Content uploaded by Steven Cohen
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Steven Cohen on May 21, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
www.europeannancialreview.com 7
Understanding
the Sustainable
Lifestyle
A sustainable environment and economy
are possible only if they provide support to a
sustainable lifestyle. This is a way of life that
sees material consumption as a means rather
than as an end and attempts to ensure that
consumption has as little negative impact on
the biosphere as possible.
What is a lifestyle? It’s a peculiar word,
but it is what people do with their time:
work, recreation, entertainment, travel,
social life, family life, religious life, education/
learning, hobbies, and so on. It also includes the
setting within which they undertake these activities
– where someone lives, where they work, where
they play, and where they pray (if they pray). What
does lifestyle have to do with sustainability? It’s not
simply what you do, but how your lifestyle impacts
natural systems.
It is clear that sustainable urban systems lead to a
sustainable environment and economy only if they
provide support to what we might call a sustain-
able lifestyle. This is a way of life that sees material
consumption as a means rather than as an end and
attempts to ensure that the materials consumed
have as little negative impact on the biosphere as
possible. Denitions of sustainable living in the liter-
ature generally refer to using as few resources as
possible, reducing carbon footprints, and reducing
environmental damage.1,2 The United Nations
Environment Programme denes sustainable life-
styles as “rethinking our ways of living, how we
BY STEVEN COHEN
buy and what we consume but, it is not only that.
It also means rethinking how we organise our daily
life, altering the way we socialise, exchange, share,
educate and build identities.”3
Environmental advocates often focus on indi-
vidual behaviour and say we need to develop
lifestyles that consume less and do not damage
ecosystems. On a worldwide basis with billions
of people aspiring to higher levels of material
consumption, individual reductions in consumption
in the developed world will have little real impact.
But I have hope that we can and are changing the
nature of consumption just as we are changing the
nature of work. To be clear, we cannot survive
without food, air, water, clothing and shelter. But
due to automation we need fewer people to make
and manage those things.
As we examine the sustainable lifestyle, it is
not only about what we are choosing to consume,
but where we are choosing to live. Globally, more
people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with
54 percent of the world’s population residing in
urban areas as of 2014.4 These ideas of closed
systems of production and consumption are central
to the concept of the sustainable city. As the mech-
anisation of agriculture reduces rural employment
and as the Internet communicates the appeal and
seductiveness of urban lifestyles, more and more
of the world’s population is moving to cities. Cities
are culture hubs with dense populations, which
means resources can be reused and shared easily
and effectively.
As we examine
the sustainable
lifestyle, it is not
only about what
we are choosing
to consume, but
where we are
choosing to live.
Sustainability
8 The European Financial Review December - January 2018
Sustainability
Consumption and Work in the
21st Century
All of us inevitably consume resources
in the course of our daily lives. We plug
our computer into the electrical supply,
we turn on the climate control, we turn
on the lights; we bathe, dress, and eat.
Some of us ll up the gas tank of our
car. Rather than being dened by the
size of one’s home and the consumer
items one possesses, the sustainable
lifestyle involves a search for different
values. For example, even a huge home
could be designed with geothermal
climate control, have a solar water
heating system and could be designed
to reduce its environmental impact.
You can build a zero energy house on
the outskirts of Houston and drive your
electric car all over, or you can live in
an apartment in Portland and bike, walk
and take the light rail. These choices
in homes, possessions and experiences
are lifestyle choices, and they all have
resource implications.
Contemporary lifestyle decisions are
made possible by an economy where
less and less of the GDP is devoted to
the manufacturing of food, clothing
and shelter. At one time, that was virtu-
ally all the economy did and it was how
people spent all of their time. How we
spend our time is changing. Today, we
spend less of our time pursuing our
basic needs, which means that more of
our work and our time must be devoted
to other pursuits. Part of this is due to
the fact that work is no longer limited
to the ofce or factory or to particular
times of day. In the global economy the
workday is always beginning somewhere.
