GEOG 344 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Psychic Vampire, Time Complexity, Individualism
Document Summary
Time poverty has environmental impacts because it drives us to convenience. The future we care about is individual and instrumental. Time horizon may be the most important distinction between environmentalists and others. Nature"s rhythms are cyclical, but americans believe in linear time. Ordinary consumption, like using water for toilets and water and heat for showers, is so routine and repetitive that we don"t normally consider it a part of our consumer behavior. The ways in which consumers are constructed along with the goods and services we are expected to require. Social construction of necessity: back to college market, black friday sales, shopping seasons. College students are in a position to establish lifelong brand loyalties. The frontier of necessity is always being pushed forward: upscaling yesterday"s luxuries to today"s necessities, our buy=osphere expands but our biosphere does not. Embodied energy=cotton used to make t-shirt, oil used to power machine on farm, water used to irrigate the crop, etc.
