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Sustainable Consumption American Style: Nutrition Education, Active Living and Financial Literacy

Posted on: Friday, 17 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Cohen, Maurie J

Keywords: Nutrition ecology, sustainable active living, physical fitness, individual sustainable development

SUMMARY

The 1992 Earth Summit highlighted the critical role of consumption in affluent nations as a source of global environmental deterioration. While most developed countries have begun over the past decade to grapple with the difficult challenges of reducing household demand for energy and materials, sustainable consumption has yet to attract substantive attention in the United States. There exist, however, several strategic openings that American proponents of more environmentally benign household provisioning could exploit to launch a public dialogue about the environmental implications of contemporary consumption. First, public health professionals have in recent years begun to make significant strides publicizing the nutritional inadequacy of the American diet and the contributory role it plays in elevating incidences of chronic disease. Second, the rapid increase in the rate of obesity in the country is now coming to be understood as a health problem that is attributable to the prevalence of sedentary lifestyles. Finally, there is growing public concern in the United States over the accumulation of unprecedented levels of consumer debt and the epidemic of personal bankruptcies. The intent of this paper is to highlight the need to consider the personal dimensions of everyday life when formulating strategies to foster more sustainable consumption.

INTRODUCTION

During the past decade, sustainable consumption has emerged as a new political and academic domain for discussing the linkages between affluent lifestyles and environmental quality (Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2000; Cohen and Murphy 2001; Princen et al. 2002). International institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), and the European Union (EU) have played key roles in raising the visibility of this issue (see, e.g. OECD 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002; Manoochehri 2001; Bentley 2002; Heap and Kemp 2002; UNEP 2004). In addition, some national governments - most notably Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands - have gradually begun to implement policy measures consistent with the aims of sustainable consumption and a global network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has coalesced to advance this agenda.

Despite the attention now being devoted to sustainable consumption in these settings, the issue has received little formal political acknowledgement in the United States. For instance, the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), launched by the Clinton administration in 1993, prepared several notable reports, but assiduously avoided any explicit consideration of consumption (see, e.g. Sitarz 1998). President Bush has evinced even less interest in the matter. Campaigns to foster more environmentally benign household provisioning in the country remain largely confined to a relatively small band of activist groups (Maniates 2002; Cohen et al. 2004; see also Grigsby 2004). The current official inattentiveness in the United States to the linkages among consumption, lifestyles and environmental quality is arguably attributable to how this novel concept has conventionally been framed. More to the point, sustainable consumption is viewed as incompatible with prevalent public policy priorities that overwhelmingly favour the perpetuation of economic growth, the promotion of consumer sovereignty, the profligate utilization of energy and the unrestrained accumulation of material goods (see Collins 2000).

For sustainable consumption to capture the attention of mainstream American policymakers it will be necessary, following an interpretation put forward by Dryzek et al. (2003), to reconcile the issue with at least one of the core imperatives on which contemporary governmental legitimacy is premised (i.e. maintaining internal order, ensuring international competitiveness, raising public finance and promoting economic growth). On first blush, sustainable consumption may seem to be wholly incompatible with any of these vital obligations and efforts to align them construed as hopelessly futile. However, recent studies in France and the Netherlands suggest that ample opportunities exist to adapt this policy discourse to fit within the contemporary constraints of governance (see Sanches 2004; Martens and Spaargaren 2004). In these instances, policymakers are coming to grips with the environmental impacts of heavily consumerist lifestyles on a largely inadvertent basis and without much cognizance of the political obstacles that impede the uptake of sustainable consumption as a workable concept. Moreover, in the French case there is ironically hardly any formal recognition of sustainable consumption per se, despite the progress that the country has achieved in this regard.

The following discussion, by necessity, describes an instrumental approach for customizing sustainable consumption to the outwardly indifferent American political context. More specifically, this strategy seeks to identify pragmatic policy initiatives to which sustainable consumption could reasonably be joined. The rationale for proceeding in this manner resides in the fact that it is easier to motivate a recalcitrant public to adapt its consumption practices when the grounds for doing so are cast in terms of already established social problems. For instance, it is arguably more straightforward to reduce reliance on private automobiles by appealing to drivers' safety concerns than to their putative apprehensions about global climate change.

