planetary destruction- excessive consumption

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Consuming the Planet to Excess

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Consuming the Planet to Excess

John Urry

AbstractThis article examines some major changes relating to the contemporaryconditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradic-tions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the courseof the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon tohigh-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies ofcontrol, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones ofconsumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Societiesbecome centres of conspicuous, wasteful consumption. The implications ofsuch forms of ‘excess’ consumption are examined for clues as to the natureand characteristics of various futures. Special attention is paid to the inter-dependent system effects of climate change, the peaking of oil and excep-tional growth of urban populations. It is argued that the 20th century hasleft a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possiblefuture scenarios which are briefly described.

Key wordsclimate change ■ complexity ■ contradictions ■ Marx ■ peak oil

The big discovery is that planet Earth does not generally engage in gradualchange. It is far cruder and nastier. (Pearce, 2007: 21)

The complexity of the climate system, its myriad of parts, interactions, feedbacks and unsolved mysteries, needs researchers able to transcend theirown specialities, jump over and build bridges across artificial disciplinaryboundaries. (Rial et al., 2004: 33)

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of humanbeings and their natural environment . . . would result in the demolition ofsociety. . .. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and land-scapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power toproduce food and raw materials destroyed. (Polanyi, 1954: 73)

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),Vol. 27(2–3): 191–212DOI: 10.1177/0263276409355999

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Capitalism and New Contradictions

THIS ARTICLE examines some major changes relating to the contem-porary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergentcontradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich

North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts have involvedmoving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societiesof discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specializedand differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess.

In focusing upon such emergent contradictions, capitalism, which isnow the only game in town, is its own ‘gravedigger’ as Marx and Engelsargued (1888 [1848]). But the ‘gravedigging’ is not being effected by theproletariat becoming revolutionary as they projected. Marx and Engels alsonoted that such a proletariat is ‘concentrated in greater masses’ (1888[1848]: 64). And this is part of the context for 21st-century gravedigging.Massive population growth within huge urban centres, along with multiplemobilities, ‘excessive’ global consumption and rising carbon emissions, isdestroying the global conditions of human life upon Earth.

Marx and Engels wrote of how modern bourgeois society ‘is like thesorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether worldwhom he has called up by his spells’ (1888 [1848]: 58). The sorcerer ofcontemporary capitalism has indeed generated major emergent contradic-tions. This article discusses how, through climate change, capitalism isbringing ‘disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger[ing] theexistence of bourgeois property’ (Marx and Engels, 1888 [1848]: 59). In the21st century, capitalism is not able to control those powers that it called upby its mesmeric spells that were set in motion during the unprecedentedhigh-carbon 20th century. As Leahy writes: ‘capitalism could come to asticky end . . . without the supposedly essential ingredient of a revolution-ary proletariat. Capitalism as a growth economy is impossible to reconcilewith a finite environment’ (2008: 481; this is not to suggest that any othermodern economic system has a ‘better’ environmental record).

It is generally presumed in the economic and social sciences thatsystems are naturally in a state of equilibrium and negative feedback mech-anisms restore equilibrium if movement occurs away from such a stablepoint. This notion of such naturally re-establishing equilibria can be foundin general equilibrium models in economics and various sociological modelsof structure and agency. However, notions of emergent contradictions problematize the plausibility of these equilibrium models (Beinhocker,2006: chs 2, 3). In this article I thus make no distinction between states of equilibrium and states of growth. All systems are viewed as dynamic andprocessual, generating emergent effects and systemic contradictions, especially through positive feedback mechanisms (Beinhocker, 2006: 66–7;Homer-Dixon, 2006).

In particular it is shown that the high-carbon economy/society is themassive contradiction that 20th-century capitalism in the rich North

192 Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3)




unleashed. It was the genie that was let out of the bottle and cannot ‘easily’be put back into that ‘bottle’. Capitalism is not able to control the excep-tional powers which it itself generated, especially through new forms ofexcessive consumption that are changing climates and eliminating someconditions of human life and its predictable improvement. This articleexplores how consuming to excess has come about and the ways in whichit is transforming some of the possibilities for future lives upon Earth.

Climate Change and Peak OilThese arguments about non-equilibrium and contradictions relate to themost significant issues facing contemporary human societies. First, then, theemerging sciences of global climate change rests upon analyses of complexsystems, feedbacks and nonlinearities (Lovelock, 2006; Pearce, 2007; Rialet al., 2004). Rial and his collaborators summarize how the Earth’s climatesystem is ‘highly nonlinear: inputs and outputs are not proportional, changeis often episodic and abrupt, rather than slow and gradual, and multipleequilibria are the norm’ (2004: 11; see also TCS 2005: issue 3). I show howthese features are central to the analysis of climate change.

