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Discounting Consumerism

Janna Olson works as a Sustainability Marketing Consultant in New York City, currently serving as the NYC Market Manager for Greenopia's local guides to green living. I spoke with her last week to talk about the power of the individual and other forces shifting our culture towards a sustainable future.

Michael Kroon: How do you see the future of a green economy?

Janna Olson: I see things we've been calling "green" inside the worlds of sustainability and environmentalism being taken main-stream so that a green economy looks increasingly like the human species coming home to a society that stops drawing really arbitrary lines of distinction between what's healthy for the planet and what's healthy for us.

Looking at the shifts it's increasingly apparent we must make - engaging solar and other alternative energy solutions as we end fossil fuel use in transportation and manufacturing, concentrating the growing populations in urban centers to maximize life supporting infrastructures, concentrating food production at a regional level to minimize global imports and boost healthy farmlands, embracing large-scale job retraining to move working people into green growth industries and address job losses in the growing list of failing ones, like fishing and US auto manufacturing - all of these are steps that remind us that we humans are the key beneficiaries of what's been called "green."

MK: So environmentalism is really about humanity?

JO: I see an economy increasingly driven by components that can right the wrongs we've perpetrated against our planet and ourselves. It puts people at the center of sustainability's integration of the triple bottom line - planet, people and profit.

This wasn't the case even three years ago.

In 2005, I had an epiphany over my frustration with the word "consumer." I never understood why we were all defined by that word and how it came to supplant "citizen," "person" - I mean what happened? In America especially, where we have such a strong and stalwart sense of self, I was surprised even as a little kid by how effectively this word could rank a person lower than an earthworm.

I started thinking, what if there were a word that could supplant "consumer"? What if it could assert sustainable choices, be free of political ideology and -isms, be active without demanding activism and just make us think more accurately about who we are in the marketplace?

I was struck with the word "sustainer."

MK: Instead of the "consumer" label?

JO: Exactly. We've come to the end of the Industrial Era. And, stepping into a sustainable age, couldn't this tiny shift in vocabulary be a productive way to think?

As an average American, wasn't I always a sustainer? Wasn't I always out raising barns, building a stronger community by my faith, self-reliance, family and team contributions? Crafting smarter solutions with my know-how and can-do spirit? I thought that was supposed to be my Destiny.

MK: As an American?

JO: As an American, our subliminal self-awareness as sustainers was once at the core of our values and consumer was kind of wedged in there - bolstering us as a manufacturing and marketing superpower, sure. But internalizing consumerism - through media, in economic terms - has rendered us steadily unhappier as a nation since 1956 according to Gallup polls often sited by Bill McKibben and now observable through other measures like the Happy Planet Index.

So I kept thinking, what if every time we heard the word "consumer" - consumer reports, consumer confidence, consumer spending, mainstream consumer - automatically triggered a healthier self-image in our minds by the almost subliminal term "sustainer"?

And what if there really were measurable sustainer spending on, say, sustainably-made brands and carbon neutral services that gave rise to the need for a Sustainer Confidence Index?

I began calling up the sustainability and economic experts that I knew of to ask those questions - Clifford Cobb [of Redefining Progress' Genuine Progress Indicator and the Sustainable Index of Economic Welfare], L. Hunter Lovins [of Natural Capitalism and Presidio School], Jared Bernstein [of the Economic Policy Institute] and people at The Rocky Mountain Institute.

And I began building a Sustainer Confidence Survey composed of the simple, clear questions that could begin to chart a standard benchmark for the US, measuring sustainable uptake over time and acting as a complement to the Consumer Confidence Index.

MK: You mentioned the Happy Planet Index. Can this relate to the irony the wealthiest nation is also one of the most depressed?

JO: Yes - of course. Lately, I'm compelled to revisit it with a question to measure happiness as it correlates to making fewer and healthier expenditures. After I started thinking about how we can regard ourselves differently and do it in a way that is completely unique to each one of us just by trying out this idea of being a sustainer...I noticed personally feeling more powerful and more conscious about how I'm investing my dollar each day in the world, not just spending it.

MK: And even the word "spending" has a negative connotation.

JO: That's a great point....sustainer investing became a frame for me to take forward. It took me away from Whole Foods and out to the farmers' market; and it got me out of box stores and into tiny local stores; and it made me curious about who was manufacturing the safest, healthiest products I could invest in. It just made me feel differently, so I thought it may make other people feel differently too.

MK: Is consumer confidence an oxymoron?

JO: It comes back to that idea of the earthworm concept. The earthworm itself takes in, digests and wastes. But what it wastes replenishes the earth and actually helps it regenerate. As a consumer, we're supposed to think that as human beings at the top of the food chain all we can do is buy, use and throw away - and that negates every person's positive contribution to a healthy whole. What am I - a man or a mouse?

As people, we are capable of thinking creatively so far beyond that definition - it just doesn't seem like the right personal stamp for us to carry forward into the next millennium. So, now as we are walking upright and out of the Industrial Era -

MK: Walking upright into the next step in our evolution.

JO: Yes. Upright and out of the Industrial Era with its climate change, increasing global conflict over energy supplies looming large, tanking economies on home turf in the US and paralyzed economies in entire countries beholden to our current corporate models or left behind by them, there's a chance to leave behind the oxymoron that was consumer confidence.

What if we walk into the Sustainable Age with a self-awareness that liberates all the creativity, know-how and possibility we applied to technological solutions from our fading era and applied them to a dawning one?

Starting with an address of climate change is just the beginning.

MK: Now that you mention it, did you know there's a tornado warning right now for us here in Manhattan?

JO: That's craziness! And of course that points right back to the storm intensifications that we are experiencing. It's not just a tornado - it's a tornado that can last longer and occurs with greater frequency than it had historically. With hurricanes, the number of category 4 and 5 storms have more than doubled in the last 20 years according to a 2005 Georgia Tech published article in Science Magazine.

MK: That's pretty intimidating.

JO: Yes, but in that scenario, "sustainer" helps me look towards solutions that can curb such intensity. Thinking of yourself as somebody who's got the power to influence factors as big as the weather? That's pretty big! You've heard that old saying, "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it?" But actually, everyone complains about the weather and everyone does something about it. Now our charge is to do something productive!

We need tools that help us - in this country and elsewhere - to know we are people who have the power to make that change happen no matter whether we engineer solutions, install them or just plain sustain them by our buying and being habits. If it's not about consumer anymore then it's also not solely about spending. And that frees us all to apply our own creativity to how we choose to sustain ourselves, our passions, our children and our world.