Embracing sufficiency

It is a narrative offering a sweeping study of global human consumption. It considers Embracing sufficiency consumption from a historical perspective, tracing the usage of Earth’s resources from early humans through today. The author summarises key global occurrences of the millennia in largely readable prose as his engineering background contributes to technical but not uninteresting descriptions of such innovations as the internal combustion engine and manned flight while his overview of advertising, “a major force in many capitalist economies,” demonstrates a keen understanding of marketing techniques and media, in particular the emergence of television and the internet. The second half of the meticulously researched book concentrates more directly on consumption, broadly defined by the author to encompass the use of all of the planet’s resources, including fossil fuels, water, and food. Consumption levels of the world’s wealthiest countries…are draining the remaining stockpiles of critical nonrenewable natural resources at untenable rates; the disparities of this consumption are glaring. Twenty per cent of the population from the highest income countries consumes 86% of all private consumption. Globally, garbage waste is accumulating at 2.12 billion tons per year, 555 pounds of garbage each year per each global citizen. Also pertinent are the five profiles (Brazil, India, China, Russia, the United States) provided as examples of energy and environmental usage by individual countries. The author’s lucid discussion of a “Nature-Conscious Consumer” reflects a sensible depiction of human accountability. With a rather remarkable eye for detail, the author takes a broad view of human consumption, neatly dividing the topic into understandable segments while relating them to the whole. The author employs the occasional meaningful example for illustration and supports the text with a liberal use of carefully chosen statistics. TW

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