Resisting consumerism
One of the key means by which corporate capitalism meets the profit and growth needs of global businesses is through consumerism. The process is simple: use media and advertising to stoke insecurity and discontent, while presenting marketed products as the "solution." This endless treadmill undermines individual wellness while engulfing the living planet in a conflagration of destruction. The good news is that reducing consumerism not only relieves pressure on the planet, it helps build community and connection, thereby improving personal well-being.
Tool libraries offer access to a wide variety of specialty tools, recreation and outdoor equipment, kitchen gadgets, and more – without contributing to an individualist, wasteful and energy-intensive throwaway consumer economy. Tool libraries are also known as lending libraries or libraries of things.
Take action
- Find a nearby tool library with Local Tools' worldwide map Find Your Local Tool Lending Library.
- Check your local public library: many host small libraries of things in addition to books.
- Start a new tool library with Share Starter's kit Start a Tool Library or Library of Things, with tools and templates for nonprofits, social ventures, and public libraries.
- If you have tools you rarely or no longer use, donate them to a local tool library.
Get inspired
- The Thingery movement in Vancouver, Canada is a growing set of community-owned libraries of things housed in modified, self-service shipping containers.
- Students at Edventure Frome in the UK started SHARE:Frome, which rents more than 1000 items at a low cost.
- The Brisbane Tool Library in Australia lends tools and actively advocates for reducing consumerism in Brisbane and beyond.
- The article The library of things: could borrowing everything from drills to disco balls cut waste and save money? profiles a number of successful, inspiring tool lending libraries across the world.
Sharing items with neighbors and friends builds relationships and interdependence, and reduces the environmental impact of buying objects that are rarely used. Recreation and outdoor equipment, tools and kitchen implements are all great candidates for informal sharing networks.
Take action
- Learn ways to start either an online or offline network with How to Start a Neighborhood Tool Share, an article by Earth Easy.
- Join the simple, free online platforms Neighborhood Share Network (US) or Streetbank (UK), by providing a list of items you are willing to lend and people you are willing to lend to.
- Expand your local sharing economy further with Shareable's links to more than 300 guides to help you share resources in your community, spanning food, housing, transportation, tools and beyond.
Get inspired
- Sharing items is a key aspect of Dama, the traditional gift culture in Mali that forms the backbone of community. Learn more about this philosophy in the Gift Economy page of this Action Guide.
- The Small Farm Guild in northern Vermont, US, shares farm equipment – cider press, chicken processing equipment, food dehydrator, rototiller, and much more – among local farmers, homesteaders and gardeners.
Gift economies free us to give without an expectation of direct payment, and to receive without feeling indebted. They can help us shift our personal economies from a series of faceless transactions to a web of nurturing relationships. In most societies today, gift economies cannot form the entirety or even majority of our economic transactions. Nonetheless, they can be a vital part of our transition from global to local economies.
Take action
- Organize a Really Really Free Market – a space for people to get and give away goods completely free of obligations to pay, trade or barter – with Shareable's guide How to start a really really free market.
- Refuse payment – even in barter – for small goods or services you provide to others in your community. At the same time, explain the gift economy concept. See how long it takes to notice that others are doing the same.
- Join or start a Buy Nothing Group with the Buy Nothing Project, which facilitates hyper-local gift economies where people offer and request items with no transactions involved. There are more than 5,000 active local groups in 44 countries; if your area doesn't have one yet, the website offers everything you need to get started.
- Explore the economic, social, psychological, relational, spiritual and cosmological elements of gift economies with Charles Eisenstein's in-depth, self-guided course Living in the Gift.
Get inspired
- An Teach Saor in County Galway, Ireland is a thriving house, permaculture garden, and community space that operates without money. The article Happiness Without Money? This Irish Community Proves It's Possible shares their story.
- Reclaiming the Gift Culture, an anthology of 26 essays by Shikshantar: The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development in India, describes gift economies in Mexico, Mali, India, and elsewhere.
- GIFT, a documentary film by Robin McKenna, is "a tribute to something that can’t be measured or counted, bought or sold. An intimate exploration of real-life gift economies," covering both giving freely with no expectation, and giving to generate the wealth of social capital.
