MY TAKE

THIS CAT IS A CONSUMER

Image credit: TAPAS EASWAR.

 By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

 Our son and his partner recently adopted a kitten. Turnip is now a few months old and her needs decide their routine. And the decor of their place.

Plants have been moved out of reach, and Turnip’s things given pride of place. Her scratching post-cum- perch is in the living room. Her bed, by a sunny window, just above which is suspended a cat hammock. She travels in a special see-through backpack that unfolds into a “tent”. She has many toys and it goes without saying that she also consumes only special cat food.

I say that we had three cats and a dog when I was growing up, and they never had all this fancy stuff.

“Mom, you didn’t have all the fancy stuff we did, either!” our son points out with a grin, referring to all that we accumulated for his brother and him.

And then one day, he calls to say that of all her toys, Turnip enjoys playing with paper crumpled into balls the most. “She skitters across the floor, batting at it, like a hockey player on ice with a puck!”

In the absolutely fascinating The Day the World Stops Shopping JB MacKinnon, the author of the best-selling The 100-Mile Diet and another favourite book of mine, The Once and Future World, writes that now “our pets produce their own trash”.

About a fifth of our food ends up in the garbage worldwide, and, remarkably, this is a problem in poorer countries as well as richer ones. Dogs and cats used to help us dispose of leftover food. Today they have their own consumer goods, from beds to toys to clothing to “pet tech” products – a market worth more than $16 billion in the US alone.

We are all guilty of purchasing and consuming more than we need. Of piling up stuff we then don’t know what to do with.

In recent years, I’ve heard from many friends who are in the process of clearing out stuff they’ve accumulated over a lifetime.

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh spent the early months of the lockdown culling her vast collection of books and documents. She sent thirty bankers’ boxes full of documents and files related to women’s studies to the Uof T archives. Seventeen cartons of books on feminist theory and Caribbean studies to the New College Library where they could be used by students instead of gathering dust in her basement.

“My rule is simple,” she says. “If I haven’t read the book or referred to it in the past five years, or if I don’t plan on doing so soon, it goes in the box!”

She saved some personal favourites and autographed copies, sending another 17 cartons to Barcodes Media to sell, recycle or donate.

Dr Vicki Bismilla and her husband Yusuf, both academics, also have a veritable library of books. Books were an indulgence and she collected the works of favourite authors on a variety of subjects. But not only are they not adding to that collection any longer, they’ve spent weekends sorting through and filling cartons of books they’ve donated. In fact, now she buys only from second-hand bookstores and donates the books back so they can be sold again.

Dr Chandrakant Shah practises aparigraha, the Jain philosophy of non-possessiveness, non-grasping or non-greediness. Visitors to their gracious home are told in advance not to bring any gifts.

“Food and flowers, maybe, but not any nonperishables!” he decrees, with a smile.

I am reminded of our neighbour Anne who asked if I wanted their chest of drawers. It was pine – not the cheap veneer that is the bane of modern furniture – and beautifully crafted. Also, very large and very heavy. I loved it. We lived next door, so it would only have involved bringing it down the stairs in their home and then across the front yards and into ours.

I was so tempted. But then I did a quick mental tour of our home while standing in front of it. Where would I place it in a home already straining at the seams?

I declined her generous offer. Very reluctantly.

Anne understood. “Our children don’t want it, either,” she said.

She and her husband ended up placing an ad for someone to come and take it away for free.

Many years ago, when she was still in the peak of good health, my mother-in-law took to opening her jewellery box and asking her daughters-in-law to pick an item they liked whenever the family gathered on annual visits home.

When my sister-in-law and I protested that we couldn’t possibly do that, she insisted. “You are going to get it after me. This way, I get to enjoy seeing you wear it, to tell you a little about where that particular ring or bangle came from, what occasion it was purchased for.”

She was passing down not just prized jewellery but also precious family history.

So is this article headed towards not buying anything or giving away everything? I’d have said of course not, I’m not against keeping the wheels of economy turning.

But that was until I read the aforementioned The Day the World Stops Shopping. We’ve been conditioned to believe that the only way to progress, to meet everyone’s wants and needs is to produce much, MacKinnon writes. There is another way: to want little.

Our political and business leaders say we need to keep consuming, because even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy and home foreclosures.

The planet tells us the opposite: we consume too much. In Canada, we burn through the earth’s resources at a rate five times faster than they can regenerate. “When it comes to climate change, species extinction, water depletion, toxic pollution, deforestation and other crises, how much each one of us consumes now matters more than how many of us there are.”

MacKinnon wondered if it was possible to reduce consumption to planet-saving levels without triggering the collapse of civilization.

In search of an answer, he looked to real-world places and times where consumerism has suddenly slowed or never really took hold in the first place.

And then watched his thought experiment come shockingly true as a virus brought shopping to a stop around the globe.

MacKinnon shows how shopping for ethically-made eco-friendly and long-lasting goods is good for the planet.

He quotes the philosopher Ivan Illich: “In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

If only we could grasp the import of these words. Then, perhaps, I wouldn’t awake to alerts of YouTube videos of women showing ways to turn old leggings into everything from sari blouses to some contraption called “tan protectors”.

How many leggings must a woman possess to want to turn them into something else? Into more piles of more stuff?