Global temperatures have risen over the past century by at least0.74°C and this appears to be the consequence of higher levels of green-house gases within the Earth’s atmosphere (IPCC, 2007). Greenhouse gasestrap the sun’s rays. As a result of this ‘greenhouse’ effect the Earth warms.Such greenhouse gas levels and world temperatures will significantlyincrease over the next few decades. Climate change, which may well berapid and abrupt, constitutes a major transformation of human life andpatterns of economic and social organization. Even the Pentagon hasannounced that climate change will result in a global catastrophe, costingmillions of lives in wars and natural disasters. They say that its threat toglobal stability is far greater than that of terrorism (see Abbott et al., 2007;Homer-Dixon, 2006: 313).

The scientific evidence for climate change is much less uncertain thanwhen the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reportappeared in 1990. The organized actions of many scientists across the worldhave come to transform public debate, and this ‘power of science’ isprobably unique in the case of mobilizing actions and events around theperceived and looming crisis of global climate change, according to Stehr(2001). And the climate change orthodoxy has now largely marginalized the‘climate change deniers’, with 2005 marking the year when the climatechange debate tipped according to Lever-Tracy (2008: 448–50). Socialscience research has revealed the complex and ‘interested’ funding that hassupported much of the research that denies the thesis of climate change(McCright and Dunlap, 2000, 2010). However, none of this suggests thatthere is anything but uncertainty with regard to the sciences of climatechange, and especially of the general circulation models used to predictfuture rates of greenhouse gases and temperature increases (see Wynne,2010).

Urry – Consuming the Planet to Excess 193




Nevertheless by the time of its 2007 Report the IPCC was able todeclare that the warming of the world’s climate is now ‘unequivocal’ (2007).This is based upon extensive observations of increases in global average airand ocean temperatures, of widespread melting of snow and ice, and ofrising global average sea levels. The Report further shows that carbondioxide is the most important of the human-produced or anthropogenicgreenhouse gases. Its concentration levels exceed by far the natural rangeidentified over the past 650,000 years. Its high and rising levels must thusstem from ‘non-natural’ causes. And there are many elements of suchclimate change: increase in Arctic temperatures, reduced size of icebergs,melting of icecaps and glaciers, reduced permafrost, changes in rainfall,reduced biodiversity, new wind patterns, droughts, heat waves, tropicalcyclones and other extreme weather events (for popular science accountssee Kolbert, 2007; Linden, 2007; Lovelock, 2006; Lynas, 2007; Monbiot,2007; Pearce, 2007). Overall, then, there is high confidence amongst thethousands of IPCC scientists that global warming is in part the effect ofhuman activities which have dramatically raised carbon emissions.

Moreover, the IPCC Reports are based on reaching a scientific andpolitical consensus and as a consequence do not factor in all the potentialand more uncertain potential positive feedback effects. Such Reports thusunderestimate the likely future consequences. As world temperaturesincrease over the next few decades, these will almost certainly trigger furthertemperature rises as the Earth’s environmental systems cannot absorb theoriginal increases. Monbiot states that climate change begets climate change(2007). The most dramatic aspect of this positive feedback involves thewhole or partial melting of Greenland’s ice cap, which would change theGreat Ocean Conveyor and hence sea and land temperatures worldwide.This would include the turning off or modification of the Gulf Stream.Another potentially significant feedback factor involves how climate changehas led to the first recorded melting of the Siberian permafrost with thepotential subsequent release of billions of tons of methane that is even moredamaging than CO2 emissions (Sample, 2005). Thus various diverse yetinterconnected changes within the Earth’s environmental systems arecreating a vicious circle of accumulative disruption, or ‘sudden and disrup-tive climate change’ according to a range of climate change scientists(McCracken et al., 2008). This is occurring ‘with speed and violence’(Pearce, 2007). Indeed, the study of ice cores shows that in previous glacialand inter-glacial periods abrupt and rapid changes occurred in the Earth’stemperature. Earth, according to Pearce (2007: 21), does not engage ingradual change. Rapid changes have been the norm, not the exception.Moreover, temperatures at the time of the last Ice Age were only 5°C colderthan they are now. And in the Arctic recent increases in temperature havebeen really marked, with feedbacks creating local warming of 3–5°C overthe past 30 years.

With ‘business as usual’ and no significant reductions in high-carbonsystems, the stock of greenhouse gases could treble by the end of the





century. The Stern Review states that there is a 50 percent risk of more thana 5°C increase in temperatures by 2100, and this would transform theworld’s physical and human geography through a 5–20 percent reduction inworld consumption levels (2007: 3). Even a temperature increase worldwideof 3°C is completely beyond the experience of humans and would transformboth human and animal life as it has been known (see the possible scenariosin Lynas, 2007).

Thus the overall consequences of such unique changes will substan-tially reduce the standard of living, the capabilities of life around the worldand overall population as catastrophic impacts begin, starting off in the‘poor’ and less resilient South (see Roberts and Parks, 2006). The WorldHealth Organization calculated as early as 2000 that over 150,000 deathsare ‘caused’ each year by climate change, such changes being global, cross-generational and concentrated in the poor South. While the planet willendure, many forms of human habitation will not. Stern (2006: i) argues thatclimate change is ‘the greatest and widest-ranging market failure’, now ofcourse sitting alongside many other examples of market failure after October2008. And according to Lovelock: ‘there is no large negative feedback thatwould countervail temperature rise’ (2006: 35).

