Contemporary Connection: My Year of Meats and American Over consumption

When I think of America I think BIG. America is a nation that consumes a lot; we can't help but over indulge. Americans are struggling with obesity while in other countries they are struggling with famine. We don't know our limits with any of our resources; not food, not with buying unnecessary goods, not with our fossil fuels. 

• The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources—burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas.
• Calculations show that the planet has available 1.9 hectares of biologically productive land per person to supply resources and absorb wastes—yet the average person on Earth already uses 2.3 hectares worth. These “ecological footprints” range from the 9.7 hectares claimed by the average American to the 0.47 hectares used by the average Mozambican.
• the U.S. ranks highest in most consumer categories by a considerable margin, even among industrial nations. To wit, American fossil fuel consumption is double that of the average resident of Great Britain and two and a half times that of the average Japanese. Meanwhile, Americans account for only five percent of the world’s population but create half of the globe’s solid waste.

Americans are fueled by greed and love over excess and the Wal Mart Mentality epitomizes that. In the book they talk about how the character Suzuki loves Wal-Mart. "the capitalist equivalent of the wide-open spaces and endless horizons of the American geographical frontier. All this for the taking! Your breast expands with greed and need and wonder...I was learning. This was the heart and soul of My American Wife!; recreating for Japanese housewives this spectacle of raw American abundance"(pg35). The power of access. They talk about how they want the American culture of over consumption brought to Japanese house wives. "want is good" but how much want is too much? When will it be enough, when we run out of all of our resources, when we are forced to look at our lives?  "...because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth"(pg35).

  

http://business.time.com/2012/07/02/ten-ways-walmart-changed-the-world/slide/the-culture-of-overconsumption/

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits/