The Ethical Choice of Sustainable Living with Helpful Plants, the Sun, and Buying Less

The environmental problems today are of human origin. Global warming, famine, pollution, disregard for animals, and the degradation of wilderness are all a result of over consumption and taking more from the Earth than it can provide. Changing our lives to becoming more sustainable is the most important choice that people have to make. It will require both collective and individual actions to keep life on the planet livable for generations to come. Cutting this addiction to consumerism will be difficult, but shifting to healthier, more environmentally friendly lifestyles will benefit everyone and will be worth it. In this paper, I argue that a sustainable society is an ethical choice that the world needs to make.

An article written by Al Gore, creator of the move “An Inconvenient Truth”, says that the way we run our economy and lives on consumption is unhealthy and like being addicted to a drug. Over consumption leaves us feeling empty and always wanting to buy more. We do not see any problem with this and many people do not want to quit, but Gore says this is exactly what addicts say. A heroin addict will always wants more heroin to feel better for a while, but that person continually needs an increasing amount of heroin to feed a stronger addiction. That is exactly what some American citizens do with recreational shopping. They will buy some shoes, talk about how cute and great they are until the next day when they get tired of them and want to buy more shoes. A sustainable society would buy one pair of shoes because they are needed tools to get places, but then not buy anymore because they do not need anymore. Need is the main ingredient of a sustainable world, need not greed.

Al Gore also made the analogy on how America works like a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional family works by always assuming everything is ok without questioning anyone in the family’s actions and eventually begins to think what they are doing is actually good and moral. For example, let’s say that the mother in a family is addicted to shopping. She spends large amounts of money on the hottest shoes, appliances, electronics, and she continually buys things that the family does not need. The amount of time, energy, money, and resources wasted here only gives her a short fix of happiness before she has to go buy more things. The wrong action for her family to take is to not do anything because it is bad for the family and the environment. An even worse action to take is to say what she does is ok because then the children will continue her addiction when they grow older. The moral action would be to confront her on her addiction and put an end to it. People really only need food, water, shelter, heat, and medicine to live. It requires experiences to make a person happy, not an awesome collection of shoes. Experiences that help your family, community, environment, or anything memorable that involves having fun defines a life well-lived, not the amount of things stored in your attic. Consumptive societies are unhappy because they have too many things in their attics.