Consuming the Environment

It is commonly asserted by environmentalists that nature is being consumed by a vast array of cultural practices to the point that its very existence is under threat. This entry discusses this proposition in the light of analysis on the changing relationship between nature, consumption, and culture.

One commonplace understanding of the relationship can be seen in the kind of millennial arguments proposed by Bill McKibben and his claims that we have now reached “the end of nature” (1989). McKibben claims that human activity, driven by the technological-industrial complex, has now altered whatever we once thought nature was. Wilderness no longer exists in a pristine state, anywhere; forests and farmland has become thoroughly domesticated; marine and terrestrial environments have become polluted; even the climate appears to be altered, possibly irrevocably, as we face the threats of climate change. Nature is here confronted by an array of human-imposed threats, from acid rain to global warming, from the extinction of species to the destruction of the rainforest. A new variant emerges with the advent of new genetic and nanotechnologies, with their ability to alter and re-work DNA into new forms of life, evoking images of the “postnatural” and indeed, the “post-human” (Hayles 1999, McKibben 2003).

Within this frame, nature, including human nature, is literally being consumed by culture and, in particular, by modernity's rapacious capacity for depletion, exhaustion, improvement, and remaking. Consumption is pitted against nature, driven by self-propelling logics of industrialism, materialism, and visions of economic progress. Closely aligned to such a discourse is a second story line of how the remains of nature are being consumed by and through representational practices. Denuded of any genuine authenticity and external referent, nature in this discourse becomes merely a sign, commodified and preserved by consumer culture, often Disneyfied, devoid of any legitimacy, according to Alexander Wilson. Research within this mode of thinking has examined the implosion of nature into artifice, and how this is achieved through myriad practices of commodification, fetishization, spectacular consumption, management, packaging, engineering, and other forms of mediation.

An analysis of social practices of consumption is a particularly significant social pattern here. As the various entries in this encyclopedia testify, practices of consumption have had profound impacts on the structuring and self-definition of modern societies. Such changes include the following: first, a huge increase in the range of goods and services that are currently available, as markets and tastes have been significantly internationalized. Second, the increasing semiotization of products so that sign—rather than use value—becomes the key element in consumption. Third, the breaking down of some “traditionalized” institutions and structures so that consumer tastes become more fluid and open. And fourth, the increasing importance of consumption patterns to the forming of identity and hence some shift from producer power to consumer power.

[Page 329]Zygmunt Bauman has argued that such changes amount to a structural shift in society as consumer conduct comes increasingly to provide the cognitive and moral focus of everyday life. The pleasure principle becomes a dominant and structuring idiom. Pleasure seeking becomes a duty since the consumption of goods and services has become the structural basis of Western societies. Social integration thus takes place less through the principles of normalization, confinement, and disciplinary power, as described by Michel Foucault or indeed by Bauman in the case of the Holocaust. Instead, it takes place through the “seduction” of the marketplace, through the mix of feelings and emotions generated by seeing, holding, hearing, testing, smelling, and moving through the extraordinary array of goods and services, places and environments, that characterize contemporary consumerism organized around a particular “culture of nature.”

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