3. Use it up, throw it out: over-consumption as a way of life

Old habits die hard

Talking about sustainable development is one thing; living sustainably is quite another. Individual lifestyles have a crucial role to play in delivering environmental and social stability. Principle 8 of the Rio declaration states: "To achieve sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people, states should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption...."

Virtually all aspects of everyday life have some degree of environmental impact, including the homes we live in, the way we travel, where our food comes from and how we dispose of our waste. Headline indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and personal travel are the sum total of millions of individual decisions.

In this respect there have been some notable achievements since Rio, such as a rapid growth in municipal recycling, a sharp rise in renewable energy capacity and steady improvements in urban air quality. But most of the major indicators of pollution still point in the wrong direction. It seems the principle of sustainability has yet to make a serious impact on everyday living.

Figures produced by the International Energy Agency reveal that in the 10 years ending in 1997, energy consumption in North America rose by 16 per cent, in South America by 35 per cent, and in the Middle East and North Africa by 58 per cent.

Meanwhile in the 10 years to 1999, vehicle miles traveled by car in the U.S. and the European Union rose by nearly 80 per cent. Globally, air traffic doubled.

A report entitled "Ecological Footprints of Nations," published in 1997 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Rio summit, used a wide array of indicators to assess how consumption by different countries measured up against their "ecological capacity." It concluded that humanity as a whole uses over a third more resources than what nature can regenerate and that the "ecological deficit" is widening.

Equally worrying is that people in developing countries are looking enviously at the lifestyles of people in affluent nations, poised to emulate the resource-hungry, pollution-intensive lifestyles to which past growth has been shackled. With some justification, governments in the developing world have pointed out that their counterparts in industrialized nations are in no position to lecture them on sustainable living.

So why has the connection between long-term environmental damage and individual lifestyles not been made? In part it is a question of scale. The decisions made by an individual have a negligible effect globally. But in part it is because of a perception that living in an environment-friendly way must inevitably entail a lower standard of living. This, of course, is not the case.

Unfortunately, the post-Rio decade has seen little progress towards dispelling the myth that to live sustainably is to shiver in the dark.