The subsequent sections outline three issues of current policy relevance to which proponents of sustainable consumption in the United States could purposefully tether their agenda: the growing problem of food overabundance, the poor physical fitness of certain demographic segments of American society, and the current anxiety that surrounds the increasing accumulation of consumer debt.

NUTRITION EDUCATION AND SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION

In discussions about sustainable development, interest in nutrition has tended to focus on the approximately two billion people - most of whom reside in developing countries - that lack consistent access to sufficient caloric resources. Accordingly, dietary issues were at the heart of both the Brundtland Report in 1987 and the proceedings of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Malnourishment and chronic diseases associated with food scarcity continued with good justification to garner prominent attention at subsequent international gatherings and one of the most forceful statements to date on the nutritional aspects of sustainable development - the Beijing Platform of Action -was adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 (Briggs 1997). Nutrition was also an important issue during the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002 (Vorster 2002).

The dietary challenges that exist in the developed nations are, of course, drastically different. While inadequate nourishment continues to persist among certain demographic groups and within specific geographic locales, as a rule, affluent societies today hardly face the same kind of food crises that frequently persist elsewhere in the world. In the United States, for instance, agriculture is so munificent that production in caloric terms is currently twice the biological needs of the population (even after exports have been accounted for) (Nestle 2002; see also Levenstein 1993). This massive surplus has created market conditions in which food in the country is amply available and quite inexpensive. Americans, on average, spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food and this share is only slightly higher for other developed nations (see, e.g. Putnam and Allshouse 1999). By comparison, in many developing countries it is common for households to spend upwards of 60 to 70% of their income on food (Scale et al. 2003).

The great quantity of food that is generally available today in economically advanced societies has led to pronounced personal difficulties controlling body weight and to epidemic incidences of diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease and other chronic health disabilities. Data collected in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that 65% of American adults are either obese or overweight and the problem is becoming more prominent among children and adolescents. The percentage of overweight youngsters aged 6-11 has increased by 300% during the past 25 years and growth in this measure for teenagers is only slightly lower ( see, e.g. Eisenmann et al. 2002; St-Onge et al 2003).

The problem is partly attributable to hypercompetitive market conditions in the food industry that require companies to resort to very aggressive practices to sell a vast surplus. For instance, producers have taken advantage of the frenetic pace of contemporary lifestyles to sell unhealthful fast foods, convenience foods and snack foods. Especially clever purveyors have exploited the budgetary crisis in public education to vigorously advertise and dispense fat- and sugar-saturated products to school-age children. Education administrators now routinely a\gree to 'pouring contracts' in which soft-drink vendors provide schools with cash kickbacks, electronic equipment and athletic gear in exchange for exclusive distribution rights (Molnar 1996).

Creative food companies have developed a number of other innovative strategies. First, the marketing tactic of offering 'more for less' has become increasingly popular in recent years (Crister 2003). This technique exploits the fact that satiety is a flexible feature of human physiology. A widespread perception is that satiation conforms to a fixed threshold; in other words, 'fullness' from eating is achieved once hunger has been fully satisfied. However, by upgrading portion size (and calorie content) at nominal cost, it is readily possible to increase the point at which satiety becomes manifest in customers. Through the use of merchandising policies that increase portion size relative to price, fast-food restaurants have beea able to conflate this physiological feature with consumers' instincts to seek value and to thereby induce them to spend more money.

This so-called 'supersizing' strategy has proven highly profitable because the incremental increase in the cost of commodity inputs such as beef and potatoes is insignificant in the overall scheme especially in comparison to other factors such as labour and facilities. Major clothing retailers have also adapted this strategy. By outsourcing production to low-cost Asian countries and employing teenage sales clerks, these companies are able to sell goods in large quantities at prices that are, by virtually any measure, very cheap (Schor 2005). The new garments marketed by these large retailers are often less expensive than their second-hand counterparts at charity shops. The ultimate expression of this strategy is, of course, the sport-utility vehicle (SUV) where for slightly higher costs of production automobile manufacturers are able to sell a vehicle that is substantially more profitable than a conventional car.

