Will Green Consumption & Sharing Lead to Deeper Change?
I had an inspiring conversation with Nadine Weil of Heart of Green and Ecofabulous at Bioneers last weekend. I know Nadine from serving together on the board of Forest Ethics, though we don’t know each other much outside of that. Our encounter at Bioneers was by chance. I expected a friendly hello but got something completely unexpected.
We ran into each other at the Mother Jones table near the entrance to the exhibit hall. Nadine was headed to this large wooden sculpture of a woman holding up earth on the stage of the hall. I went with her to check it out.
The life-sized sculpture was thoroughly impressive. The woman was bent backwards holding the earth at the end of outstretched arms above and behind her head. This was a sturdy woman, but she was straining. A large crack ran up the middle of her sternum from her belly. It looked like she could collapse backwards at any moment. The earth she was holding had a handprint etched into the side of it between the woman’s hands. Nadine interpreted the handprint as an invitation for humans to push the earth and thus Mother Nature back into balance. That struck me as an astute interpretation.
Just above the handprint was a small, carved spiral. Nadine said she was fascinated with spheres and spirals lately. I asked her if she’d ever walked a labyrinth. She said yes, and that on one such occasion she had a flash of insight that prompted her to leave the world of cube farms to do environmental work. I told her about a similar moment that lead me to begin work on sharing solutions.
It was affirming to share our stories of change. From there we talked briefly about our respective projects. While we didn’t speak about this directly, Nadine helped me see sites like Ecofabulous and Shareable as representing points on a continuum of change. That while green consumption alone may not result in the green house gas reductions we need or lead to better social conditions, it can be the thin end of a wedge of change. It meets hundreds of millions of people where they are - in the marketplace - and can, at least theoretically, be the starting place for deeper personal and social transformation. Despite the damage that consumer culture does, I believe change begins in familiar places.
The risk, however, is that green consumption is seen as the destination and not the starting place of a journey. Or that people get focused on changes that make almost no difference, but, as Graham Hill of Treehugger said in his recent GEL conference presentation, represent “feel good environmentalism.” In any case, simply changing the stuff we own will neither get us the green gains we need nor address the root cause of our environmental and social problems. Like the wooden statue at Bioneers, the developed world’s priorities are out of balance. Economic growth is valued above all else, including human and environmental well being.
There’s also the rarely discussed issue of identity that a recent WWF report Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity raises. The report talks about how some environmental campaigning reinforces materialistic and self-enhancing values, values that in the long run work against environmental goals. The report is a deep and sobering criticism of the environmental movement from one of the largest environmental organizations on the planet. We should listen. Green consumerism could be doing the same thing by reinforcing a well-established frame in consumer culture that suggests we form identity through what we buy. In this way, stuff becomes representative of status and segregate us by our buying power. It doesn’t have to be this way. Buying green together and sharing stuff can be points of solidarity.
I also began to think of sharing as a bridge from green consumption to deeper personal and social transformation. From my experience, the initial impetus to share is often materialistic, for instance as a way to save money or get access to something you can't afford on your own. But the results can be so much more. As my friend Robert Ford, a longtime member of Howard Langton Community Garden in San Francisco, has said to me, and I paraphrase here, “We started growing a garden, but ended up growing a community.”
In the case of the garden, they may have started with the idea to improve the built environment of the neighborhood, but what happened along the way is that people of diverse backgrounds learned to work together. They built something beautiful to enjoy, and unexpectedly came to appreciate the importance of healthy relationships to a healthy garden. Sharing can “bridge” to personal and social change that are often more satisfying than the material gains.
So what can be done about all of this? Below are my hopes for how green consumption and sharing can work together to help push society and Mother Nature back into balance:
- Green media leaders use their influence to get wider recognition of green consumption as a starting place – and not a destination – on a longer journey of personal and social transformation. Plus point the way to next steps including sharing.
- Sharing becomes recognized as a bridge between green consumption and deeper transformation, and not as somehow better but rather as part of a continuum of change.
