Edited:
My intention was tp post this in the "Obsolescence be damned!" thread but I was automatically logged out so this ended up, accidentally, as a new thread. Moderator feel free do do with it as you will.
I stopped buying the latest "must have" (nauseating phrase) photographic products a couple of years ago, sickened to a degree by the constant hysteria that seems to surround each minute development and by the way that the dangling carrot of technical perfection retreats at the same rate as we approach it: churn, a fundamental requirement of the economic philosophy that engenders these products. I admit that my financial position also makes it unwise, if not impossible, for me to succumb to the sort of impulse purchases for which I would once have effortlessly generated justifications.
But there's more to my position than that and it relates to the entire world of economics and its relationship with the increasingly disintegrating world that we inhabit. I see people slavering over the prospect of an iPhone "n" or Sony's latest full-frame camera whilst disregarding the fact that this relentless marketing contest takes place at the price of the most valuable thing we all have, which is our planet and all that it naturally contains (or used to contain.) Like DNA. Before today's out who knows how many species will have passed into extinction? And yet almost any challenge faced by mankind for our continued existence on a habitable world has probably been solved by billions of years of evolution. Its as if we live in a gigantic library where so far we've only managed to read a few pages of a handful of books - which we're steadily tossing into a furnace in order to raise the temperature a (wholly uneccessary) few extra degrees.
The relationship between these phenomena isn't too hard to understand although I can only attempt a simplification here. In a world where the proportional return on capital is increasingly allocated to the owners of capital, with an equivalent decrease in wages to the preponderance of the world's workforce, (who also constitute the market for the products they produce) there's a requirement for an ever-increasing number of consumers. It's the economics of the chain-letter/Ponzi scam. If the expression "The elephant in the room" has any mileage left in it, it's surely applicable to the issue of population growth, the underlying cause of every problem in terms of climate change and resource depletion: which, as far as I can see, is almost never raised when discussing the symptoms of the disease.
Of course whenever anyone dares to mention this (which happens amazingly seldom) the hoary old argument of decreasing birth rates in developed cultures (taking "developed" to mean wealthy) arises. Imagine what it will cost for the entire world to be raised to "western" consumption levels by the time such an objective could be realised, if it ever could. A few years ago James Lovelock - a man who for many years was ridiculed as a crackpot, until many scientists realised that his "Gaia" metaphor was one of the most useful tools ever invented with which to understand planetary ecology - estimated that for humanity to live on a stable Earth (ie one where resources were generally renewed) at the level of consumption currently enjoyed in "The West", the maximum viable world population would be about one-third of its current level. Now I've no idea how this estimate was generated but it strikes me, instinctively, as at least a pretty inspired guess.
I reflect on this every day as the headline news items now invariably incorporate the word "migrants" in the first sentence. A couple of weeks ago I saw an interesting TV news piece about the human-free exclusion zone at Chernobyl. It now exhibits an amazing resurgence of all kinds of species (the European Bison!) with astonishingly scant evidence of the disastrous genetic mutations we've come to expect - the catfish living in the pools of highly radioactive coolant being the main exception, and even they don't seem to have undergone any catastrophic changes. To some it might seem paradoxical that this piece cheered me up tremendously on an otherwise depressing news day.
