5-09-05, 4:50 pm
Is our addiction to super-sized consumption worth eating an Australian – or even a Canadian?
Well, maybe.
Listen:
Outside of Bangor, Maine – on a long road trip to Boston – I pulled into a coffee shop and ordered a large cup of my favourite addiction. I was expecting a generous cup – a sizable snort of get-up-and-go. But what arrived was not just a big cup of French Roast, nor even a giant mug of black java. No, what arrived was a bucket of coffee. I was incredulous.
Later, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I stopped at a family restaurant for dinner. And as with the coffee, what the waiter placed in front of me was an exaggerated indulgence: a plate piled impossibly high with food. Again, I was incredulous. But looking around, I was amazed to see that all the plates were similarly piled high. And stranger still, the food was being eaten – all of it, every bite.
Later still, as I neared my destination in Boston, I looked around with greater care. Not only were the cups of coffee oversized, and the plates of food oversized, but so were the cars, the trucks, even the houses.
And while staying at my friend’s place, I read in Time magazine that designers were actually incorporating the growing girth of Americans into their work: the clothes were now oversized, door frames oversized, even furniture oversized – right down to the seats in the movie theatres. I felt I was suddenly a traveller in Gulliver’s land of the giants.
When I gently broached the subject of wide-eyed-consumption-without-limits with my friend, suggesting that perhaps moderation might be in order, she suggested that moderation was un-American, an attack on freedom of choice.
I couldn’t help thinking back to the words of that great modern-day defender of freedom, George W. Bush. When searching for the right words of comfort after September 11, he urged his fellow Americans to buy more.
Maybe my friend was right: moderation was un-American.
Back in Canada, high taxes – if nothing else – kept jumbo-consumption at bay. Or so I thought. When I returned home, I started looked around with greater care. To my horror, I watched people at the fancy new movie theatres sitting in new over-sized chairs with new buckets of Pepsi washing down new grocery bags of popcorn. And I surveyed the new jumbo-sized houses being built on the outside of town and realized that the age of the super-sized had arrived in Canada.
Long ago, I once started writing a science fiction story about a race of super-sized people. Rippling with fat, their mouths made wider by natural selection, these super-sized simian sorts aggressively consumed the Earth – until all the food was gone. Only the super-sized people were left orbiting the sun with nothing left to eat – except each other.
Of course, I abandoned the story as being too silly, too far fetched. But after my trip to the land of the super-sized, I got to thinking: maybe my story wasn’t so silly, as much it was deadly serious.
Look: we are eating the planet, the whole damn thing, right down to the last blade of grass.
Our ecological footprint is one way to understand the degree of this consumption. If we measure the world’s productive land – and graciously grant that a modest 12 percent is necessary for the biodiversity of other species – what remains is the productive land available for sustaining humanity.
When the math is done, and the productive land is parcelled out – relative to our present population – every man, woman, and child is entitled to 1.8 hectares of productive land to sustain the Earth and its humans. And if the human population peaks at 10 billion – as is expected in the next 30 years – then the land per person shrinks to one hectare.
Our problem, of course, is that we consume far more than that. The ecological footprint of the average American is 10.3 hectares (first place, globally), of the average Australian, 9.0 (second place, globally), and of the average Canadian (globally in third place), 7.7. Comparatively, India’s footprint per person is 0.8; China’s, 1.2; and Bangladesh’s, 0.5.
The world ecological footprint average is 2.8 hectares per person. That is, we presently need an additional world as a resource to happily continue on our rapacious ways.
Maybe that’s why George Bush wanted to settle Mars.
Now before I prattle on about driving efficient cars or no cars at all (for most cities, cars are the single greatest source of pollution), about eating less meat or no meat at all (a meat-based diet requires seven times more land than a plant-based diet), or about using less fossil fuels or no fossil fuels at all (wind and solar are here and ready for use), we first need to acknowledge our problem:
We eat too much. We buy too much. We want too much.
We are the super-sized people in my science fiction story, busily eating our way through the Earth, busily expanding our jiggling girth and growing our wider mouths. And we do see moderation as an attack on our freedom.
And frankly, we just don’t care.
In the climax of my story, the corpulent Canucks are left sharing the empty cosmos with the portly Aussies and the super-sized Yanks, all preparing to consume each other in the great Battle of the Wide-Bodies.
Given the gruesome prospect of having to eat a Canadian, an Australian, or an American, I hope my story remains fiction.
But somehow, I doubt it.
--Steven Laffoley is an American writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. You may e-mail him at