- The Singapore Really Really Free Market is one example of dozens around the world. The article The Really (Really) Free Market Operates Under a Simple, Radical Philosophy explores how these markets help us to see "how societies could function more equitably, compassionately, and sustainably."
The cumulative environmental costs of industrial consumer products – from mine to landfill – are astronomical. One of the best ways to reduce our impact is to step away from the destructive pressures of consumerism by consciously choosing to live with less.
Take Action
- Learn how to "live more on less" with this action plan from The Simplicity Institute, which has many more materials on simple living and resistance to consumerism.
- Find non-consumerist ways to celebrate holidays – from Christmas to Passover to birthdays – on NewDream.org.
- Learn about the benefits of downshifting – breaking the work-and-spend cycle – from LowImpact.org.
- To fight consumerism and help build a “hyper-local gift economy”, find or start a local group of the Buy Nothing Project. Also check out the book by the project’s founders, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.
Get inspired
- Read about 7 Invisible Benefits of Living Simply in this essay by Courtney Carver.
- For the sheer fun of it, check out these videos from Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. There's a serious side as well, including direct action against major corporations and banks that profit from unbridled consumerism.
Creating a space for your community to come together and repair objects is not only a great way to keep waste out of the landfill and reduce consumerism, it can also create intergenerational bonding. At Repair Café events, people with specialized skills and knowledge come together to fix almost anything that's broken, from moth-eaten sweaters to smartphones. Originally started in Amsterdam, the concept has now spread around the world.
Take action
- Find a repair café near you with Repair Café's links to Community groups in the US, Europe, and Australia. There are many other grassroots communities around the world, too.
- Start your own local group with Repair Cafe's Repair Café Manual and templates, offered for a modest fee.
Get inspired
- Club de Reparadores in Argentina has helped organize more than 30 repair events in Buenos Aires, Río Negro and Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
- The Bower Reuse and Repair Center in Australia has been in operation since 1998. Their mission is not only to reduce the amount of waste entering landfills by reclaiming household items for repair, reuse and resale, but also to provide affordable goods to low-income earners and to generate local employment.
- The Restart Project in the UK focuses on electric devices. They run regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to fix their broken and slow devices – "from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones."
Swapping the goods we already have is an excellent way of side-stepping consumerism and the compulsion to buy new products. Swapping enables us to let go of things we no longer need or want while enabling others to acquire them free of transactional obligations of money, trade or even barter. Get swapping with the resources below.
Take action
- Set up an event with Shareable's guide How to throw a community swap meet and How to set up a swap or free store.
- Connect with a local group in the Freecycle Network, a global movement comprising more than 5,000 groups in 130+ countries who are "giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns and neighborhoods" to promote reuse and prevent waste.
Get inspired
- Every neighborhood in and around Austin, Texas, in the US, has a Buy Nothing Group. The article Buy Nothing Groups are Changing Austin One Neighborhood at a Time shares some of their stories.
- The Fitzroy Urban Harvest in Melbourne, Australia is a monthly event where residents both barter and give away homegrown and homemade food.
Planned obsolescence is the insidious practice of deliberately designing products to break, wear out, or stop functioning, compelling people to continually purchase replacements. Goods can also be made obsolete through technological "innovation" (such as when your computer operating system is no longer supported) or fashion (when those clothes you bought last year are suddenly "uncool"). Planned obsolescence is not only exacerbating the ecological crisis, it is also an environmental justice issue, since discarded products (full of toxic components in the case of electronics) too often end up being dumped in poor communities.
Take action
- Corporations make it difficult – or even illegal – for people to repair products they have purchased. Join the Right to Repair movement (US), which seeks to make it easier for people to legally repair their own goods.
- The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.
- Download a public policy guide to ending premature obsolescence in the European Union, written by the French organization Stop Planned Obsolescence (Halte à l'Obsolescence Programmée, or HOP). HOP's perspective is refreshingly broad: they critique what they call the "over-consumer society" founded on artificial desires stimulated by unscrupulous advertising and other commercial strategies. Sign their manifesto against planned obsolescence.
