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emotional well-being. As modern advertising and marketing techniques tend to create ever- greater material desires, they leave consumers in a constant state of dissatisfaction because, however much they acquire and consume, they always want more. Consumerism thus works not through the satisfaction of desires, but through the generation of new desires, keeping people in an unending state of neediness, want and aspiration. Second, materialism and consumerism provide the cultural basis for environmental degradation. This occurs as the ‘consumer society’ encourages people to place short-term economic considerations ahead of longer-term ecological concerns, in which case nature is nothing other than a commodity or resource. In this light, ecologism can be seen to be associated with the ideas of postmaterialism (see p. 217) and anti-consumerism.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN ACTION . . . SCHOOL CLIMATE STRIKES
EVENTS: In August 2018, a Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks, to protest against political inaction on climate change. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and the message soon went viral, creating an international movement (‘Fridays for Future’ or ‘FFF’) in which school students take time off from class on Fridays to raise awareness about the climate crisis and ecological destruction. A global strike in March 2019 attracted more than one million participants, with around 2,200 strikes taking place in some 125 countries. The Global Week of Climate Action in September 2019 gathered roughly four million protesters, many of them schoolchildren, making it probably the largest climate demonstration in history. SIGNIFICANCE: The Fridays for Future movement is underpinned by the fact that anxieties about climate change have a marked future-looking character, meaning that moral obligations in relation to the issue are unequally distributed between the generations. Young people, and therefore schoolchildren, are entitled to greater consideration than older people on two grounds. First, the negative consequences of climate change (more and stronger storms, longer heatwaves, rising sea levels, melting ice caps and so on) are set to be felt for longer, and more severely, by children than by adults. Second, by contrast with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, children are in no way culpable for the failure of ecological stewardship that allowed the
climate crisis to escalate in the first place. If these arguments apply to the younger generation, they do so even more strongly to those yet to be born; that is, ‘future generations’. However, what can be called cross-generational justice has also been called into question. For example, the younger generation is not a fixed unchanging entity, distinguished, throughout their lives, by the same set of values and beliefs. Instead, as today’s children are tomorrow’s adults, the idealism of many young climate activists might be expected to fade over time. Similarly, to see the climate change debate very largely as a clash of generations is to ignore the impact on the climate of structural factors such as mechanistic and reductionist thinking and consumer capitalism. Finally, specifically in relation to future generations, because their size is unknown, living generations may either make sacrifices for the benefit of people who may prove to be much better off than themselves, or their sacrifices may be entirely inadequate to meet future needs.
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