What’s with all this stuff and where did it come from? The United States is the richest and most wealthy nation in the world and there is no doubt about it. We as a nation are accustomed to and experience the vast amount of material wealth in goods and services that this nation brings us.

Many Americans today define themselves by their shopping and consuming habits. People concern themselves with the amount of things that they can buy and the cost of buying them. Social acceptance comes by having more or as much as someone else. At the risk of using a cliche, everyone is “keeping up with the Jones’.” While most people would agree that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, it still happens.

Now, to some degree, having material goods is in some ways liberating. I like to sit back and watch a DVD or play Playstation while having a nice meal or a cocktail as much as anybody. Having leisure time is a good and welcomed thing, and everybody knows that it beats working. Yet at the same time, one should be conscious of what one consumes while enjoying his or her leisurely activities. In the instance of my previous example, not only am I using consumer products that were manufactured and then shipped to me, but also the food and drink and everything that went in to produce them, and the electricity to run the TV and the Playstation, which was made in a power plant that itself used a great many raw materials to be produced, and the connections go on and on.

So even in its smallest form, consumption takes place constantly and in America it is done on the most grandiose of scales.

The question still remains as to what the problem is with consumption. Other than its obvious unequal distribution in favor of America, what’s the big deal after all if we don’t use it. It’s going to go to waste, right?

Wrong.

Given the current consumptive practices of United States citizens, the environment that we rely upon to give us these items cannot be sustained. Believe it or not, everything we see around us has come from the Earth. Aliens or Bigfoot or Jesus didn’t magically make it appear and put it into existence, it all came from beneath our feet. The plastics and metals and woods and everything that makes up all of the products around us were at one point, in some form, in the Earth. In order to make more of the goods we enjoy today, they either must come from something we already produced and are re-using, or it must come from the Earth. It is as simple as that, and it also is a simple fact that we are a society that uses and discards rather than reusing.

With the dependence upon our environment to provide us with not only our food and water, but also the consumer goods we have come to expect and enjoy, it is not hard to imagine that our current rate of exploitation of the environment and the focus on consumption in American capitalism cannot continue. A recent study by geophysicist Jean Laherrere estimates that the combined resources of undiscovered and currently-known oil reserves will peak in production around 2025 and the oil we have will be all but gone shortly after 2050 at current consumption rates. As petroleum products are the primary fuel and base for many of the goods we enjoy, we are facing a crisis in the future.

In order to ensure our survival with some kind of quality of life, our current focus on consumption needs to change. It is certainly realistic and possible that we still can enjoy many of the same material luxuries that we have today, given we change the focus toward a more sustainable production process and reuse of materials rather than the current use-and-discard trend.

The problem becomes one of time and if we will want to wake up to the reality of the situation before it is too late. While many can dismiss this plea for rationality as some kind of fanatic cry for everyone to give up their possessions and return to the wilderness, sorry to disappoint you, but that is not a feasible answer either.

Understanding that unbridled consumption is not healthy and is not the definition of one’s success is key to changing our way of life to a sustainable one & one that brings greater prosperity and happiness.