Get inspired
- Thanks to a law passed in 2015, planned obsolescence – defined as deliberately reducing the life cycle of a product in order to increase its replacement rate – is illegal in France. It is punishable by a two-year prison sentence and a €300,000 fine.
Thanks to corporate power and government indifference, it is often difficult and sometimes illegal for people to repair their own equipment and devices, which compels an ever-accelerating treadmill of consumption and waste. We need laws and policies that mandate repairability and enshrine the right to repair.
Take action
- Support Right to Repair efforts by US PIRG (US) and the European Right to Repair Campaign (EU), which seek to remedy the outrageous criminalization of repair by empowering people to legally repair goods they have purchased.
- The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.
Get inspired
- In 2020, France passed a law that will institute both a repairability and durability index for products, ban products that are impossible to repair, and encourage more durable and repairable products through procurement and taxation tools. Read more in the article Major steps for durability and Right to Repair taken in France from the European Right to Repair Campaign.
- An anti-monopoly executive order by the Biden administration in the US bans companies from "establishing repair monopolies and from having policies that prevent DIY or independent repair," covering everything from consumer electronics to tractors. Read more in the article Biden’s Right to Repair Order Covers Electronics, Not Just Tractors from Vice.
Advertising - a global industry that spends nearly $600 billion each year - is one of the biggest drivers of consumerism, stoking artificial demand and warping preferences and perceptions towards discontentment and acquisitiveness with startling efficacy. Consumerism is wreaking environmental, social and psychological havoc, and we cannot confront it without taking on advertising. There are ways to fight back against this insidious industry, involving policy-based bans and restrictions, especially against advertising targeting children.
Take action
- Get involved with the campaign to stop some of the worst advertisements – those directly fueling ecological destruction and ill health – with this toolkit and these action ideas from the Badvertising campaign (UK).
- Protect your child from being captured by the consumer culture with help from groups working to end advertising and marketing to children: Food Marketing Workgroup, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, and Leave Our Kids Alone.
- Fight back against the advertising world with these ideas for action from Subvertisers International.
Get inspired
- Both Norway and Sweden have passed laws to prohibit advertising that targets children.
- The article The Growing Movement to End Outdoor Advertising, from Equal Times, shares about the city of Grenoble, France's recent ban on outdoor advertising, profiles networks of local chapters resisting advertising in France and the UK, and discusses the climate, environmental justice, and psychological impacts of landscapes plagued by advertisements.
These short videos illuminate the community-building power of reducing consumption:
- Repair Cafés: Building Resilience is an excellent overview of the international repair café movement.
- SHARE: A Library of Things offers a peek into a successful tool library in Frome, UK.
- The Streetbank Story shows how sharing possessions can increase the connection among neighbors.
These videos explore the impact of consumer culture on our societies: - A number of documentaries by the Media Education Foundation powerfully expose the harms of the advertising industry and consumer culture, including Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse, Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, Shop Til You Drop, Feeding Frenzy, and The Illusionists. Each film is available to watch for free through some universities and public libraries, and has a freely available transcript and companion discussion guide for deepening the learning and impact.
- In the video What is Right to Repair?, US PIRG's Nathan Proctor explains how "giving every consumer and small business access to the parts, tools and service information they need to repair products from cell phones to tractors...can keep products in use longer and reduce unnecessary waste."
- The Sharing Economy: It Takes More than a Smartphone, written by Local Futures’ managing director Steve Gorelick, shows how community relationships are the foundation of true sharing economies.
- Our Obsolescent Economy, also written by Steve Gorelick, addresses planned obsolescence and resisting a throwaway culture.
- The Story of Stuff Project unpacks our relationship with objects and consumer culture through a series of animated videos.
- The advertising industry is fuelling climate disaster, and it's getting away with it, by Andrew Simms, argues that excessive consumption is an inevitable outcome of the advertising industry's grip on our world, and calls for a pushback against unregulated advertising as part of addressing the climate crisis.
- The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer explores how we can "learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange."