Consumerism and Creation

Consumerism and Creation

Tia Stajkowski

I want to start off by saying that From Nature to Creation by Norman Wirzba is one of the most interesting and impactful books that I have had to read for a class. I could tell it was going to be good just after reading the introduction. However, I wanted to discuss some things from the first two chapters.

Something that has dawned on me over the last few years is that humans, especially Americans, commodify nearly every aspect of life. Consumerism has become such an important part of how we present ourselves to the rest of society. The car you drive, the house you live in, the clothes you wear, the makeup you buy, we are told that all of it matters... but why? To reference the wasp story from class, I feel like the loop that humans get stuck in is the consumerist cycle. We learn to desire items, so we work for at least 8 hours a day to pay for them. But we come home exhausted from work and consume more media based advertisements saying "buy this, buy that" making us desire more things, and the cycle continues. The other part of it is, people like to consume things. It is no longer simply desire, but the desire for desire. This is the part that needs to change. I don't think desire is inherently bad, but I feel that it has been corrupted. "Teach a person to think that the point of life is to acquire, and everything becomes a commodity" (26). We are somehow incredibly materialistic, yet not materialist enough. We crave the desire for new items, but we do not respect where they come from or how they are made. I think the latter describes what true materialism is. This might be a bold statement, but I don't think any American citizen has the complete knowledge of how one of their items was made or where it came from, no matter how un/willingly ignorant they are. And the truth is, you can't blame people for this type of ignorance. We aren't taught to question where our things come from. I was watching a video clip in one of my classes the other day (it may have been this one, but I honestly don't remember) showing a little boy joining a community garden. One of the adults went over to the chicken coop and gathered a few eggs that were recently laid to show the children. The boy asked where he got the eggs from and the man said he got them from the chickens. The boy looked at him confused and said, "but eggs come from the grocery store". This is just one example of how disconnected people have become from land. Because nobody knows where our things come from or how they are made and we are taught not to care, we do not ask if the creation of our things has any impact on the world around us. Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the United States, and, "it is a contradiction to profess belief in God the Creator and then live in ways that degrade and destroy God's creation" (25). Not only is it an incredible dismissal of the presence of God to continue to degrade His creation, but we have tried to replace His presence with human presence. "Because Europeans had established themselves in the position of a god designating value and significance, things could not appear as God's creation," and so we continue to look past the value in our environment (27).