the corporations' pref erred economic climate continues to prevail. Central to this neoliberal agenda is the removal, in the name of "efficiency", o f remaining "barriers" to the free movement of goods, capital and investment. This translate s as the systematic erosion of any differences in local trading conditions caused by anyt hing other than "pure" market forces. This includes not only "protectionist" trade policies favo uring domestic over foreign enterprises, but also the "rolling back" of regulations and legisla tion which "distort" the market. Prominent examples of such legislation are regulations protecting pu blic health and safety, rights to union recognition and secure (or "inflexible") contracts of em ployment. Increasingly, however, laws, regulations and practices promoting environmental p rotection, animal welfare and sustainability are also being targeted as "impediments to fre e trade". This colonisation of other policy areas by economic ideology is partly achieved by influential corporate lobbying of governments at the national level. Another important devel opment is the creation of "free trade areas" such as the EU, NAFTA in North America, MERCOSUR in Latin America, and others in the pipeline. Within these areas, national sovereignty ov er trade policy is reduced in order to create the much-vaunted "level playing field". On a truly gl obal level, the long-running negotiations under the auspices of GATT (the General Agreement on T ariffs and Trade) created, on January 1, 1995, a powerful body that may prove to be the mos t significant actor in the consolidation of the power of "free trade" orthodoxy: the World Tra de Organisation. Paragraph 4 of Article XVI of the voluminous GATT agreement creating the WTO sta tes that "each member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administra tive procedures with its obligations as provided in the annexed agreements". (cited in Korten p. 174) The annexed agreements are a series of multilateral agreements on freedom of trade in goods, services and "intellectual property rights". The WTO is essentially a body created to adjudic ate disputes arising where one country believes it is being disadvantaged by laws of another

country which infringe these agreements, and where necessary to enforce this "conformity" thro ugh fines and trade sanctions. In practice, no country has yet risked these enforcement measures, (which potent ially amount to almost total economic isolation), by refusing to bring its laws into line with W TO accepted "international standards". In almost every case, this results in a lowering or r elaxing of national or local standards of health, safety, labour or environmental protection. Thus w hat is presented as the "harmonisation" of international standards is in practice the enforced reduc tion of those standards to levels which are considered acceptable to the representatives of gl obalised trade, rather than to citizens and democratically elected governments. (Finger & Kilcoy ne, 1997). The only acceptable form of justification for local standards which exceed inter national ones (which are usually, and increasingly, set by the industry in question, or by bod ies dominated by industry representatives) is "scientific evidence". A government which, for exam ple, imposes an import ban on a foreign product in response to public concern over safety, healt h, environmental, welfare or animal rights therefore has no defence other than to attempt to creat e a scientific justification for the trade-restricting actions which it took for other reasons altogether. Local interests are not considered a valid basis for l ocal laws. Regulations and practices of local and regional authorities are also subject to challenge before the WTO, even though those authorities are not themselves signatories of GATT: n ational

governments are held responsible for the compliance of local authorities within their borders. Challenges are always nominally brought in the name of one country (or group of countries) against another. In practice, however, transnational corporations who find their interests threatened tend to encourage and help nation states (not necessarily their count ries of origin) to bring cases which will benefit them. For instance, the recent WTO decision outla wing the British practice of maintaining import tariffs favouring bananas from the Windward Islan ds (as a form of post-colonial development aid) arose out of a case brought technically by Ecu ador, but orchestrated and funded by American multinationals who have vast plantations in that country producing bananas at a much lower unit cost than the small-scale independent far mers of the Caribbean can match. A May 1997 ruling overturned the European Union's ban on the import of beef and dairy products produced using the genetically engineered growth hormone rBST. The ban had been introduced in response to widespread popular concern over the health risks of ch emicals in food; but under WTO rules the only admissible evidence was scientific proof that use o f the hormone endangered human health. Scientific opinion was divided on the matter, and thus the WTO panel found the trade-restricting measure to be unjustified. Of course the uncertainty of the risks was and remains a major factor in the level of public unease which had produced the ban; but such "precautionary principle" measures are not legitimate under the new regime. The case was brought by the USA, the major user of rBST, but was widely seen as essentially a victory for Monsanto, who produce the chemical. (Retallack 1997) One of the WTO's first rulings, in January 1996, was in favour of Brazil and Ven ezuela who argued that the sections of the US Clean Air Act which set stringent purity stan dards for gasoline (aimed at reducing atmospheric pollution) discriminated against foreign producer s which could not meet them. The US Environmental Protection Agency, in May 1997, relaxed the standards to comply with the ruling, to the dismay of environmental groups which had fought l ong and hard against oil industry opposition to get the standards adopted in the first place. Even before the WTO came into being, under the GATT rules that preceded it anoth er American import restriction, on tuna caught by methods which kill dolphins, was undermine d after Mexico successfully argued that the way in which a product is produced may not be used