- Green media and sites like Shareable find ways to collaborate to better serve their communities by offering a range of solutions – some store bought, some community powered, and others that combine both.
- Green consumption is combined with what Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers are calling collaborative consumption to help environmental products achieve price parity with traditional products – plus offer a familiar entrée to a Shareable lifestyle.
For discussion in comments:
Do you think green consumption and sharing are bridges to the deeper changes we need? What would you add to the above list?
My call to action:
If you think this is an important discussion, then please share this post with your friends and family so they can join in.
Bridge photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives.
Comments
RACHEL BOTSMAN wrote on 10.26.09, 4:34pm:
Just to clarify, Collaborative Consumption is not actually about “helping environmental products achieve price parity with traditional products.†It’s about systems that change not just what we consume but fundamentally shift how we consume whether that be sharing, bartering, trading, co-operatives etc.
I agree with you, ‘self-interest’ is the key. We need to help the Wal-Mart consumer realize that sharing does mean asking people to play nicely in the sandbox.
The enormous problem we have to overcome is that over the course of the 20th century, we have constructed a large part of our freedom around our ‘right to own,’ and our self-identity around the things we own. Unfortunately, ‘Greener Goods’ don’t truly disrupt these behaviours and perceptions that are embedded within hyper-consumerism. For the most part they tweak an existing paradigm by making the product and its value chain more eco-friendly, invariably at a premium price.
But we have a lot to learn from the Method’s and Prius’s of the world. They get that brand and advertising is about connecting with not just who the consumer is but who they want to be; in other words, their unmet desires. The ‘sharing brands’ of the world (if we should even label them that) that are starting to make real impact fundamentally understand that they have to play the same brand and advertising game as traditional consumer and ‘greener products’. Case in point, Zipcar. They never point the finger of blame or shame and by no means are they telling people not to drive; they are simply urging them not to own. With their distinct white and green bus billboards with the message of “Today’s a BMW day. Or is it a Volvo day?†Zipcar stay laser focused on the key “better than owning†benefits of sharing; choice. Indeed, they have got it so right that or some consumers, proclaiming you are a “Zipster†carries as much cache as have the latest iPhone.
We need more companies that are not in the race to reinventing ‘greener product’s but re-imagining the larger system within which their product operates. And then we should use sophisticated brand and advertising to help consumers understand that usage’ trumps possessions, or as Kevin Kelly, puts it, “access is better than ownership.†That's the bridge to deeper consumer change.
Rachel Botsman
www.collaborativeconsumption.com
www.rachelbotsman.com
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.26.09, 5:07pm:
Just to clarify, part of what I'm suggesting is that green consumption doesn't in itself lead to deeper personal or social change, but that it could be a gateway to deeper change, just as gateway drugs lead to harder drugs. One may begin with buying CFLs, but end up in a buying club or carsharing.
For the record, I'm not entirely convinced of this. That's why I posed it as a question. On the one hand, some media outlets are so focused on green products, say like Treehugger, that they reinforce consumer culture with all it's disempowering values and practices (you are what you buy, high personal debt, planned obsolescence, hoarding). On the other hand, some media outlets blend products with new practices (perhaps Common Ground or Yoga Journal), so could offer a bridge from consumerism to new ways of being.
One thing to take into account about online media is that it's generally easier to build a successful content model around reviewing products as opposed to services or practices, so consumer culture gets reinforced on some of the most popular sites. One exception might be lifehacking, DIY, or productivity sites, which are all about behavior change. That's why we think the book Sharing Solution by Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow is so important. It's a practical how to guide focused on personal benefit. And why we at Shareable mix essays with how-to posts.