The Internet and cloud computing mean
that analytic work and written work can
take place anyplace at any time. So too
can meetings. They can become Skype
sessions or conference phone calls.
While I remain convinced that humans
require live interaction and in person
contact to be effective, a high proportion
of communication is electronic and
require few incremental resources to be
undertaken. I am quite certain that we
spend more time than ever communi-
cating professionally and personally.
Peer-to-peer markets, known as
collaborative consumption, or more
commonly “the sharing economy”,
also demonstrate changes in the way we
consume and use goods and services.
The sharing economy has become an
appealing alternative for environmen-
tally conscious consumers that are
concerned about climate change and
sustainability. With sharing, less energy
is needed for transportation and
production of goods, and less waste
is created as everyday products and
services are shared among a group of
people.5 We are learning how to share
autos, cabs, clothes, bikes and even
homes when we travel. By allowing
people to consume less and own less,
thereby using fewer resources, the
sharing economy promotes urban
sustainability.6 According to the MIT
Sloan Management Review, the sharing
economy has the potential to “unite
cost reduction, benet augmenta-
tion, convenience and environmental
consciousness in one mode of
consumption”.7 It is a system built
around the utilisation of unused or
underused resources.8 Owning less
invariably means less waste. The chal-
lenge these emerging companies face
is proper management, and cities must
strategise on efcient regulations for
the sharing economy.
Example: Sustainable Waste
Management
One of the most unique sustainability
challenges lies in managing material
ows. Garbage, or what environmental
engineers call solid waste, presents
immense difculty for communities
and government ofcials. Any casual
look at New York City’s public recycling
bins will provide a sense of the dif-
cult road New York must travel to reach
anything approaching the “zero waste”
ideal of places like San Francisco. Paper
bins are lled with bottles and the
bottle bins are lled with a wide variety
of unsorted waste. However, the city
has proven in the past that progress is
possible. New York City has eliminated
indoor smoking in public places. New
Yorkers have learned how to comply
with alternate side of the street parking
rules and some are even learning how
to stop jaywalking. So it is possible that
waste disposal behaviours could change.
It is more likely that we will get better
at automated waste sorting and so one
waste stream can be subdivided when
the waste is processed. Zero waste is
an element of the concept of a circular
economy. In a circular economy, all
waste from consumption becomes an
input into new production. Inevitably
there is some leakage in the tightest
circular production process. But the
goal is to move from a linear model
of production-consumption-waste to
one more closely resembling a circular
model. I don’t think of zero waste as an
achievable operational goal, but rather
as a model and an aspiration. It is a way
to think about resource use and waste
management, rather than an absolute
target. It requires a paradigm shift or a
new way of thinking about consump-
tion and garbage.
The Future of the Sustainable Lifestyle
So how do we transition to a sustainable
lifestyle? We have already begun to
We are learning how to share
autos, cabs, clothes, bikes and
even homes when we travel. By
allowing people to consume less
and own less, thereby using fewer
resources, the sharing economy
promotes urban sustainability.
www.europeannancialreview.com 9
transform our energy, consumption
and waste systems. It is not difcult to
imagine continued progress, but the only
way it will happen is if people are positively
attracted to the sustainable lifestyle
rather than punished for their attraction to
unsustainable consumption patterns. This does
not require a monolithic one-size-ts-all limited
way of life. What unies the people pursuing a
sustainable lifestyle is that consumption is a means
and not an end. The winner isn’t the one who
accumulates the most stuff, but the one who lives
the fullest life, however that is dened. The key to
the sustainable lifestyle seems to be the pursuit of
a sustainable culture. According to researchers from
the University of Groningen, by creating a dynamic
in which pro-environmental behaviour is not only
the “right” thing to do but also aligns with the
“norm” of society, those behaviours become what is
referred to as “normative goal framing”. Observing
others participating in a sustainable behaviour
can encourage one to adopt those habits as well.9
Researchers who have examined interventions to
increase environmentally friendly behaviours found
that the key to success is linking those behaviour
changes to shared values.10 Culture and values are
far more powerful forces of social change and
consumption patterns than regulation. In America,
Prohibition didn’t end drinking; if anything it might
have encouraged the consumption of alcohol. If
someone wants to buy 50 pairs of shoes and ride
around in the water on their speedboat that should
be their right, but hopefully the images of interesting
and exciting work and play will reect the growing
understanding of the need to minimise the damage
of our work and play on the planet that sustains us.
