Pondering "Eco"

Recently, I had a chance to tour the showroom of a major electronics maker. In Japan, this appears to be the only showroom whose special feature is proposing new lifestyles centered on eco- and universal design. It was chock-full of goods that the envisioned three-generation household would find totally convenient and eco-conscious. It was fun just to walk around and look at everything. And yet, to be so saturated in eco left me with the honest impression that though I get the whole reason for eco design, I don't want to pay more for it, and I feel like I'm running a marathon with no goal in sight.

In the general mood today, where it is alright for things to be expensive if they're eco-conscious, or that people who don't follow-conscious lifestyoles are bad citizens, I feel something akin to fascism or mass hysteria. If this mood goes too far, the next thing will be a return of darkness to cities at night, with all-night businesses and night street lighting prohibited, or an end to legitimate sales of non-eco-conscious goods that waste resources, like newspapers and magazines. Maybe there will even be a gluttony tax on foods that exceed a certain calorie count, because that would be a waste of food resources, or tax on people living alone because single-member households are a waste of resources. "An Inconvenient Life" really may come true.

Danish political scholar Bjorn Lomborg was widely lambasted the world over when he was critical in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, of overly emotional global warming debates, saying environmentalists need to cool their heads together with the earth. Environmentalism to that extent is a brand of fundamentalism, and has a strong element of out-of-control compulsion. And, yet at last year's G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit "ego" won out over "eco," as most expected. Swinging back and forth between these two polar oposites is problematic because it seems to leave no room for finding a middle ground.

I would hope at least that a goal can be established that is premised on eco-consciousness coexisting with pleasurable human existence on the one hand and with capitalism on the other.


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