Every product we buy in any supermarket or other store can be likened to an iceberg. When we buy we bring home the point, I think there is anything else. Somewhere, however, a greater or lesser portion of nature (raw materials, energy) was used for the finished product.
Because each product has its own social history also: behind every product there is only the environmental impact (including waste), but also the work of those who produced it (the conditions of employment, the right to leave, to strike, health care and union representation).
But that label for example, the can of cola or hurriedly pack of cookies that we have made in the shopping cart is not indicated.
In this sense, the new "Guide to the critical consumption. Information on the conduct of business for a consumer awareness" - prepared by new center development model led by Francesco Gesualdi - may have its function.
Catalog, crosses and provides updated data for information about the movements of hundreds of structures productive relationships with which we frequent.
Review 145 groups of food businesses and those of hygiene products and household, selected for their ability to sell nationally. For each company provides information on eleven areas: transparency, abuse of power, the presence of the South, labor relations, environment, connection with weapons and the military, relations with oppressive regimes, the refuge in tax havens, compliance and consumer law, animal abuse, boycotts against them.
And to facilitate consumers in their search for news on companies and products, the guide provides information through two different ways: symbolic (for quick reference) and descriptive (for development).
In particular, the information for quick reference is provided in the tables, which are organized by product in the second part of the guide (and descriptive information can be found in Part Three). Reading the tables, so you can quickly determine which brands to choose from their own priorities, moral, social and environmental issues. To this may be particularly useful at the time of purchase. Moreover, the choice of a product can also be made on the basis of criteria other than the economic price of taste or even induced.
No coincidence that the purpose of the Guide consumption is critical, "the complaint" but give the consumer the information necessary for it to make conscious choices, responsible and "free" from conditioning from a society based on consumption, a system that invites us to consume more and more (The wealth of detail, in fact, supplies the critical spirit of the reader, however, left the freedom to draw their own conclusions).
In fact, as demonstrated by the recent study published in the Republic era man of availability seems plagued by a real disease (although not yet recognized as a disorder by the American Psychiatric association in the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for mental disorders to the internationally accepted classification of mental illnesses). It's called compulsive shopping and afflicts 5 percent of Italians, 85 percent are women.
So before this scenario, it seems unlikely that a single guide to critical consumption may be able to produce the necessary cultural change.
Without a director, a governance model that reconvert production and consumption in an ecological sense, the results will be few or none, because we now forced to gorge themselves "forced, to break them, the mechanisms that give us a sense of satiety. In other words we seem to be always hungry and consume in a scandalous way against all logic, common sense and good hygiene. "Until you get to no longer distinguish what are our needs and when they are satisfied (and it shows precisely the pathology of compulsive shopping). Unfortunately, we consumer perspective has increasingly taken hold because the system makes us believe that our happiness through the steps to have.
Much of traditional economic, however, is indifferent to the concept of well-being of human beings or to the satisfaction of basic needs such as food, shelter, good health, strong relationships and the ability to realize the potential of every individual. (From this point of view explains why the pursuit of the highest GDP-index measure inappropriate for measuring welfare, social changes, economic and climate - is one of the key policy objectives of each country).
The environmental consequences of the race for economic growth threaten the stability of the global economy. If we add to all this socio-economic impacts of modern life (like that 2.5 billion people live on $ 2 a day or in industrialized societies is increasingly rising obesity, related diseases and mental disorders) here that the need to rethink the objectives and modalities of modern economies becomes apparent. Why
economies based on the conventional model where nature is nothing but a tank from which to draw, where profit is the only purpose is increasingly destructive and uninterested in the welfare of human beings.
But it is also true that the transition from a growth-focused economy tout court as defined by Gesualdi of "satiety" is a "difficult task not only for changes that require life-style, but especially for compared to the news that involves issues such as labor and management of public economy. "
The question then is how to reorient the economy towards sustainability. In the current global situation in which it became clear that there is an interweaving of ecological crisis, economic and social climate, which is also shown that the current model of development (aimed at unlimited growth) can not guarantee a stable future for the planet.
So the new economic model - regardless of how you want to qualify - must take into account the limitations of material and energy resources, inequalities with which they are used and the disparity between those who have wealth in natural capital and who exploits it for ensure their standard of wealth.
www.greenreport.it
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