We are learning how to live more sustainably
in our day-to-day lives. We are using bikes more,
walking more, smoking less, and paying more atten-
tion to what we eat. Our cities are developing green
infrastructure to reduce the impact of
ooding on our streets and waterways.
Young people are increasingly inter-
ested in experiences and less interested
in owning things like big houses and
ashy cars. More and more of our time is
devoted to the low impact consumption of
music, movies, news, games, social communica-
tion and anything else that appears on our smart
phones. Young people think about where their food
comes from and its impact on their own health and
the health of other living beings.
How we spend our time and what we do every
day will continue to change. Human ingenuity
guarantees it. What is not guaranteed is that our
inventiveness will take into account the health of
our natural systems. But the growing number of
people determined to live a sustainable lifestyle
will help ensure that this new chapter of economic
evolution will not be the nal chapter.
Steven Cohen is the Executive
Director of Columbia University’s
Earth Institute and Professor in the
Practice of Public Affairs at Columbia
University’s School of International
and Public Affairs.
References
1. Regenerative Leadership Institute. 2007. “What Is Sustainable Living?” RLI Blog,
February 17. https://www.regenerative.com/sustainable-living.
2. Winter, Mick. 2007. “Sustainable Living: For Home, Neighborhood and Community.”
Napa, CA: Westsong Publishing.
3. United Nations Environment Programme. 2011. “Visions for Change:
Recommendations for Effective Policies on Sustainable Lifestyles.” http://www.unep.
fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1321xPA-VisionsForChange%20report.pdf.
4. United Nations (2014) “World Urbanization Prospects 2014 Revision.”
Department of Economic and Social Affairs. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/
highlights/wup2014-highlights.pdf.
5. Belk, Russell. 2010. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research 5: 715–734.
doi:10.1086/612649.
6. Hirshon, Lauren, Morgan Jones, Dana Levin, Kathryn McCarthy, Benjamin
Morano, Sarah Simon, and Brooks Rainwater. 2015. “Cities, the Sharing Economy
and What’s Next.” National League of Cities. http://www.nlc.org/sites/default/
les/2017-01/Report%20-%20%20Cities%20the%20Sharing%20Economy%20
and%20Whats%20Next%20nal.pdf
7. Matzler,K., Veider, V., & Kathan, W. 2015. “Adapting to the Sharing
Economy.” MIT Sloan Management Review. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/
adapting-to-the-sharing-economy/
8. Bond, Andrew T. 2015. “An App for That: Local Governments and the Rise of
the Sharing Economy.” Notre Dame Law Review Online, 90 (2): 77-96
9. Steg, Linda, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Kees Keizer. 2015. “Intrinsic
Motivation, Norms, and Environmental Behavior: The Dynamics of Overarching
Goals.” International Review of Envir onmental and Resource Economics 9: 179-207.
doi:10.1561/101.00000077.
10. Miller, Dale T., and Deborah A. Prentice. 2016. “Changing Nor ms to
Change Behavior.” Annual Review of Psychology 67: 339-361. doi:10.1146/
annurev-psych-010814-015013.
What unifies the people pursuing a sustainable
lifestyle is that consumption is a means and
not an end. The winner isn’t the one who
accumulates the most stuff, but the one who
lives the fullest life, however that is defined.