Second, restaurant meals have evolved for many families over the last three or four decades from occasional indulgencies to virtual necessities. In particular, for working parents with children, fast food is now an indispensable feature of daily life. An associated trend has been the increasing prevalence of frozen meals that are prepackaged for quick preparation. While consumers that rely on these products evince an apparent willingness to trade off money for convenience, such food also requires them, perhaps less eagerly and consciously, to surrender control over the ingredients used to produce them (Crister 2003). Food products designed to have a long shelf life or to be heated in a microwave oven invariably contain large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt to enhance their tastefulness. Without these ingredients, the meals would be utterly unpalatable.

Finally, agricultural interests and major food-processing companies have become highly adept at manipulating the regulatory system to their advantage (Nestle 2002; see also Sims 1998). Food producers routinely work to ensure that elected officials select political appointees to oversee dietary agencies that are sympathetic to their concerns and they invoke scientific uncertainty to obstruct administrative proceedings that might adversely affect their commercial interests. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has consistently resisted amending its guidelines to encourage consumers to reduce their overall food intake. Instead, the proffered recommendation is to 'Choose a diet that is low in saturated fat and cholesterol and moderate in total fat' (OMB Watch 2004).

Increasing public awareness of these duplicitous practices has begun to meld with the efforts of public health professionals and consumer advocacy groups into a nascent social movement. Some of these alliances have grown out of the successful decades-long battle with the tobacco industry and attention is now turning toward the nutritional inadequacies and marketing practices that are common among food producers (see, e.g. Hays 2004; Schlosser 2001; Vidai 1997). Indeed, one of the leaders of the current wave of anti- fastfood activism is legal scholar John Bazhaf who led the fight against the major tobacco companies. The rhetoric of anti-fast-food activism, by encouraging consumers to be more conscientious and by chiding producers to become more socially responsible, calls upon several of the same claims advanced by proponents of sustainable consumption.

Current indications, however, suggest that it is improbable that this new public health clash over fast food will provoke the same kind of bare-fisted litigious warfare that characterized the battle over cigarettes. The targets of this more recent campaign are unlikely to offer the same kind of steadfast resistance that was mounted by their counterparts in the tobacco industry. In fact, there are already indications that McDonald's, Burger King, and others are signalling a willingness to make swift compromises and have already begun to overhaul their offerings to include more nutritious menu choices.

While scholarship pertaining to sustainable consumption has considered the environmental impacts of dietary content and the energetic implications associated with the production and preparation of food, it has not taken up the issue of nutritional excess. This omission is in large part attributable to the divide between environmental policy and nutritional policy. Walton and Bridgewater (1999) describe the situation in the following terms:

Traditional ecologists have not devoted much attention to people and their domestic plants and animals. Human 'disturbance' was avoided. Conventional health scientists have largely excluded the wider environments in which people and their domesticated species live.

Although the two fields grew out of a common nineteenth century vision of reform - and were initially closely aligned with the emergent social sciences increasing professionalization prompted them to become more and more estranged from one another (Gottlieb 1993; see also Kamminga and Cunningham 1995). This rupture was regrettable because it gave rise to a widespread sensibility that environmental quality and nutritional well-being were wholly separable pursuits. Despite the important contributions of Rachel Carson (1962) and Francis Moore-Lapp (1971), the prevailing sense has been that human health and biospheric health have few common points of intersection. Based on this view, most developed countries created distinct regulatory systems and this trend has contributed to the fragmentation of responsibility, the reification of artificial administrative boundaries, and the generation of rampant public confusion. For instance, at the federal level in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may under certain unique circumstances take an interest in food contamination in terms of, say, the public ingestion of PCB-tainted fish. However, nutrition is not typically one of its major concerns. Moreover, those governmental bodies that periodically evince an inclination to become engaged on issues at the intersection between the environment and nutrition are shunted aside by the politically potent Department of Agriculture.

There are now indications that this longstanding division is beginning to break down and the locus of human nutrition, ecology, and the social sciences has begun to attract academic attention (Leitzmann 2003; see also Schwenk and Hauber-Schwenk 2003; Honari and Boleyn 1999; Carlsson-Kanyama 1998; Duchin 2005). One of the most interesting expressions of this development is the emergence in Germany over the past 20 years of the field of 'nutrition ecology.' Coined in 1986 by Claus Leitzmann, the term nutrition ecology connotes a holistic and interdisciplinary view of the socio- environmental nutrition system across muldple scales of analysis - individual, local, regional, national and global with the aim of improving human quality of life. More concretely, nutrition ecology is attempting to link together issues and perspectives that are relevant to nutrition scientists, public health professionals, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, sociologists and others. This mode of inquiry provides a means to unshackle the study of nutrition from its customary scientistic and reductionistic moorings and to incorporate an appreciation for how regulatory practices, social systems, and political considerations interact to influence human access to food.

