It seems quite simple, especially for food and drink: I can only use what I have or what I expect to have. I cannot eat more plums than it has grown on the tree, I cannot drink more water than I have in the well.  However, there is a snag, because this “local” view seems overcome now. There comes a lorry with plums and a tank with water and the worries disappear – I can eat plums and drink water after that as much as I want.  Until I find that it’s unsustainable if two people do it who share only one toilet.

The moment we leave the clear local thinking and the world becomes a kind of vague field that is a storehouse, warehouse and dump, the spiral of consumerism starts spinning. It’s just to pay redistribution costs -  they work somewhere for peanuts anyway – we simply have a good position.  Indeed, the development of consumption leads to optimism and optimism reflects in economic growth.  This is how it worked for some time, until some cleverer people started to warn that there is not any kind of “foreign zone” in the world, that the world is united, global and that we cannot export our problems anywhere else.  We realize that only a certain amount of plums can grow up in our world every year,  that we can drink only a certain amount of water and, last but not least, that we only have a certain number of toilets available. In addition, the redistribution costs are not “only” some “external” money.  The whole system of mass logistics of goods influences our life considerably, brings about changes in the landscape and in human thinking. It forces us with its own logic that it wants to be cared for, it wants the states to invest money in it, to maintain ways, great strategic reserves of fuel, etc.

Sustainable consumption is thus today a bit more complicated topic than just “to live with a look into the purse”. It is also the need to think about our behaviour and to decide responsibly how to behave.