as grounds for trade discrimination. A prominent US campaigner was quoted at the time as saying : "This case is the smoking gun. We have actually seen GATT declare that a US environmental law [the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act] must go." (quoted in von Weizsacker et al 1997, p. 285) The difference now under the WTO is that decisions like this are much more enforceab le. The effect is not only to challenge existing legislation but to create pressure on nation s tates to ensure that future legislation of any kind does not interfere with free trade under WTO rule s. The WTO was explicitly envisaged and created to work closely with the Bretton Wo ods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, rather than with the United Nations, i n developing frameworks for global trade and finance (Korten 1996, Karliner 1997). All three are secretive, unaccountable organisations with massive power and influence, which are effectiv ely capable of dictating to nation states, rather than being constrained by the need to respect and implement the priorities of national interests as determined by domestic politics. To free mar keteers and globalisation enthusiasts this is seen as a virtue; nation states are represente d as increasingly impotent, ineffective and irrelevant, and the UN and all its associated bodies, as a collection of deadlocked national interests, as even more so.(e.g. Ohmae 1996; Schmidheiny 199 2). The institution of the sovereign nation state is indeed facing many difficult an d complex challenges to its effectiveness at this end of the twentieth century, not least those raised by the environmental and social effects of the global economy. But satisfactory respons es to these

challenges are not to be found by transferring power over economic affairs to un elected institutions which view all other considerations as secondary to the central goa l of encouraging growth by making life easier for big business. Nations do at least attempt to se rve the interests of people as citizens, not only as consumers; the shortcomings of democracy certain ly do not justify abandoning it in favour of a de facto global government which serves the interes ts of no-one except the infinitesimal minority of the world's population who stand to benefit from the success of the mighty corporations. To return to the specific question of consumption levels, the growing power of b odies such as the WTO is clearly a direct threat to the development of sustainability policies at a national or local level which aim at reducing resource consumption through environmental legislati on and regulation. The universal imposition of lax "international standards" in the are na of environmental regulation will dramatically reduce the ability of countries or lo cal authorities to set higher standards in response to local factors, or indeed simply to the wishe s of their electorate. By reducing the power and effectiveness of democratic institutions it is also li kely to be destructive of citizens' trust in their governments' will and ability to respond to their concerns. Although this may stimulate the emergence of alternative mutually supportive net works and highly politicised resistance movements among some strong-willed free-thinking i ndividuals, in society at large it is more likely to destroy community and increase the general sense of powerlessness and fatalism, causing people to become further detached from socia l, political and environmental ideals. The flourishing and largely unregulated global advertising and marketing industries will ensure that these social conditions fulfil their potential to tr anslate into continued growth in consumption, at ever-greater cost to human communities, other species, and the integrity of the natural systems on which we depend for life. Freedom revisited: the interests of people and the interests of corporations It has been widely observed that to call this process of globalisation "free tra de" is wildly inaccurate. The inexorable erosion of any conditions which favour small local tr aders (with ties and responsibilities to local communities) over the local outposts of giant corp orations is as destructive of free trade in the sense envisaged by Adam Smith and David Ricardo as it is of individual autonomy and environmental diversity (Daly & Cobb 1989, ch. 11). Davi

d Korten (1996) argues that we are witnessing the consolidation of a hugely powerful olig opoly of global corporations whose members effectively control most of the resources and product ive capacity of the planet. These corporate bodies, while competing fiercely in their chosen mar kets, also co-operate extensively in manipulating governments and international organisatio ns into promoting the advancement of their shared interests. Insofar as there is a coher ent globalisation project, it is these interests which dictate its form and goals. The only freedom associated with "free trade" is the freedom of these transnatio nal corporations to trade as and where they please. As Karl Polanyi prophetically observed more t han fifty years ago: "With the liberal the idea of freedom thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of f ree enterprisewhich is today reduced to a fiction by the hard reality of giant trusts and prin cely monopolies. This means the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attemp t to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property ." (Polanyi 1957, p.257) This is freedom of capital, not of people; this distinction is rarely made, and these days usually