Thanks Rachel for thought provoking comment, and the awesome Kevin Kelly quote! For those who haven't read the article it's from, go here: http://bit.ly/KpT1
I also found this cool quote from him recently, "online culture is the culture." If so, then collaborative production and consumption will eventually become the norm.
camerontw wrote on 10.26.09, 9:56pm:
A lot of the most unsustainable consumption is NOT the sort that is deeply connected to my identity. It is the more inconspicuous consumption that is guided more by convenience. If we are beginning to make more use of shared-use systems, as we are, it indicates that we are renegotiating our sense of what is and is not convenient, more than it indicates that we are discovering new identities.
For instance, car-sharing reduces ecological impact primarily because car-sharers drive less overall. Because driving a car-share is less convenient for impulse driving than an owned car, car-share members are more deliberative about when and where they drive. They are re-ordering how they live and learning to find other (shared or renewably-powered [walking, cycling]) modes of transport more convenient again - or working politically hard to make them more convenient. The result is increased collective convenience - less traffic, less pollution. If they use car-sharing for new identity reasons (or straight financial reasons), then they would not be driving less; they would probably be driving more, just via a car-share company, to the detriment of the car-sharing system and our ecosystems.
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.27.09, 10:51am:
Good points Camerontw. I would add that some people do use cars to construct identity, though there's high cost barrier to that practice. It's a more accessible and widespread practice to use fashion, for example, to construct identity as this is a less expensive a more personal (it adorns our bodies and goes wherever we go) and revealing choice.
Plus, they're different types of goods. Cars are a good case for shared use because of their high cost and use patterns, especially with groups of ad hoc users where you can have as low as a 1:20 ratio of cars to people. Obviously, clothes have a lot of issues including size, style, and more. Serial rather than shared use makes more sense. Economist Yochai Benkler writes about the relationship between the type of good and it's shareability in Sharing Nicely, a really useful paper found here: http://bit.ly/dbfzt
I really like the idea of "collective convenience" you point out too. I hadn't thought of that as a benefit. It's interesting because it's a tangible personal benefit that can only be gained collectively. We could build on Janelle Orsi's piece on the four degrees of sharing by including the types of benefits at each level: http://bit.ly/1CxhYh.
RACHEL BOTSMAN wrote on 10.27.09, 2:20pm:
Cameron, raises a great point. When people engage with collaborative systems of usage 'unintended consequences' often happen. This was colorfully illustrated with ZipCar's Low Car Diet (http://www.zipcar.com/lowcardiet/) when 300 participants (many avid car users) committed to living for one month without the use of a vehicle. Instead, they were encouraged to utilize public transportation, increase walking and biking, and they were given a Zipcar membership. Participants increased their miles walked by 85 percent and miles biked by more than 100 percent and all the extra exercise resulted in weight loss for 40 percent of participants. But the most relevant result of the experiment is that 58 percent indicated that they planned to continue to live without an exclusively owned car, and another 31 percent were considering that same commitment. In just one month, alternative travel became a habit--174 people out of the 300 did not want their keys back. (Admittedly, this was a Zipcar marketing scheme but its a good indication of what happens when a car is not outside your door.) This does not happen when you buy a Prius.
Another great example is around food. When people belong to a CSA or an allotment, go to a farmer's market or even 'landshare' they get better food for a lower price but they also become part of a community. This does not happen when you buy organic products from say, Wholefoods. In other words, the behavioral experiences around collaborative systems vs. green goods are wider and deeper.
And I do actually believe even if some people first sign-up to Zipcar for 'identity' reasons the above benefits are still likely to happen. I call these consequences 'unintended' in that they are not necessarily the consumers primary motivation for using them in the first place. The consumers drivers maybe just cost or convenience (or belonging to something) and have nothing do with 'going green'. But it is when people experience these consequences they realize what they have been missing and start to discover a new identity not based on shopping, brands or stuff.
When we talk about collaborative systems, I think we are sometimes in danger of focusing too much on the collective or cumulative benefits related to the environment or society. As we try to make these systems more mainstream, I believe its critical to remember that we are sadly in a hyper-individualistic age and many people still want to know "what's in for me" before "what's in for us." And to help people understand the 'us' benefits (such as less traffic, less pollution) before the 'I' benefits (cheaper, more convenient, better for you) is not necessarily the best way to initially get mainstream consumers into systems of shared-use.
