consumption

Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson discuss the influences behind this heartfelt and riveting documentary on "Life at the End of Empire." Framed in Tim's personal story of awakening to the big global issues threatening everyone's survival. It will touch you and make you think. Episode 72.

Food, as Cecile Andrews suggests, is a metaphor for life, in that our relationship to food is also suggestive of our relationship to living and how we connect with the world around us. "Slow is Beautiful" suggests that happiness can be found through being more mindful of our actions. Such an idea is suggestive that happiness itself is a tool to help us achieve more environmentally responsible living.

Dr. William E. Rees is an ecological economist and professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning and co- creator of the Ecological Footprint Analysis. The footprint model calculates the area of the Earth’s productive surface necessary to support a particular lifestyle or level of consumption. Dr Rees explains that our present level of resource consumption, coupled with our current population growth, exceeds Earth’s carrying capacity and, therefore, is not sustainable. Unless we change our consumption patterns now, modern civilization as we know it is doomed to collapse.