obscured. In fact the rest of the world has effectively followed the lead of the American legal system, which ever since a Supreme Court judgement of 1886 considers a private c orporation to be a "natural person" under the U.S. Constitution and thereby entitled to the pr otections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech and the same right as any ind ividual to attempt to influence the government in pursuit of its own interest. (Korten 1997 p. 59) We are encouraged to think of businesses as legal persons who, like individual h uman citizens, have a basic right in a liberal democracy to carry on their chosen activities, t o pursue their own good unhindered, and correspondingly to lobby and negotiate in the political are na to protect their interests against those of others with which they come into conflict. But a corporation is not a person, despite the American legal system's definition, and it is certainly no t a citizen. Even leaving aside weighty moral and metaphysical questions about whether a corporati on can be said to have interests at all, in any sense analogous to the sense in which human bei ngs have them, it is clear that its interests will not necessarily be compatible with those of hum an beings. A corporation's interests, as a profit-making concern, are essentially financial. It has no direct interests in public goods such as a habitable and beautiful environment; evident ly it has an indirect interest in the existence of the conditions its employees and customers need to survive, but only as means to its ultimate financial ends. For humans the priorities are reversed; despite appearances, we have only an indirect interest in acquiring money, as a means to our other more fundamental ends which however we describe them must always include non-financia l goods such as a habitable environment and a supportive community. As the Cree Indians allegedly put it to the white settlers who plundered the once-abundant natural resources of th eir ancient homeland, you cannot eat money. A corporation's interests thus can never be identical with those of people at la rge, nor even of its own employees; it is often claimed that its interests are those of its sharehold ers, but even this is true only in a narrow sense. Firstly those shareholders may well be largely comp osed of other corporate bodies; and even to the extent that they are individual people their i nterests are served by the corporation's success only within the financial sphere. Non-financial int erests such as a habitable environment can only be, at best, contingently and indirectly served b y bodies which exist purely to make and multiply money as efficiently as possible. To extend to such a body the right of a citizen to campaign for its own interest

s in the political and decision-making processes of a human society leads inevitably to an under-re presentation of non-financial interests in those processes. Consider any situation in which a co mmittee of people are deliberating as to whether to proceed with a profitable but environmentally destructive scheme. Each person stands to gain financially but also to share in the loss of a public good, namely environmental quality; the decision-making process consists of the diffic ult task of weighing these two essentially incommensurate quantities against each other. Sup pose they find the two to be of roughly equivalent weight, and thus cannot make a decision. If they are joined by another person with a similar financial interest, the newcomer will have to m ake the same difficult calculation, and the outcome may well still be indecision. But if the newcomer is not a person but a corporation, it will bring to the table a decisive vote in favour o f prioritising the financial interest, unmodified by any consideration of the public good in which it strictly has no interest. In this hypothetical finely-balanced situation, this may well cause th e decision to go the way the corporation favoured. The fact that just one participant in the process was a corporation, not a human being, was the decisive factor. In practice, of course, commercial i nterests are intimately involved in political decisions, and in legal challenges to those dec isions; indeed they have considerably more privileged access to these processes than non-profit-maki ng bodies, and vastly more than individual citizens. This is not to suggest that the interests, financial and otherwise, of the peopl e who work for

corporations should not count for anything in the political process; they should , as should everyone else's. The objection is to counting the interests of a private profitmaking corporation per se; as an amoral, non-human agent with no interest in public goods, it simpl y has no defensible place in human politics. If its interests and those of humans were id entical, its enfranchisement would be merely a curious anomaly; but where they are different it will inevitably shift the objectives of government away from those of real human peop le. On the issue of achieving a reduction in consumption, the two sets of interests are, as I hav e suggested, almost diametrically opposed. Aristotle and the World Trade Organisation The distinction between acquiring money as a means to an end and acquiring it as an end in itself goes back, as Karl Polanyi (1957, p.53) realised, to Aristotle. For Aristotle, h uman well-being or "the good life" is not reducible to the mere satisfaction of preferences but has definable content, and can be pursued by the cultivation of various virtues; any sphere of human ac tivity or behaviour can potentially be examined in this light to discern the relevant virt uous course of action. The task of politics is to create and maintain a society which fosters t hese virtues and thus maximises well-being. Even this general assertion is often taken to constitute a telling critique of the values of market society, in which preference satisfaction is taken as the p rimary measure of well being, irrespective of the content or type of the preferences. But a more s pecific criticism is derived from Aristotle's description of the art of household management, involvi ng the acquisition of goods only up to the point of sufficency for meeting need, as opp osed to the trader's "wealth-getting art" of the acquisition of goods and money without limi t, as an end in its own right. These two forms of acquisition, says Aristotle, are easily confused, especially by those who "as their desires are unlimited, also desire that the means of gratifying them shoul d be without limit" (Politics, 1258). But the two are distinct, and acquisition without limit is not the aim of good household management. (This in itself contrasts sharply with, for instance, Marg aret Thatcher's famous evocation of households as market players in a "shareholding society".) F or Aristotle, excessive consumption was unequivocally seen as a departure from virtue. Aristotle goes on to suggest that the economic affairs of larger units of human societies (in his own context, the polis) should be managed in an analogous way to households, wit

