Material World
“The Boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right,
Cause we are living in a material world,
And I am a material girl,
Cause we are living in a material world,
And I am a material girl...”
If the momentary dip into popular culture (brought to us by the Queen of Pop, Madonna) can be forgiven, it is necessary to point out that “we are living in a material world” and that, has serious social and ecological consequences. Since 2009 and even today in my architecture classes, we recognise a worrying trend that our dwellings are becoming larger and larger. Indeed Australia and United States now average massive homes of over 200 square metres, more than double the United Kingdom average of 76 square metres (BBC, 2009).
In social discourse, there has been argument that such increases, the desire for lager homes and more products at home is not as black and white as it would seem. Indeed, it has been noted that “the interactions between environment and economy and their unsustainability are a product of many complementary processes.” (Norgaard, 1997, p. 222). Our desire for better, larger homes is fuelling waste, through a society spending finite resources faster than they can be reproduced and through shortening cycles of built-in obsolescence.
Furthermore, these centralised economies and globalisation have additional impacts, favouring industrial enterprise, which operate on global scales and forgetting that ecosystem management sometimes occurs at the local scale (Norgaard, 1997, p. 222). In essence therefore, the “fossil-fuel-driven economy” has had a direct impact on how we have developed our economies and marginalised our protection of the environment.
A study conducted in 2007 for example found that “there is a pattern in which people with higher levels of materialistic values expressed less support for feminist and environmentalist attitudes than those with lower levels of materialistic values.” (McDermott, 2007, p.103). This therefore arguably shows that there is a fundamental need to alter our perceptions and desires for material products in order for society to become truly sustainable. While we do not necessarily wish to give up our many luxuries, we have to be prepared to change how we do things, our behaviours and our actions. It is of course also important to remember that materialism should not be our only devotion after all, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
References
Richard B. Norgaard. (1997). “The Coevolution of Economic and Environmental Systems and the Emergence of Unsustainability” in Evolutionary Concepts in Contemporary Economics. (edited by Richard W. England). USA: University of Michigan Press. Accessed online via: http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QDACUmOO8SsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA213&dq=materialism+and+unsustainability&ots=E7CPF_nZLp&sig=-ihn369nJtenW772yLBEZfQ_Cys#v=onepage&q=materialism%20and%20unsustainability&f=false
Christa McDermott. (2007). “Understanding the psychology of unsustainability: Linking materialism, authoritarianism, attitudes toward gender and the environment and behaviour”. (Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation, The University of Michigan). Accessed online via: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/57650/mcdc_1.pdf?sequence=2
BBC. (2009). “Room to swing a cat? Hardly”. Accessed on 25 April 2014 via:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8201900.stm