Personal Lifestyle

Count your food miles, buy organic, live without plastics, buy local products, support small businesses – we’re told this is how individual consumers can choose to help the environment.

Really? Don’t get us wrong. We’re all in favour of people taking personal responsibility - the voluntary society we want will depend on that very thing.

But these incitements to personal sacrifice are a gigantic act of misdirection. The powers-that-be love talking about your personal responsibility for the state of the planet, because it's better than owning up to their collective responsibility for ruining it.

They are responsible for a profligate and wasteful system that creates obscene wealth and luxury for the 1% while many of us end up struggling just to get by. And they have the effrontery to tell us to cut back on our personal consumption!

So be responsible, by all means. But just remember, capitalism never will.

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Why is it that most of what we ever buy – food, clothes, electricals, etc - is mass produced?

It’s because of economies of scale, which reduce production costs, so mass-produced stuff comes to dominate the market because it’s always cheaper.

So why does this stuff have to come so far for us to buy it?

The companies that make the stuff are always trying to undercut each other to grab more market share. This has tended to push production out to wherever in the world wages are cheapest, resulting in long, complex supply chains and wasteful global transportation.

These two factors have wiped out most local production over the decades, so we have little choice when we shop.

But there’s another factor that restricts our ability to choose.

The ‘cost of living’ is the major determinant of wage levels. And it’s the prices of the global, mass-produced stuff that determine (and tend to push down) the cost of living.

So while some may be able to shop ‘ethically’, it's a luxury many of us simply can't afford.