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54] THE Purtosopny or Eco-Pourtics
sacrifice for the sake of making a living and the only purpose of life is free
time, which has to be spent with the consumption of the mass of produced
goods. An effective critique of the society of plenty cannot begin with
anything other than demanding the first condition of a good life, good
work. Work has ultimately become meaningless for most people because
at their workplace they are not producing “something”, but anything
anywhere: replaceable goods in plastic packaging, while as consumers
they have to consume this anything that is the same the world over in
such quantities that the batch size should minimise the costs of
production.
From an ecological perspective, the main characteristic of the society
of plenty is wastefulness ad absurdum: planned obsolescence, the mass
of throwaway items and the determined effort to transform the material
world into rubbish in the shortest possible time. Our descendants will
most likely deem waste to be the most characteristic creation of the
global age of the consumer; this is finally something which in this form
was practically unknown to previous generations. All the efforts of
civilisations so far have been against entropy: people aimed to turn
processed material into some kind of complicated, high energy-content
state and keep it there as long as possible. In a way, our throwaway
society is attempting the opposite: the increase of entropy. However,
the attempt can only meet with partial success, but not because this
society too is transient, but because its waste is very much permanent.
Our concrete buildings, radioactive fuel rods, metal alloys, giant
machines and the nanoparticles released by plastics will survive us. They
are turning the Earth into a cemetery of rubbish, a desolate and
dangerous place for all those who will try to live on it hereafter.
5. The ecology of poverty
Poverty is usually taken to mean the scarcity of the basic physical and
cultural conditions fundamental to a life worthy of a human being. Most
of those who have addressed the subject until the past few centuries
agreed that these conditions — goods and abilities — are always available
in limited amounts. ‘They therefore held their temporary or sustained
lack as the normal concomitant of the human condition. The opposite
was held to be true only in the prehistoric mythical times (before original
sin) or in a utopia. Their historical experience convinced them that
scarcity is unavoidable and that the unequal distribution of goods