Nutrition ecology furthermore adopts a normative view with respect to sustainable consumption. As Leitzmann (2003) observes,

From a nutritional point of view, sustainability also deals with the fair distribution of food through ecological and preventive eating behavior. To achieve sustainability, a comprehensive rethinking of common values is needed to attain a new understanding of the quality of life.

Intellectual developments currently taking place around the notion of nutrition ecology are roughly comparable with those occurring with respect to industrial ecology (see, e.g. Graedel and Allenby 1995; Ehrenfeld 2002). On one hand, industrial ecologists conceive of the productive economy as a closed system and study the various impacts that occur throughout the entire life cycle of manufactured goods. On the other hand, though much less prominent at present, self-styled nutrition ecologists are seeking to understand the food system in all of its dimensions: production, harvesting, preservation, storage, transport, processing, packaging, trade, distribution, preparation, consumption and waste disposal (Leitzmann 2003). As such, the field of nutrition ecology provides a practicable approach for beginning to validate the symbiotic relationship between human health and global environmental well- being.

SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION AND ACTIVE LIVING

The plentiful caloric content of the average Am\erican diet has combined to devastating effect with an increase in sedentariness among large segments of the public. The tendency has been to attribute this growing trend toward physical inactivity to personal indolence and poor discipline. However, public health officials have begun to redefine the problem in social terms and to draw attention to the cultural and infrastructural factors that contribute to a declining pattern of muscular exercise (see, e.g. Nestle and Jacobson 2000). In particular, the general lack of fitness in the United States can be attributed to the low regard for physical education in school settings, the advent of widespread automobile dependency, the prevalence of television (and other electronic modes of leisure and recreation) and the societal preoccupation with ease and comfort.

First, moderately strenuous exercise has fallen out of favour in formal educational settings in the United States. While a select number of capable student athletes continue to compete on school teams, comprehensive fitness programmes for the general student population have suffered from a lack of financial commitment, a tendency to disparage activities that emphasize self-expression and creativity, and a desire to insulate students from the travails of poor performance (Crister 2003). In wealthier communities around the country, declining public support for school-based physical education has been offset by the creation of pervasive extra- curricular sports programmes that operate on an independent funding basis and often rely on parental voluntarism. However, less prosperous locales have not evinced the same inclination and capacity to launch initiatives that substitute for terminated school offerings (Lareau 2003).

Second, school administrators have eviscerated physical education from the curriculum over the last few decades while American society has become increasingly automobile reliant (Duany et al. 2000; Kay 1997). More than half of the country's population resides in suburbs where access to a car is an inescapable necessity of daily life. Most communities constructed during the post-World War II era have been built on the supposition that every resident would have access to a private vehicle. Cities in the southern and southwestern regions of the country - most notably Atlanta, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix - are especially prominent examples of this design strategy. At the same time, the country's older metropolitan areas have experienced robust population growth over the past five or six decades on their suburban and exurban peripheries and this situation has, in combination with other factors, led to a hollowing out of central cities and the dispersal of people across wide geographic areas. Such circumstances have resulted in land-use patterns in which more recently constructed schools and other public facilities are inaccessible on foot or by bicycle. There are indications now surfacing that the growing prevalence of low- density settlement in the United States is contributing to the epidemic incidence in weight gain (Jackson 2003; Jeffery and Utter 2003; Welch 2003; Nestle andjacobson 2000; see also Stein 2004).

Third, critics of television have long alleged that the medium contributes to anti-social behaviour and sedentary lifestyles (see, in particular, Mander 1978). However, these charges - vociferous though they may have been at times - did little to slow the popularization of this form of leisure activity. Over the past two decades, electronic recreation has become even more pervasive with the advent of video cassette recorders, digital video discs, video and computer games, and the Internet. A sizeable segment of the American public now spends more than 20 hours per week watching television or passively viewing one or another kind of electronic media (see, e.g. Gordon-Larsen et al. 1999).

