The author of this image on Flickr makes a noteworthy response, very much reflecting reality, to a commenter that says, “So buy less means people loose jobs. Then the economy will fall and people will go on welfare and maybe they will start stealing for ways to make money for food. so yes lets buy less.”

The problem is that argument is premised on a number of false assumptions which are too numerous and complicated to get into here, unfortunately. The most significant of these assumptions is that it’s The Economy that makes the world go ’round, when in fact, it isn’t.

It’s that assumption that this Cree prophesy addresses:
“Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

The Economy is based on the exchange of goods and services. For goods and services to be produced, materials that come from “The Environment” have to be used, and waste material has to be expelled. Your argument assumes that there is an infinite quantity of material in the Environment with which to produce goods and services, and that there is no limit to The Environment’s capacity to absorb the waste produced through the production and consumption of goods and services. However most resources (water, oil, metals, land, to name a few) are not renewable, and pollution is resulting in a reduction in the earth’s capacity to renew those resources that are renewable. If we keep using up finite resources and degrading the environment through the production and consumption of goods and services, we will not be able to continue producing and consuming the products that make The Economy go ’round. My point here is that your argument fails to consider that environmental degradation is an even more serious threat to The Economy than a decrease in consumer spending.

However, focusing on The Economy is missing the point, as the Cree prophesy suggests. Our lives depend on clean air, water, food produced in clean soil, and land upon which to live–people cannot breathe money, they can’t drink money, they can’t eat money, and they can’t live in money. In the scenario that you present, jobs are lost and people are stealing to make money to buy food. But if we destroy our sources of drinking water, use up all of the non-renewable resources, and build subdivisions on top of all of our farmland, then there will be no point in stealing money, because there will be no food to buy.

If we continue to degrade the environment, we will have no water to drink, no food to eat, and nowhere to live, regardless of our employment status.

Of course buying less stuff is not going to magically solve everything either. It is only one small part of a much bigger project of changing the way we do things on planet earth. One of the things that many people (myself included) think has to change is The Economy itself. Unlike The Environment, The Economy is a system that we created, and so it is a system that we can change. But that is a story for another day.

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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.