“Conscientious Consumerism”, or How You Can Actually Be More Sustainable
Consumers are more conscientious than ever before about what they buy, how it was produced, who produced it.
This idea, that as consumers in a capitalist society we can make our voice heard with our wallets, is both powerful and pervasive. It is powerful because it gives us the consumers — the “little guys” — a feeling of control.
Consumers now think they have real power and producers make that power real by thinking about them.
There are two uncomfortable (dare I say, inconvenient?) truths:
Truth #1: We are not as conscientious as we think we are
We might be conscientious with respect to buying food or not driving, but rarely are we as conscientious about buying everything. The reason: it is really hard to do all that research.
When you buy clothes do you look to see if it uses cotton that is produced using fair wage and labor standards? Otherwise it is highly likely that your cotton comes from a place like Uzbekistan where the entire country is forcibly mobilized to pick cotton.
When we buy furniture do we ask when we buy furniture whether the wood is from sustainable forests?
