ABSTRACT
So we have a massive problem. Our consumption behaviour is spinning out of control, causing immense harm to us as individuals, as communities and as a species. Individually the obvious manifestation is in physical illness caused by corporate marketing – obesity, lung cancer, liver cirrhosis and at a group level the social malaise of public drunkenness, sedentary entertainment or dying high streets. Meanwhile, the planet inexorably heats up. Underpinning all this is a corrosive passivity; we consume rather than produce, shop rather than create, and so become ever more dependent. Increasingly, it seems, we get our self-worth not from our achievements but from a packet.
