Sustainable Consumption

Fall 2017

Designing a Sustainable Future: A New Economy as if People Mattered

Session 6: What is Sustainable Consumption?
Music: "The Ghost of Tom Joad," Bruce Springsteen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SN1UK8ghGw

Essential questions:

• What is sustainable consumption?

• What impacts do our consumption patterns have on the planet?

• What is the extractive economy?

• What is a regenerative economy?

Gathering: After looking at the Preferred State, Present State or Incubator ideas that we have created, I would like to add the following idea…

Rick’s Rap

Video:  Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff” http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/

            •Video debrief: Reflective Sentence Starters

            • discussion

Exercise:

            • 100 items

            • one garbage can

Closing: Something that I learned in this session was…..

 Readings:

• Annie Leonard, “How to be a More than a Mindful Consumer,” Yes! Magazine, 8/22/13
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-human-cost-of-stuff/annie-leonard-more-than-a-mindful-consumer

• Gus Speith, “Breaking the Chains of Consumerism,” from America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, New Haven, Yale University Press,2012 https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/09/10/america-possible-breaking-chains-consumerism

 Resources:

• E.F. Schumacher, “Buddhist Economics,” Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Hartley & Marks, 1973 http://www.centerforneweconomics.org/buddhist-economics
• Colin Beavin, "No Impact Project,"http://noimpactproject.org/experiment/

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

                                      Kenneth Boulding