Today, social commentators are not the only voices censuring the intensive public penetration of television and other electronic pastimes. Medical researchers are beginning to identify strong statistical associations between these leisure activities and chronic health disorders, most notably pdiatrie obesity and type II diabetes (see, e.g. Hu et al. 2003; Crespo et al. 2001 ). Moreover, the number of hours devoted to television viewing and related pursuits is closely correlated with other factors that exacerbate caloric imbalances such as inadequate physical exercise and soft drink and snack food consumption (Giammattei et al. 2003; Robinson 2001).

Finally, the continual upgrading of standards of comfort and convenience has undermined physical fitness by substituting technology for human exertion (Shove 2003; Crowley 2001). While few people would freely forsake fuel-powered tractors in favour of hand ploughs or revert from automatic clothes washing machines to washboards, an important reason for the retention of surplus body weight is that many routine activities no longer require tiresome inputs of raw muscle. A somewhat more circumspect eye, however, reveals that 'ease of living' has become a sacrosanct objective of the contemporary era and a prominent feature of marketing appeals. When indoor temperature can be readily maintained by dialing an electronic thermostat, the cutting and hauling of wood is viewed, at best, as an anachronistic practice. The point here is that the costs associated with today's remarkably high levels of comfort and convenience are often ignored and many people actively avoid arduous labour. As a general rule, there is a powerful and paradoxical tendency to extend high levels of social prestige to occupations and lifestyles that require relatively low levels of physical exertion, despite the fact that they may be clearly unhealthy from a fitness perspective.

To overcome the dilemmas created by the lack of energetic activity and to foster more wholesome lifestyles, some scholars and organizations have begun to advocate for more 'sustainable active living' (IUCN 1991; Lake et al. 2001; Mariethoz and Bokonyi- Moeschler 2003). One of the most comprehensive statements on the issue is provided by Lake et al. (2001) who describe sustainable active living as 'the integration of physical activity into daily life in order to improve the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.'

Discussions regarding sustainable consumption to date, by stressing the need to achieve ambitious technological efficiencies in materials and energy use, have failed to consider the potential value of individualized initiatives that emphasize physical exercise and healthful living. In their effort to avoid treacherous political waters, proponents of this agenda have needlessly overlooked modest advances in how people manage their personal well-being.

Aside from its direct health benefits, sustainable active living can potentially provide an effective channel for encouraging values that are consistent with sustainable consumption - cooperation, fairness, participation and reflexivity. Unfortunately, because of the battering to which physical educators have been subjected in recent decades, what was once deemed a noble vocation has lost much of its stature. There is sound reason to question whether recruits to the field have sufficient background and training to take up the challenges that would be part of a professional commitment to sustainability. Moreover, there may be a real intellectual deficit as physical education does not presently foster the kind of critical outlook that would be necessary for it to make a meaningful contribution to the realignment of contemporary lifestyles. Despite the general thrust of the foregoing assessment, there are hopeful signals that a more socially and environmentally responsive mode of thought may be emerging among physical educators (Humberstone 1998; Rovegno and Kirk 1995; Sage 1993; see also Csikszentmihalyi 1990; McKibben 2000).

At the same time, environmental educators have a role to play in reaffirming their commitment to physical activity. Environmental education as taught in schools has typically been presented in a science format despite the fact that it has long been recognized that outdoor pursuits - particularly hiking, rock climbing and cross- country skiing - are important components of a comprehensive curriculum. One way, therefore, for environmental educators to overcome this bias is to become more actively engaged with their colleagues in physical education (Humberstone 1995).

The poor level of physical fitness among members of the American public is beginning to come to the fore and these developments should be of considerable interest to proponents of sustainable consumption. Colorado, in particular, is one state that has taken concerted action to promote more active lifestyles. Local public health officials were galvanized into action in 2002 when it was revealed that the state's residents, after decades as the leanest Americans, were falling victim to the same upward trends in obesity and inactivity as the rest of the country. The issue took on special prominence because the state had come to rely on its healthful and youthful image as an outward marketing theme. Physical educators and elected officials launched a novel programme known as 'Colorado on the Move' that seeks to increase the number of steps people in the state take each day by 2000 strides. School administrators have also been enlisted to develop ancillary7 programmes to encourage children to walk to school. However, the most comprehensive effort in the state to date involves the redevelopment of Denver's former Stapleton Airport into an 'active recreational' community. The project, designed to accommodate an eventual residential population of 30,000 people, contains a dense network of cycling paths, walking trails and parks, as well as neighbourhood health clinics that emphasize nutrition an\d exercise (Johnson 2004).