h a view to comfortably meeting needs rather than to endlessly increasing wealth. The point is developed, and applied to modern environmental concerns, in O'Neill (1993). This has considerable resonance with modern critiques of growth as the end of ec onomic management, such as Herman Daly's concept of the "steady state economy". On the specifically political level, however, my point here is to draw a parallel between the confus ion Aristotle mentions and that which arises in the present day from the practice of regarding modern profit-making corporations, and their powerful collective voice, such as express ed by the WTO, as legitimate participants in themselves in political lobbying and decision-maki ng. Anything approximating to an Aristotelian householding model of virtuous political econom y, including any policy of deliberately limiting or reducing consumption, will inevitably be opposed by such interests wherever possible, since they exist purely and simply to practice prec isely the "limitless wealth-getting" which Aristotle describes as so inimical to that model, and requ ire a climate in which this is viewed as the legitimate end of human activity. When Polanyi wrote in celebration of Aristotle's insights, he believed that free -market ideology in economics had been fatally discredited by the long drawn-out and catastrophic collapse of nineteenth-century European society which finally culminated in the Second World War. For three decades he was proved right; but nurtured in prosperous and conservative c orporate

America and quietly tested in places like Chile, the neoliberal backlash against the social settlement of the post-war years exploded into power in Europe and America at th e end of the Seventies with the election of Reagan and Thatcher. The effective surrender of t he only remaining opposition to the free-market "new world order" at the end of the Cold War allowed globalised capitalism to become more powerful even than the governments of the c ountries which had spawned it. Those governments, whatever their protestations, are now e ffectively dictated to by the rich, stateless major corporate players in the international markets, with disastrous social consequences for people all over the world; but especially, as before, for those in the poorest countries. This time around, however, ecological sanity as well as social justice requires us to somehow regain control over the unrestricted market's senseless rush to turn all availab le "resources" into bankable short-term financial gain. "Free markets" are not an outcome of human e volution but of a radical political and economic programme which is inimical both to freedom and to ecological sustainability. Many things in the world simply have nothing to do with markets, and should not be for sale at any price. Conclusion Market forces will never meaningfully reduce consumption. The myth that they can or will is an attempt to protect the ideology of growth against the threat posed by its increa singly evident consequences. Achieving a sustainable future is not a task that can be left to t he markets; it requires a renewal of non-material values, and political action by people as cit izens, not simply as consumers. Ultimately this political action, if it is to be effective, must r esult not only in local resistance but in the election of governments which are prepared, and mandated, to govern in the interests of citizens as full human beings in the real living world, not simply as economic units of production and consumption. Such governments will have to explicitly question th e desirability of further economic growth and be prepared when and where necessary to resist th e powerful influence of globalised capitalism. It is fundamentally illegitimate for a commercial enterprise to attempt to influ ence the legal, regulative and taxation framework within which it operates; such frameworks are the province of democratically accountable public bodies, answerable to citizens. Business is bi g enough and ugly enough to look after itself; it is creative and adaptable enough to work wi

thin whatever rules are set for it. A still stronger view might also question the legitimacy of atte mpts to influence the consumption habits of individuals in ways which undermine the aims of democratic ally decided policy. Reducing consumption unavoidably entails reclaiming the political process from t he constraining influence of non-human corporate interests. This is true not only because the ag enda of what David Korten succinctly calls "corporate libertarianism" is one of resisting reg ulation, increasing production and promoting growth in consumer appetites, but also because the effe ct on human society of government which follows this agenda is the destruction of the sense of community and social good which is essential for the emergence of responsible citizenship. Only in a coherent society with a responsive, accountable and popularly supported system o f government can either voluntary or coercive measures aimed at bringing consumption levels w ithin the limits of ecological sustainability ever be effective. THE END

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Michael Hannis Copyright 1998