Rachel and her husband built a passive solar greenhouse on their farm with materials they scavenged from dumpsters and recycling bins: a shower door from someone’s bathroom, wood left over from home improvement projects, discarded soda bottles.
“This is such a fat country,” she says. “There is so much, that you can live off the pickings that are left over.”
“All the clothes I buy,” says Terry, “I buy at the thrift store. Partly because I am a cheapskate and partly because the clothes already exist, and (it’s) perfectly good stuff.” Buying new clothes, she says, creates “a demand for more to be made.”
Helen washes and reuses plastic bags. She no longer buys pads of note paper, but writes on used paper.
Rachel, Terry, and Helen are among nine women who were the focus of a recent study by Julie Ozanne, associate professor of marketing at Virginia Tech. The study sought to examine empirically how a group of women view nature and their own relationships to the environment, and how these perspectives influence the way they choose, buy, use, and dispose of products.
Consumer behavior, says Ozanne, has been and continues to be the main area of study in consumer research and a major focus in marketing research. However, consumer culture and the all-American passion for shopping and acquiring has been questioned in such best sellers as Simple Abundance (1995) and Your Money or Your Life (1992), and by an anti-materialism movement that took its name from a 1981 book by Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity, that advocated an “outwardly simple, inwardly rich” way of life.
Voluntary Simplicity
While voluntary simplicity is not yet a major social movement, its ranks appear to be growing steadily. Simplicity advocates point out that as people become more aware of the tolls of the working-and-spending treadmill — tolls on the environment and on their own health and quality of life — the idea of scaling back starts to make sense.
Judging from news reports about the simplicity phenomenon, many, if not most, people make modest, rather than drastic, lifestyle changes. They are generally motivated by the benefits of reduced stress and more personal and family time as a result of not having to work overtime to pay large credit card bills.
In contrast, the women in Ozanne’s study (conducted with Susan Dobscha, an assistant professor of marketing at Bentley College) see a pared-down lifestyle as the best way to protect and conserve nature and to assert a greater sense of control in the marketplace.
These women, she says, have a great respect for nature and feel deeply connected to the earth through activities that include bird watching, gardening, and walking in the woods. Rachel, for example, says time spent in the woods made her realize that “I needed to learn to be a lot more gentle in my relationship to the earth and much more conscious about what I do with my garbage and what I spend my money on.“
An Ecological Life
She and the other women, Ozanne says, seek to live an ecological life by making consumption a less central aspect of their daily lives. “Unlike the traditional environmentally conscious consumer who seeks to shop differently, these women seek to live differently.”
These are women who practice recycling with greater intensity than most people. Cathy uses jars as drinking glasses and reuses envelopes by scratching out the old address and putting in the new one. Robin and Dana use milk jugs for watering or storage cans and soup cans for pencil holders. Laura reuses aluminum foil until “it’s totally falling apart.”
The women don’t use lawn chemicals. They avoid flea and tick products for their pets. They don’t eat at restaurants where leftovers are packaged in polystryrene containers. They don’t use dryer sheets or the dryer in warmer months, and they have no use for paper cups, plates, towels, and napkins. If they cannot do without a product, they use less of it and make it last longer.
Some of them launder less often (Laura, for instance, questions the need to wash bath towels regularly when people use them after they’ve just showered), use environmentally friendly cleansers, and have generally adopted cleanliness standards and cleaning styles that are definitely not their mothers’.
The women are highly skeptical of business and marketing practices. Consumerism, says Terry, “needs to be confronted rather than simply repainted. We should use things when we need to use them, but we should question much more what exactly it is we need to use and get out of the ‘buy more, buy more’ mindset.”
The women are also active in their community, which Ozanne notes is already characterized by “a moderately high level of ‘mainstream environmentalism’” (paper drives, spring cleanups, composting leaves, recycling of packaging and oil). They volunteer in local schools and teach formal and informal programs for children and adults.
A few of the women have managed to implement their philosophies at their workplaces. Laura launched an effort to encourage employees to use both sides of the paper in printing drafts. Rachel began a composting plan at the restaurant where she works and uses the waste to enrich her farmland.
Living the ecological life can be far from simple, however, in a society that makes it convenient to consume. Juggling the needs of humans and the needs of Planet Earth, Ozanne says, requires inventiveness — “many acts of creating, building, foraging, and making tradeoffs.” Sometimes, no good alternative exists. In a rural community, for example, cars are a necessity.
The women’s behavior as non-consumers, Ozanne says, refutes the assumptions and results of traditional research on “green marketing” — i.e., the marketing of products that are considered environmentally friendly.
Green Market Research
Green marketing research so far, Ozanne says, has focused on managing the relationship between consumers and the environment — determining the characteristics of the environmentally conscious consumer, assessing consumers’ perceptions of business, and measuring the influence of perceptions, attitudes, and incentives on green consumption. Researchers assume that consumers express their “green conscience” by shopping and buying differently and that consumers believe that consumption of “green” products is the solution to environmental problems.
A few researchers, however, have pointed out that consumption itself contributes to environmental degradation and that merely shifting to green alternatives may not solve the problem.
The women in her study, Ozanne says, present an alternative vision of the environmental consumer through the breadth and depth of their green living, which does not center on consuming, green or otherwise. Instead, the women seek to live outside the marketplace, which they reluctantly enter only when non-market options aren’t available. “These women question the problem-solving ability of the marketplace.”
Ozanne, who is currently volunteering with the Seeds of Simplicity organization, says that her research on the simple living movement has sometimes made her feel “odd” in her profession. “My research techniques are not mainstream; they’re feminist and critical. And I’m in a school of business, but want to understand why people don’t consume and how they can resist the tactics of marketing.”
The decision to use only women as subjects was deliberate, she says. “Women are at the center of many environmental movements. Women are also the primary organizers and maintainers of households. Therefore, they may be more likely to see the detrimental effects of pollution and toxic materials on their families’ health.”
And, as women still do most of the household shopping, they are “decision makers with tremendous potential for impact in the marketplace.”
Lessons from ‘Outliers’
Ozanne says that it may be convenient to view the women in her study as an extreme minority to be ignored, but she believes that even as “outliers,” they offer lessons for the consumer goods industry and public policy alike. Harvard economist Juliet Schor, Ozanne points out, has estimated that nearly one-fifth of consumers downshifted as a voluntary lifestyle change in 1990-96.
Manufacturers, Ozanne says, should respond by creating a more ecologically friendly marketplace: pricing that takes into account the environmental costs; reduced packaging; increased use of recycled or recyclable materials; and advertising with environmentally accurate information.
As for public policy, more information is not the critical solution, she says. Instead, the goal should be to foster direct contact between people and nature — hands-on experiences that “demonstrate ecological diversity and the inter-connectedness of all living creatures.”
For example, Ozanne says, “instead of focusing solely on increasing recycling, we should be implementing more programs that bring urban children to rural areas, or programs that encourage whale watching, nature walks, or bluebird trail building.” Such direct, personal contact with nature, she says, could provoke people to give greater thought to the environmental impact of their own consumption.