ABSTRACT
Arguably, the human impact on the environment may boil down to one thing: consumption. As “the physical throughput of materials and goods in human lives,” consumption is the primary interface between humanity and the natural world (Hartman 2011a: 9). We eat the non-human world; we wear it, we burn it for fuel, we use it as tools and devices; when we are finished, we dump it or burn it or compost it. If we care about the ecological systems in which we live, we should seek to minimize the ill effects of our consumption, but this is easier said than done. In a global, industrialized economy, we typically do not know the effects of our choices, and sometimes we are constrained by a system not of our own making, such that we do not have a real choice in the matter of our consumption’s environmental impact.
