Overconsumption Quotes

“We each make our solo voyages to deep, expansive waters. Alone in our contest with the wider world, we test our mettle and seek our trophies, promotions, compliments, and accolades. We strive to be needed and to thereby know that there is a reason for us. We seek to be told we are good because we're too unsure of ourselves to know. Yet often we remain so focused on our neediness that we forget the creatures—human and otherwise—we're drawing into the vortex of our own passion play. All of us have compulsive loves we must forbear. We forget to see that we can engage the world without harming it. And although we fish for approval, the challenge is: to capture our prizes while bringing more to the world than we take.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history?”
― Robert Wringham, Escape Everything!

“In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model feeling the overconsumption of the West.”
― Tom Butler, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot

“Let’s not fall into the trap of conventions and habits and convince ourselves that the way we are consuming now is next to impossible to alter because of regulated options, economic limitations, cultural norms, accessibility, or whichever excuse we come up with. Let’s remember that just as it is momentarily the norm to mindlessly shop and consume, it could easily become the new norm not to; to radically reduce one’s consumption and to focus on the usage and aesthetic nourishment of the objects one owns and invests in. Something being the norm doesn’t mean that it is carved in stone. Norms are changeable. Not easily changeable, but nevertheless changeable. Cherishing, mending, and repairing one’s belongings could become the new normal.”
― Kristine H. Harper, Anti-trend, Resilient Design and the Art of Sustainable Living

“If you’re worried about overpopulation and you are not worried about overconsumption, you just don’t like poor people—and in this case poor brown people. So really what it boils down to.”
― Beau of the Fifth Column