ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, when I looked at the population changes back in the 20th century and into the 21st after finishing the book Hardships of a Big Country, I sighed at the extreme contrast of the two centuries: the 100 years of the 20th century saw population explosion while the 21st century would witness population aging.
After the turn of the 21st century, the train carrying the world population that had been running at a high speed started to slow down. However, the contradiction between population and consumption did not disappear, and weak consumption became manifested with decreases in population growth. In fact, population changes are characteristically slow and progressive, and their impacts are hard to detect in a short time; however, once they have been accumulated over a long enough span of time, the changes, including their progressive fermentative effect on consumption, will have an amplified influence.
After WWII, the world was more or less in a state of stable development, and the wage rates of various types of labor, both high and low, were all improved to a degree, but at the same time, laborers were no longer tolerant of the immense gap between high and low incomes. In fact, only when a society has reached a certain degree of economic development – i.e., industrialization has mostly been completed, the industrial structure is tilting to the sector of modern services, and the surplus of laborers has started to transition to shortage – will the gap between the rich and the poor become intolerable, which is then a serious social problem that cannot be ignored.
What is the concept of green consumption? Green is the color of forests, grasslands, and crops, born with nature. Chlorophylls in green plants consume water and carbon dioxide and synthesize organic compounds and oxygen with the help of sunlight through a progress called photosynthesis. Therefore, green reflects the metabolic state of green plants. Decreases in the shade of green signal decreases in green plants, leading to weakened photosynthesis, oxygen release, and ecologic balance; increases in the shade of green, on the other hand, signal increases in green plants, leading to strengthened photosynthesis, oxygen release, and ecologic balance.
Sustainable consumption and development demand the placement of economic development in the scope of a strategy for sustainability, which is based on the green, moderate growth of consumption. The conventional concept of economic development values maximization of profit through maximizing the amounts and values of production, which has led to heated competitions for GDP increments. In contrast, sustainable development that is oriented toward people is after satisfaction of all-around development of the people, which is not exactly the same as maximization of profits. A new concept of economic development that covers green consumption should be formed.
