From Fast Fashion to Connected Consumption: Slowing Down the Spending Treadmill

Abstract

The year 2011 was ecologically ominous. Record temperatures, extreme drought, virulent hurricanes and rapidly escalating food prices provided vivid evidence that climate change is upon us, that resource scarcities are intensifying and that humans have gone beyond safe planetary boundaries in our efforts to produce and consume. The science of ecology is complex, but the degradation now being visited on the earth can also be thought about in relatively simple terms. One of those is time. The rhythms of human impacts and natural systems are not in synch, and eco-degradation is the predictable result. Greenhouse gases are emitted too quickly for the earth’s sinks (e.g. forests and oceans) to absorb them. Waste is generated too rapidly to break down and be re-incorporated into natural cycles. Maturing trees are cut down too soon and fishing stocks are depleted at too accelerated a rate. When the speed of production and consumption increases, nature does not adjust benignly: it roars back to re-establish its own temporal equilibrium (World Wildlife Fund 2010; Meadows, Meadows and Randers 1992; Wackernagel et al. 2002; Rockström et al. 2009). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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