Sustainable active living also entails efforts to resist the urge to sit down in front of a television, video game or computer. A national programme run under the auspices of an organization called the TV Turnoff Network (TVTON) encourages both children and adults to spend a week each year without the apparent luxury of television. TVTON distributes customized curricula to schoolteachers and encourages community groups to arrange programmes to divert public attention away from passive forms of electronic entertainment. Other overt expressions of anti-television activism have included efforts to ban the airing of television programmes in schools and campaigns to limit advertising aimed at young children (see, e.g. Cohen 2004; Molnar 1996; Fox 1996). This antipathy stems in large part from initiatives to force educational administrators to cancel their contracts with Channel 1, a proprietary network that broadcasts a daily digest of news and commercials to schools around the country.

SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION AND FINANCIAL LITERACY

Virtually all developed countries have experienced large increases in outstanding consumer debt over the past decade. The upwelling in non-mortgage credit has been particularly sizeable in the United States where the amount of so-called 'revolving debt' has doubled from approximately $1 billion to $2 billion (Braunstein and Welch 2002). This category of consumer credit comprises primarily credit card debt that remains unpaid and 'rolls' over, along with finance charges and fees, from one month to the next.

Some commentators have attributed this trend to an especially crass form of unchecked consumer exuberance. More reflective analysis, however, highlights several structural changes in the financial services industry and the ways in which consumers negotiate the obstacles of everyday life have been at the centre of these phenomena (Leyshon et al. 1998; Evans and Schmalensee 1999; Calder 1999; Manning 2000; Cohen 2004). For instance, banks previously generated their revenue by dispensing loans to a largely local clientele, but this traditional business practice has been outpaced by a process of modernization. The financial services industry today employs the tools of modern marketing and database management to assess from a distance the credit worthiness of a much wider circle of prospective borrowers. By utilizing geographical information systems (GIS) to recruit new customers and networked credit-reporting consortia to verify financial histories, banks are no longer confined to recruiting proximate borrowers. The advent of toll-free call centres (and more recently the Internet) has substituted technology for face-to-face interaction and a staff of centralized operators can now cost-effectively manage the accounts of a very large pool of dispersed customers.

These new arrangements have stripped away the banking industry's customary coziness and collegiality. Contemporary financial service providers now intensively compete with one another and this new situation has given rise to the use of a broad assortment of aggressive promotional practices. For example, at one time banks were unenthusiastic about clients that were poor credit risks, but today they actively pursue customers that have customarily lived outside of the formal banking economy. To compensate for the added exposure of novice customers it is common to impose onerous interest rates on their accounts. College students, because they are prone to use credit cards imprudently, have proven to be an especially lucrative market (Norvilitis et al 2003; Hayhoe et al. 2000).

At the same time, the growth in consumer credit has paralleled the general swelling in size of the consumer economy in recent decades and retail transactions now account for nearly two-thirds of the economy in the United States. Under such circumstances, access to a near-cash payment tool one that has the advantage of being virtually universally accepted - becomes an important piece of equipment for living. In addition, access to readily available consumer credit serves a number of other useful functions. For instance, cardholders can draw credit advances during times of financial duress and this may be, for any number of reasons, a more suitable alternative than informal assistance from friends or family members (Warren and Warren-Tyagi2003).

Ample personal credit also provides what some observers might consider to be a more frivolous form of flexibility in that it enables consumers to upgrade, at least for a time, their material standard of living. In a society where cultural standards of personal presentation are continually ratcheting upward, credit becomes an indispensable means to maintain social appearances at a relatively low cost (Schor 1998). Moreover, in the United States there are few prohibitions on product promotionalism and under such permissive conditions it can be challenging for people to maintain their psychological health (Wachtel 1983; Jacobson and Mazur 1995; Kasser and Kanner 2004). The use of readily available credit to acquire goods provides a convenient safety valve with which to ensure one's social standing.

