“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.”

The economist Victor Lebow wrote these words in a 1955 paper on how to maintain the North American lifestyle. But this was the not the end of his chilling prognostication.

“These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole “do-it-yourself” movement are excellent examples of “expensive” consumption.”

56 years ago Lebow created a recipe for the world as we see it now – a plastic planet of over- consumed, throw-away products – and people. And in creating this society of consumers, we (all of us!) have created a world where human worth has become secondary to gadget-worth.

Funny to hear that from a geek eh?

Consider this… if the entire planet consumed goods at the rate of American and Canadian consumers, we would need FIVE planets worth of natural resources to sustain the Earth!

Or consider this… we see lots of pictures on the news about industrial accidents and pollution in China, India and the Third World. And yet the amount of green house gases being emitted from these countries is a fraction of the amount produced in North America and Europe! Even more damning is that with our global system of monitoring much of the green house gas emissions from these countries relates to manufacturing for the North American and European markets! In essence shifting part of our green house gas ‘blame’ to these countries STILL leaves us with a huge amount of emissions in our own backyard.

All this gloom, doom and over consumption has left us, as individuals with a huge case of ‘gas’, something a bazillion tons of Bromo Seltzer probably couldn’t get rid of. But the key to this huge problem may in fact rest on individual action.

If the demonstrations in Tahid Square and the Occupy! movement have taught us anything it is that people, as individuals, around the world are starting to wake up to what is wrong with our society. As Pogo so eloquently said “I have seen the Enemy, and He is US!” Granted there are probably more iPods than trees in the crowd in Wall Street, but 7 billion people around the world are starting to say “Whoa… hold on a second there!”.

We over-consume, period.

We need to starting saying “Do I really need that?”, period.

We need to start sharing what we have, period.

We need to start thinking of how to more effectively manage the resources we have, period.

The good news is that we are beginning to open our eyes, climb to the top of that fuzzy cardboard box we have been living in…and Lift The Flap!

The world is a huge place, filled with individuals, each one a living, breathing entity with the ability to think for themselves. I bet if we put our 7 billion heads together we could come up with some pretty cool solutions. Might take awhile and it sure might not make some of our major manufacturers and shareholders too happy, but at the end of the day it might just give us back the only home we have ever known.

And the individuality we started to lose 56 years ago.