Rachel Botsman
www.collaborativeconsumption.com
www.rachelbotsman.com
Nadine wrote on 10.27.09, 10:57pm:
I love when Bill McDonough of Cradle To Cradle says, "We are people with lives, not consumers with lifestyles." This for me is an inspiring summary.
When people ask me which green products to buy, I suggest a focus on the essentials first like food and then on replacement. When something essential breaks, then we can look for the greenest and healthiest option to replace it. Shopping for shopping's sake is not going to save the planet or lead to personal nirvana. That said, we can use the powerful economic and innovation engines of the U.S. and the world to drive positive change. Ultimately, I hope we can reach a place where we can celebrate truly regenerative growth and abundance the way nature does.
Neal - it was so wonderful seeing you at Bioneers and sharing stories. I love Shareable and look forward to being a part of this new enlightened community.
Janelle Orsi wrote on 11.01.09, 11:41pm:
Replacement! When I read what Nadine wrote about replacement, it hit me that the moment when someone is forced to replace something - whether it's a home, car, vacuum cleaner, or day care for the kids - is a pivotal moment and opportunity for sharing to come into play. In fact, until the need to replace something arises, most people might not consider sharing. After all, why get rid of a vacuum cleaner and share your neighbor's if your vacuum is working just fine?
My neighbor's vacuum just broke, and they felt comfortable asking to share a vacuum, because we already share meals and garden space. In other words, we already have a culture of sharing between us.
It's an interesting time: lots of replacement opportunities are arising - people getting evicted, foreclosed, losing jobs, relocating, and so on. At the same time, I don't think the doors to sharing have opened for most people. We still have the huge social, cultural, and emotional blocks that mean 1) the option of sharing doesn't even occur to most people, and 2) even if it does, we might be scared to ask others to share.
But that's changing, as evidenced by the growth of media attention on sharing. Very soon, "sharing" will be on everyone's mind as the new thing to do - the way that "green" and "sustainable" are on everyone's minds.
So an important equation for social change is: REPLACEMENT OPPORTUNITIES + CULTURE OF SHARING. Right now we have the first part, and we're working on the second.
But replacement is a reactive act. Sharing can also come into play in the more proactive green investments and activities: going solar, composting, catching rain water, building grey water systems, weather proofing homes, etc. These are all things that, if done in groups, could have a significantly broader impact than if we each did them in isolation.
When sharing meets green consumerism, it opens the door to multiply the impact of our green acts. Sharing makes green affordable. Sharing and cooperation make more onerous green tasks (such as weather proofing a house) more doable. Sharing is social, and it gives people a social incentive for doing green things (such as having a party to build a rainwater catchment system).
I think that sharing is a way to get beyond the green ceiling. Many of us who are committed to being green already recycle, we compost, we have eliminated plastics from our lives, we barely drive, we buy only sustainable organic products, etc. - but now what? We obviously need to do more, but it's hard to know what's next?
Sharing. I think that sharing provides an opportunity to deepen our green. When sharing and sustainability become intertwined and permeate everything we do, that will be real transformation.
I am excited about all the various efforts at collaborative consumption, from Shareable and Wecommune.com to localized versions like the Ainsworth Collective in Portland. But I'm not at all convinced that green consumption leads to broader behavioral change. What is seems to have spawned for the most part is such crazy greenwashing that consumers are now weary or wary of "green" products. It's sort of like those "cause" credit cards where a percentage of your purchase goes to charity. That created this strange reality where buying something substitutes for doing something(and you could theoretically buy a fur coat while simultaneously contributing to the World Wildlife Fund). I fear that the buying of green products does the same. Not that it's bad to buy green products; rather that JUST doing that doesn't amount too much. Sharing, on the other hand, seems the smarter way to go not only to help environmental products achieve price parity with traditional products as mentioned above but to help foster relationships between people buying--and sharing--them.