Here's the description of her talk, and something about her:
The public debate about ecological sustainability has mainly been focused on technological change, such as alternative energy or green design, and shifting out of damaging products, rather than the scale of consumption. In this talk, Professor Schor will argue that sustainability in the US cannot be achieved without slowing down the rapid increase in the scale of consumption. She will present new estimates of consumption volume, a parsimonious indicator of ecological impact, over the period 1998-2006, and relate them to what she calls the "social death of things." This refers to a change in process that confers social value on products. Schor will further discuss how consumers have changed their habits of acquiring and discarding items, and how the retailing environment has been transformed in ways that are ecologically damaging, and relate this to contemporary understandings of the sociology of consumption.
Juliet Schor is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Boston College. Schor's latest book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, September 2004), which has been translated into six additional languages. Schor is author of the national best-seller, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1992), The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need, and Do Americans' Shop Too Much? published by Beacon Press in 2000. She is currently working on issues of environmental sustainability and their relation to Americans' lifestyles. She is a co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream (newdream.org), a national sustainability organization headquartered in Maryland.
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So, what else did she say about the social death of things? I am figuring that as things get further commodified they suffer social death and lose their personalities (I believe things have personalities, because I am an animist and a preschooler, you see). But what did she really say?
She laid out, in rather frightening detail, the relationship between global warming and our "ecological footprint" (what we already know to be the case, but with data), and then proceeded to share the data from her study about the way that the U.S. in particular has radically increased in its consumption (buying and throwing out) of just about everything over the last three decades. On a macro level, we are collectively buying and disposing (either directly to waste streams or by exporting) almost twice as much stuff. The costs to us and the environment in production, transportation and impact of waste are not being passed on to consumers so that goods are cheaper than their real cost, and cycles of disposal have sped up.
We already know this intuitively, but she laid out the data because that's the kind of sociological economic work she does. It will be in her next book.
The social death of things refers to the idea that almost all our consumption (on an aggregate level, obviously, with differences between income, personal habits, etc) is now based on fashion rather than a life-span of utility.
She had ideas about what would be needed to change this, but you can find them at her organization's web site!
AHA, fashion rather than utility, I get it. Thanks for the general run-down on this!!!
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