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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
