The Dangers of Consumerism

When I read Anne McClintock's article I was reminded a lot of the film Wall-E as she discussed the rise of consumerism. As she described on page 507, during the 18th century, "middle-class domestic space became crammed as never before with furniture, clocks, mirrors, paintings, stuffed animals, ornaments, guns and myriad gewgaws and knick nacks" (507). In the Pixar film, the world becomes so overconsumed with this type of consumption, that eventually the earth becomes inhabitable and people have to live in space ships, where ironically, consumption still reigns supreme despite causing the end of civilization. Rather than change their consumer habits, society just moved their habits to space.
When I was thinking of the negative effects that consumption had in the film, I began to think how the world has definitely began to see the negative impact of consumerism, especially with how it has been affecting the environment. Thus, I feel a big result of the consumer society in the past, is the notion of going green today. But ironically, just as in the film, we as a society are not changing our consumer tendencies. Rather, we are using this notion of "going green" to justify consumerism, which in turn, continues to hurt our planet.
For instance, rather than slow down production of SUVs, today, you can buy "hybrid" SUVs. These cars still use a lot of gas, but they are "green," so people assume that they are automatically doing good by the environment when they buy them. In reality, green or not, cars continue to eat away at the finite resource of oil. Likewise, when you go into a store, everything from household cleaners to clothes are "certified green" so we buy them to help the environment. In reality, we are still contributing to environmental harm every time we give into consumerist tendencies to buy, buy, buy, because we are still creating excess. A person may buy a bottle of water that is green "because it uses less plastic," but at the end of the day, many people who buy these bottles of water, don't even recycle them. Rather, they are too lazy and throw them in the trash instead. Thus, they bought the product to "help" the environment, but ended up hurting the environment anyway.
While "going green" in essence should be anti-consumerism, it has thrived based off of the consumer society and this can be a dangerous thing as shown by the film Wall-E where consumer society destroyed the world.