Nonetheless, the growth in consumer debt in the United States, and the accompanying rise in personal bankruptcies, has made it difficult for the financial services industry and governmental authorities to avoid the social costs of an economic system that affords relatively unfettered access to credit. To fend off calls for new controls on their lending activities, banks have sought to define the problem of insolvency in terms of inadequate financial literacy and the industry has launched a series of educational programmes to improve public understanding of topical issues. One of the leading initiatives has been developed under the auspices of the Jump$tart Coalition, a consortium of 140 corporations, government agencies, education associations and nonprofit organizations.

Financial literacy has also been an area of vibrant political activity. In addition to Congressional hearings, Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has been a forceful spokesperson on the issue (Greenspan 2002; see also US Treasury Department 2002; USGAO 2001 ). In terms of institutionalized responses, the Treasury Department has created an Office of Financial Education and participates in the federal government's newly established Financial Literacy and Education Commission. As for direct involvement by the White House, the Bush administration has amended its flagship education programme, No Child Left Behind, to encourage schools to develop curricular content pertaining to financial literacy (Strauss 2004).

This profusion of activities by mainstream political and economic institutions represents a nascent effort to address the untoward affects of unaffordable personal debt. To be certain, these initiatives have not shed much light on the broader social and environmental dimensions of rampant credit card usage. However, the accumulation of unprecedented levels of consumer debt is surely coming to be understood as a social problem that requires a public policy response. As this process proceeds, new opportunities will avail themselves to proponents of sustainable consumption to open up the discussion beyond merely the 'wise' use of credit and to advance a more expansive critique of contemporary consumerism (see, e.g. Durning 1992; Dominguez and Robin 1999; de Graaf 2001 ).

CONCLUSION

Portions of global society have been engaged for nearly two decades in seeking to foster pathways toward more sustainable development. Numerous celebrated documents have been prepared and a long list of international gatherings has been convened. One of the most remarkable outcomes of the Earth Summit in 1992 was a formal declaration that the consumption practices of the most economically advanced countries of the world were contributing to climate change and exacerbating declines in biodiversity. Such claims were departures from an earlier era during which global environmental deterioration was solely attributed to rapid population growth in developing countries.

Despite this reassessment, there is a palpable sense that the political approach for pursuing sustainable consumption (as well as sustainable development more generally) is fraught with numerous insurmountable obstacles. Moreover, with China and India both experiencing unprecedented economic growth and lacklustre commitment among most key nations, it appears that the modest interest that governments had demonstrated for this task during the 1990s has faded as other issues have pressed for space on the international agenda. Even those countries that embraced Agenda 21, the flagship project put forth by the Rio proceedings, seem to have lost much of their enthusiasm. The emerging sensibility is that the foremost approach for working toward sustainability, with its emphasis on the role of high politics and elite institutions, has broken down (Tukker et al. 2006).

An important outcome of this nascent awareness is that engineers are beginning to rise to the challenge of sustainable consumption. There is a growing recognition among technology educators, as well as within the engineering community more generally, that headway reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling other global environmental threats will require a redoubled commitment to technical innovation (see, e.g. Thomas and Graedel 2003; Hirschl et al 2003).

While it would be foolhardy to discount entirely the improvements that can accrue from enhancing energy and materials efficiencies, history suggests that technologists tend to overestimate the potential of these gains (Princen 2005). Concomitantly, in the absence of fundamental changes in materials and energy utilization it is likely that unanticipated rebound effects will swamp engineered interventions. It is therefore essential that developedcountries such as the United States pursue a balanced portfolio of strategies to limit the environmental impacts of contemporary consumption practices. To be certain, part of the attractiveness of the technological path derives from the fact that it circumvents difficult political choices and places responsibility in the hands of presumably competent experts. However, as the preceding discussion outlines, it is possible to advance social policies that support sustainable consumption without compromising existing political imperatives. Moreover, it remains quite plausible that a public that is adequately nourished, physically fit and financially stable will, over time, develop greater empathy toward large-scale environmental problems and become more supportive of determined efforts to address them.

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Maurie J. Cohen

Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA

Correspondence: Maurie J. Cohen, Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102 USA. Email: mcohen@adm.njit.edu

Copyright Taylor & Francis Ltd. Dec 2005

Source: International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology

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