Many people believe that trying to understand the nature of our current ecological crisis can be overwhelming. Better to develop 'how to' guides which 'the public' can action immediately. As with all proposed 'simple solutions for complex problems', the consequences are invariably unsustainable.
Purchasing guides to Ecologically Lower Impacting Materials (ELIMs) are a case in point. For a long time, environmentalists believed that all that needed to be done was to produce easy-to-use information about the ecological impacts of products. With a blind faith in economic rationality, environmentalists believed that sensible consumers would stop buying the most damaging products and the earth would be saved.
Apart from the fact that objective information was difficult to come by, such 'green purchasing guides' stumbled over the bigger issue of what is or isn't sustainable. Without a clear understanding of sustainability (caused by leaping to solutions before understanding the problem), judgements about 'greenness' became relativistic and open to abuse and confusion.
It is now being realised that a more comprehensive notion of sustainability reveals the limits of 'green purchasing guides' in a number of ways. For example:
1) Lower per unit ecological impacts does not add up to sustainability, given the increase in resource and energy consumption involved in any increase in the number of units produced. Sustainability comes not from purchasing more ELIMs, but from purchasing less anything.
2) Far greater impact reduction can come from changes in the use a product than from the selection of one product over another similar but marginally more ecologically impacting product. For example, extending the use-life a more ecologically impacting product will usually contribute more to impact reduction than churning through a number lower ecologically impacting products. Like recycling, green purchasing, especially when touted as a simple solution, tends to vindicate unsustainably irresponsible use of products. Most significantly, 'green purchasing guides' fail to understand the designed relations that exist between products and their users.
Most products (especially larger ones, like new technologies, with greater on-going ecological impacts than everyday groceries) are rarely bought because of information about them (even in regard to price); they are bought because they are either appear to be necessary or desirable. It is these relations that need to be changed if more sustainable ways of living and working are to be developed.
In this context sustainments are environments that facilitate the purchase of less by designing relations between products and users that a) promote better care of existing purchased products, b) make the purchase of new products seem unnecessary and undesirable.
