For decades, the environmental vision articulated by David Attenborough was seemingly an apolitical one. The wildlife shown in his documentaries inhabited distant landscapes, which were governed by laws all their own. It was Attenborough’s job to make sense of these worlds for viewers at home—to impose narrative logic over the wondrous chaos of nature.
Entire species are dying out while the atmosphere fills with carbon dioxide and the oceans brim with plastic waste. There is an obvious temptation to place the blame with mankind as a whole. Attenborough himself has occasionally indulged in this kind of misanthropy. Humans, he recently told the BBC, have simply “overrun the planet.” Phrases like this imply that population control measures are the simple answer to the problem of ecological destruction.
The toll of affluent lifestyles
However, the beloved naturalist struck a different tone in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live earlier this month, when he identified the “excesses the capitalist system has brought us” as the root of environmental ills. Rather than apportioning blame to humans everywhere, Attenborough singled out the resource-intensive lifestyles enjoyed by the world’s wealthiest consumers. His comments echo a number of recent studies that have quantified the disproportionate impact of consumers in the Global North.According to a report from Oxfam published last month, the richest one per cent of the world was responsible for more than double the carbon pollution emitted than that emitted by the poorest half between 1990 and 2015. During this 25-year window, humanity doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a report published this summer in Nature Communications, an international group of scientists identified consumption by the globally affluent as “by far the strongest determinant and the strongest accelerator” of global environmental impacts.
The study argues that consumption must be avoided or reduced until it falls within planetary boundaries—while simultaneously fulfilling human needs. Reducing demand for resources while supporting a growing global population sounds like a daunting task. But scientists and economists are already creating models that show us what such a world could look like.
Change in consumption patterns
Inevitably, there will be some changes to the lives of the world’s richest people —a group that includes a significant portion of the UK, where the median household disposable income is £29,600. The Oxfam report states that anyone with a net income over $38,000 (roughly £30,000) is among the richest 10 per cent of people in the world.Raising the majority of the global population to their present standard of living would almost certainly precipitate an environmental catastrophe. Fortunately, recent research led by the University of Leeds indicates that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to 1960s levels, despite the population being three times larger.
The goal, the paper’s author’s write, is to reduce consumption to levels of “sufficiency.” In practice, this means merging ultra-modern technologies with changes in demand to bring consumption of energy and resources to the lowest level possible. The researchers first called upon existing studies of human wellbeing to help them compile an inventory of resources essential for humans to live good lives. Next, they estimated the ecological effects of providing them to a population of 10 billion people.
For instance, they looked at the energy impacts of growing and transporting sufficient quantities of food for every living person. Previous studies of energy and human wellbeing have taken what’s known as a “top-down” approach: using existing consumption data as the baseline for measuring human flourishing. However, the Leeds study notes that high levels of consumption are not necessarily indicative of a healthy and happy society.
Many consumers might (understandably) balk at the idea of imposed lifestyle restrictions. However, study lead author Dr Joel Millward-Hopkins is quick to note that living standards would remain universally decent—if not opulent—under this proposed scenario.
“People assume that environmentalists are calling for massive reductions in consumption and really pitiful lives,” he tells me. “We can say that our concept of decent living actually gives everybody a pretty comfortable existence. For example, you have a reasonably-sized, energy-efficient house that is probably more comfortable in terms of temperature over the course of the year than the vast majority of existing houses in the UK.”
A society of needs, not wants
Millward-Hopkins and his co-authors envision a society in which basic needs—such as shelter, transport, food and clean water—are provided, and access to healthcare, education and vital information technology is available to all. In return, citizens must give up their addictions to things like animal products and fast fashion, and companies must end the practice of planned obsolescence, which drives people to purchase the “next-best” technology, over and over again.Last year’s special report on climate change and land, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, included a policy recommendation to reduce meat consumption. Production of meat today is nearly five times higher than it was in the early 1960s—a trend driven at least in part by rising incomes. And producing beef, for example, uses 20 times the land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases than growing beans per gram of protein. Meanwhile, the emissions from all the new clothes bought in the UK each month are greater than those from flying a plane around the world 900 times.
“I'm not assuming that everyone is going back to the land and growing all their food and sewing all their own clothes and making their houses out of mud,” Millward-Hopkins says. “This is actually a very technologically-advanced world. It's just that it doesn’t have a consumer culture.”
A new way to live
It follows that a society in which people consume less is also a world in which companies produce less. In turn, citizens will spend less time at work designing and manufacturing material goods. The long-predicted onset of automation could, however, make a certain number of roles redundant. If this is the case, societies must be equipped to support large numbers of underemployed or unemployed people. Suddenly, guarantees of universal decent living look like practical policies, not utopian fantasies.Of course, the realisation of these ambitions is dependent on the rapid rollout of technologies that enable a low-carbon life. This is no small task. Homes would have to be retrofitted with the latest energy-efficiency solutions, and storage infrastructure would have to be constructed at rapid speed. And citizens in the Global North would have to be willing to vote for political parties that want to radically reconfigure their ways of life.
If humans continue on their current trajectory, destructive levels of inequality and global heating look likely to prevail. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While current notions of universal decent living are more idealised projections than policy blueprints, they show that it’s possible to live comfortably within ecological limits.
“I believe the nations of the world, ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy," Attenborough told BBC Radio 5. Opinion polls indicate that the UK public favours action to tackle both income inequality and the climate crisis. It’s time to imagine a future that can do both.
