On Thursday, Paul Ekins delivered an important public lecture at Manchester Business School, there were a few folk there, but I was surprised that it wasn’t more busy. Maybe there’s just so much going on?!
The lecture was titled: ‘A Nine Billion Strong Consumer Society: Navigating the waters between the consumerist rock and the hard place of sustainability.’ Actually, I’m fibbing – that’s only half of the title, the rest included Titanic and Icebergs, so I was expecting a lecture with a lot of words and a barrow full of metaphors.
I’m not bothered by the metaphors – it’s fair to use the full gamet of the english language to get this message across. That message being – we CAN NOT carry on conspicuously consuming as we are, within our environment’s finite resourses.
A slide titled ‘Safe operating space for humanity’ published in Nature last year shows that the options for our future range from ‘unpleasant to catastrophic’.
If you are interested in any of these concepts, essential and surprisingly accessible and perspective shifting reading is Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth.
There was a good piece about this in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, titled Beyond green growth: why we need a world without economic growth
Paul Ekins is Professor of Energy & Environmental Policy at UCL Energy Institute. Prof. Ekins was speaking as part of the Ken Green Memorial Symposium on Innovation and Sustainable Consumption.
