ABSTRACT
In medieval times, the socially condoned form of responding to one’s sinful behavior was to purchase an indulgence from the Church, a kind of pardon issued by the clergy that said all was well once again between the kingdoms of Heaven and Earth for the monetary contributor. Today, when the megamachinery of society regularly results in the blowback of political and economic upheaval, the public is routinely told by the state (e.g., Bush, 2001, 2006) and its neoliberal ideologues (e.g., Friedman, 2008) that the smart person’s solution to these problems is simply to spend and shop. This amounts to more than just the strings of people’s everyday lives being pulled and persuaded by greedy capitalist puppet masters; it is symptomatic evidence of the affluent society’s generally insane commitment to what has been termed “fundamentalist consumerism” (Levine, 2009). This fundamentalism’s ruling idea-that larger structural disorders can be properly rectified through acts of individual consumer choice-has become particularly ubiquitous in connection to our planet’s burgeoning ecological crisis. Here, an ostensibly enlightened buying public concerned with the degradation of the Earth’s limited natural resources, practices “boycotts” that signal to business and government alike that society is ready to pay for the sustainable production of goods and services in specific market sectors. Thus hailed by consumers, it is the green consumerist belief that businesses then respond by adding corporate social responsibility to their missions, opening production lines of “green” market goods, and by becoming less ecologically rapacious forces in the world.
