A Republican Idea: Sustainable Consumption

The most significant change suggested in the Republican budget plan appears to be cutting income taxes on those in the top bracket from 35% to 25%. To many this seems like the same approach to the economy used during the Bush administration and it is in part responsible for the present economic recession. The absence of any new ideas in the republican party is captured by a joke traveling around Washington D.C. these days that was shared on Meet the Press by NBC business reporter Steve Leasman. “The Republicans have found a cure for cancer.” “What is it?” “Tax cuts.”

In this vacuum there is for many a sense of denial on the right: there is no recognition that the policies they have been advocating have led to this dire economic situation; no recognition their policies led to their own administration giving the financial sector hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out. Since no one acknowledges a problem with their underlying philosophy, they do not feel the need to come up with any new ideas. While everyone else is thinking about “resetting” our economy on a more sustainable path, many republicans believe they just need to criticize the attempts others make to improve our present situation.

There are exceptions to this rule. There are republicans like David Frum who are gently seeking to bring new ideas to the party. George Will is always reading new material. He recently wrote an article on the work of Michael Pollan that is of particular interest here because it suggests a new approach to working our way out of this economic recession. This approach acknowledges that our behavior up to this point has not been sustainable—we need to change. And it describes a uniquely conservative idea for addressing our problems that focuses on individual initiative rather than government intervention.

Many of you are already familiar with the work of Michael Pollan. He is one of the bestselling writers in the world today. He tells an amazing story about food. Most of the food we eat is actually made out of oil, given all the fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides used to produce it. By moving from multi-culture organic farming to mono-culture industrialized farming, our food production became dependent on foreign oil and it began to dramatically undermine our health, contributing to a striking growth in obesity and diabetes.

Micheal Pollan, like Alice Walker and many others, encourages people to eat locally grown organic food from multi-culture farms that do not use chemical insecticides, pesticides or fertilizers. This food is, first of all, much healthier for us to eat. Second, it tastes much better than the food “by products” to which we have grown accustom. Third, it will help our country bring the food production process back to the use of solar energy enabling us to become more energy independent and reducing our carbon footprint. Fourth, it will support the local organic farmers that are the engines of this economic growth.

This trend toward locally grown organic food was brought into sharp relief recently by the first lady Michelle Obama. She recently led the way for the creation of a garden on the lawn of the White House that presently produces vegetables that are eaten at the White House and shared with local food banks.

George Will discusses Pollan’s work approvingly in his article Where the Obesity Grows. He describes how Pollan has characterized our existing diet as having made “many Americans both overfed and undernourished.” Will closes quoting Hippocrates who he says not only “enjoined doctors: ‘Do no harm’” but also said “something germane to a nation that is harming itself with its knives and forks: ‘Let food be thy medicine.’”

Here Will advocates a classic conservative answer to a problem: a reliance on individual initiative, education and innovation rather than a government controlled intervention. He is not pressing for new regulations on industrialized farming; he is encouraging individuals to be smart about what they eat. If they are, the government will not need to “regulate” industrialized farming, consumers will. They will purchase products that are produced in ways that enhance their health rather than harm it. They will also purchase products that enhance the health of the environment and the strength of our economy by using renewable energy. When they do this, the fate of industrialized farming is determined by the market, they way political conservatives generally prefer, instead of being regulated by the government.

When the government attempts to regulate the economy to serve social ends like protecting the environment, Will and other conservatives believe it can actually make things worse. He makes this point in a recent article discussing the government’s support for compact fluorescent light bulbs. We would be much better off if the government would not try to regulate the economy: we should let educated consumers purchase the products they prefer.

Here we have the kernel of a republican idea for getting out of the present economic recession and for preventing the recurrence of another in ten or fifteen years, as is predicted by the boom and bust cycles that have plagued capitalism since its inception. We could call this idea sustainable consumption: educated consumers support sustainable businesses and the market forces other businesses in a more sustainable direction. Consumers do this when they take Will’s advice and purchase locally grown organic food.

When consumers become more educated about the environmental consequences of modes of production and this is reflected in their consumer decisions it enables the price mechanism in a capitalist economy to take into account the environmental consequences of business processes. If the consumer does not think about these environmental consequences, they can be ignored or “externalized” by a business. This will often lead the same consumers who ignore these consequences in their purchases to vote for representatives that will support government regulation of businesses. These businesses will need to be regulated because economists like Paul Krugman will argue, as he did recently in response to Will on ABC's This Week, that market capitalism has failed to adequately take into account the damage done to the environment. A less educated consumer leaves more responsibility for regulation on the government; a more educated consumer, on the other hand, can cultivate more sustainable economic development with less government intervention.

In another article on the strength of capitalism, Will suggests "would-be price gougers are at the mercy of a public armed with information, which is what markets generate and communicate." Information, he argues, can be used by the public to create disinsentives for overly greedy merchants. Similarly, information can be used by the public to create disinsentives for business that damage the environment.

The contemporary concept of sustainable development suggests that past capitalist approaches can not only ignore the environmental costs of development, but they can also ignore the social costs of development: where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer until the poor do not have enough money to buy what is produced and the economy sinks into a recession in a boom and bust pattern. Contemporary concepts of sustainable development will therefore include a focus on economic justice, which insures workers are paid and treated in a just manner. A value is placed on companies that increase profit through innovation and increases in efficiency rather than simply finding more inconspicuous ways to cut the pay for their employees. These companies enable a society to create sustainable development that is not subject to the cycle of boom and bust.

When we follow Will’s advice and buy locally grown organic food, we also support the local farmers that grow this food. They profit from their own work. This, of course, is often not the case for those who work on the industrialized farms owned or controlled by multi-national corporations. These corporations have fiduciary responsibilities to maximize profit for shareholders. One of the ideas behind the contemporary concept of sustainable development is that if we support business models that share more profit with employees, it will enhance the sustainability of economic growth by increasing the long term demand that drives growth.

The sustainable consumer would then be one who supports businesses that are sustainable in the sense that, relative to other businesses, they treat the environment and their workers well. This consumer views purchases as votes that change the society on a daily basis. This is something we are already beginning to do now that we have not been doing in the past. 54% of shoppers now consider sustainability characteristics in their buying decisions according to a study recently released by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and Deloitte. In the past, most consumers purchased products based simply on the perceived quality of the product. As a result, many businesses were able to harm the environment and undermine the economic resources of their workers without impacting the price of their product. We can now see that this approach has led us back into another recession and a global climate crisis.

Of course, our initial efforts to become more sustainable consumers will be inefficient and inevitably fail to address the serious problems that confront us in the best possible way. This will provide us even more reason to take these steps now so that we can learn from them and improve the steps we take in the future.

What we do know now is that our past approach to consumption created conditions that led some Americans to be “overfed” while the environment and the rest of us were “undernourished.” Just as we have been hurting our selves with our knives and forks, we have also been hurting our selves with our purchases by supporting unsustainable businesses. Will’s focus on individual initiative and his suggestion that we become more educated consumers is well taken. This is something we can agree on: Let’s let our purchases be thy medicine.