some of which is planned. Laptops seem more solid than the electrical impulses that run through them, but they will be out-of-date in just a few years. Stylish new outfits will be unfashionable before the end of the year, banished to the back of the closet, the rack at the secondhand store, or the sodden mass of a garbage dump.15
The average American consumes more than one hundred pounds of materials a day, almost all of which is out of sight and out of mind. For instance, a fraction-of-an-ounce silicon chip resides in my computer, but the eighty-plus pounds of material involved in its production—silicon, water, chemicals, and coal or another energy source—occupy other spaces. The quarter-pounder Joe College ate for dinner is, as advertised, four ounces, but the burger’s inputs include about two pounds of corn and several gallons of water, not to mention topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and oil. A lot of the ingredients of our material world are immaterial to us, but not to the planet we inhabit.16
Many of the environmental impacts of our belongings come before they are even ours, during offshore production and global transportation. The products we buy are better traveled than we are, as one of my students noted. When closely considered, the movements of manufacturing—where raw materials from many countries are assembled in many other countries—are amazing. As another student suggested, the twenty-first-century assembly line is not confined to single factories: It spans both countries and continents, and we are the factory bosses, operating by remote control every time we swipe our credit cards.17
Remote control: 1) The device we use to control our TVs and other electronics; 2) The designs we use to control the world, socially and environmentally. Eating, for example, is a form of remote control.
At the store, a purchase is just a transaction: We trade money (or credit) for goods. But what happens at cash registers all over the world? When the clerk scans our purchase, it’s recorded in the store’s computer, which adjusts the inventory accordingly. Our simple payment drives the retailer to reorder, which drives the manufacturer to requisition more materials, which drives the farmer or miner or oil refiner to extract more from the land. As a result, the unnatural selection of the economy determines—as much as natural selection—which plants and animals will grow in which places on the planet. Human beings currently monopolize more than 40 percent of the Earth’s primary productivity, so our consumer “buyodiversity”—the desire to have more things available more of the time—affects the actual biodiversity of the natural world.18
Educated for Ignorance
When students first encounter this “problem of invisible complexity,” they’re shocked and amazed. They often note that they had no idea that they have such far-reaching environmental impacts. This ignorance is interesting. The United States boasts one of the best systems of higher education in the world, and yet its students and graduates still don’t know the basic facts about the artifacts of their daily life. To a great extent, American society socializes its kids by obscuring the true nature of their lives.19 In part, this is the logical outcome of a system of specialization and division of labor. Following the logic of Adam Smith, Americans have embraced the efficiency of a system in which different people are responsible for different productive functions. And this is good. We get brain surgeons and rocket scientists, accountants, artists, and college professors. It’s good, we think, when waste management companies collect our garbage weekly. But specialized responsibility can be a curious form of irresponsibility. In its most extreme forms, it can lead to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” in which individuals do a good job in a seemingly harmless line of work, but unwittingly contribute to systems of injustice. We can see now that American slave owners and Nazi concentration camp workers were complicit with systems of evil, but it’s always harder to see the immorality of our own time. Most of us are not evil, but we’re not always doing good, because our specialized cleverness keeps us from being mindful of the potentially harmful consequences of doing a good job of consumption. In our rooms, surrounded by familiar things, we feel at home, but we forget that we’ve also impacted the homes of people, plants, and animals around the globe, for better and worse.20
American consumer ignorance is also the result of an economic system of comparative advantage. Historically, as different cities and regions of the country specialized in the products and processes that offered advantages in the marketplace, the social and environmental impacts of those methods of manufacture moved out of sight and out of mind. Home production of food, clothes, and furnishings was supplanted by factory production, and local tailors, cobblers, and furniture makers were replaced by factory workers someplace else. As a result, people lost the local knowledge of the consequences of their consumption, as well as the local cultures of care for neighbors and neighborhoods that regulated production, consumption, and disposal of wastes. More stuff came to consumers, and it was cheaper, but its real impacts and true costs increasingly moved away.21
“Murketing”
Though specialization and comparative advantage play a huge role in our consumer cluelessness, our ignorance about the real story of our belongings comes mainly from the systems of misinformation we call commercial culture. Advertisers and marketers offer information about products, but they systematically screen consumers from information about their social and environmental impacts. They seduce us with stories about sexiness and sociability, cool and control, power and possibility, but they don’t tell stories that don’t sell—stories of extraction, production, and distribution. We see the dorm refrigerator, but not mountaintop removal mining; the laptop computer, but not the mountains of electronic waste in China. Instead of telling the whole truth, marketers often sell the half-truth (and half is a generous estimate), decontextualizing products from their real histories and recontextualizing them in fantasy worlds where costs are invisible and benefits are immediate. Thanks to such “murketing,” we routinely make our consumer choices in ignorance of their actual effects and our own responsibility.22
Murketing: 1) Promoting consumption by converting human hopes into commercial fantasies, half-truths, and lies; 2) The process of making complexity and complicity invisible.
It seems perfectly natural that companies promote the positive attributes of their products and conceal the negative implications, but if we don’t know the whole truth about the goods, we can’t make good decisions. It’s hard to do real cost-benefit analysis when the benefits are touted in ads, and the costs are hidden from sight. In theory, the free market operates on the premise that rational people make informed decisions about consumption, so you would think that business executives, who are typically the most vocal proponents of free-market economies, would tell us everything we need to know. But in reality, advertisers operate on the belief, obviously true, that emotional promises can influence good people to make uninformed decisions about their actual consumption. In such a system of irresponsible consumption, it’s virtually impossible for individuals to be responsible consumers, or to live sustainably. Until we change the system so that we routinely learn how our commodities and clothes are made, we’ ll be covering up our environmental and social shame with fig leafs and other fashions.23
The Really Good Life
When we furnish our rooms or fill our closets, we say “I want that,” but we also tell manufacturers