These and other authorities are indeed developing what we can terma ‘new catastrophism’ in environmental and social analysis. Such cata-strophist writers include the President of the UK’s Royal Society, MartinRees, former UK Chief Scientist, David King, and James Hansen, Bush’sclimate change adviser. There are a stunning range of other catastrophisttexts appearing in the second half of this decade (including Davis, 2006;Diamond, 2005; Homer-Dixon, 2006; Kolbert, 2007; Lynas, 2007; Pearce,2007; Perrow, 2007).

And one crucial reason for the emergence of such catastrophistthinking is how climate change is increasingly difficult to separate out as adistinct and limited ‘cause’ of changing weathers. Humans, especiallythrough the last couple of centuries, have transformed the weather so that,as Hulme (2010) argues, there is no such thing as natural weather any more,only ‘human weather’. Thus there is no possibility of simply stabilizingweather systems or indeed any other system (Hulme, 2010). Some commen-tators now talk of the development of the anthropocene as a distinct periodin planetary development.

Climate change is especially intersecting with a global energy crisis(see Homer-Dixon, 2006, on the complex interconnections). Today’s globaleconomy is deeply dependent upon, and embedded into, abundant cheapoil. Most industrial, agricultural, commercial, domestic and consumersystems are built around the plentiful supply of ‘black gold’ (and gas, seeDarley, 2004). As Homer-Dixon notes: ‘oil powers virtually all movement ofpeople, materials, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods – inside our countries and around the world’ (2006: 81). It is remarkably versatile,convenient and, during the 20th century, was relatively cheap. Rifkin moregenerally argues: ‘Like Rome, the industrial nations have now created a vast





and complex technological and institutional infrastructure to sequester andharness energy’ (2002: 62; see Homer-Dixon, 2006, for parallels with therise and fall of the Roman Empire). This infrastructure was a 20th-centuryphenomenon, with the US as the disproportionately high-energy producingand consuming society. Its economy and society were based upon the combi-nation of automobility and electricity. While the US possesses 5 percent ofthe world’s population, it consumes a quarter of the world’s energy andproduces almost a quarter of global carbon emissions (Nye, 1999: 6). Andit is predicted that, with business-as-usual, global energy consumptionwould increase 2.46 times between 2000 and 2050 (Homer-Dixon,2006: 328).

Yet the peaking of oil supplies occurred in the US as far back as 1971and oil production worldwide is now probably peaking. This is because newoil fields, and especially giant fields, have not been discovered at the samerate as they were discovered during most of the 20th century (Heinberg,2005; Homer-Dixon, 2006: ch. 4; Rifkin, 2002: ch. 2; but see P. Jackson,2006). Energy is thus increasingly expensive and there will be frequentshortages. This is especially so with the world’s population continuing toincrease in size, its profligate consumption of oil to move almost everythingincluding especially water, and its exceptional rate of current and futureurbanization. There is not enough oil to fuel such worldwide energy systems,with experts estimating that global consumption would, with business asusual, double by 2050 (Homer-Dixon, 2006: 174). Thus there will probablybe significant economic downturns, more resource wars and lower popula-tion levels. Rifkin claims that the oil age is ‘winding down as fast as itrevved up’ (2002: 174). The recent development of the Transition Townsmovement, which seeks to move from ‘oil dependency to local resilience’,well captures the urgency and global significance of what some call the‘petroleum interval’ in human history, a brief century or so, the Age of EasyOil between oil’s first discovery in 1859 and its demise in the early yearsof this century (Hopkins, 2008: 20–1). Kunstler considers the systemseffects of such peaking:

At peak and just beyond, there is massive potential for system failures of allkinds, social, economic, and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point.Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, allbets are off about civilization’s future. (2006: 65; see also Homer-Dixon,2006)

The crucial issue is how societies around the world manage what some termthe ‘energy descent’ at a time of potentially huge changes involving climatechange and large increases in urban populations (which use more oil andother expensive energy than do rural populations). Almost certainly thesehigh-energy systems will not simply continue. And yet, according to (formeroil executive) Leggett, the ‘Empire of Oil’ is ‘without doubt the most powerfulinterest group on the planet’, more powerful than most nation-states (2005:





12, 15). Hence ‘The Great Addiction’ (to oil) remained, with oil becomingvital to virtually everything now undertaken on the planet. And these vestedinterests of private and public oil corporations have misrepresented the sizeof their reserves, suggesting that the peaking of global oil is further away intime. Moreover, American and European foreign policies are significantlydriven by global oil interests. In the US the desire to increase access to oilsources from outside the US, since its decline in oil production commencedfrom around 1970, is the context for its attempted subjugation of MiddleEastern oil interests in the name of the ‘freedom’ of citizens to drive and toheat/air-condition their homes (something now seen as problematic by Presidents Bush and Obama).

Adding to increasing temperatures and reduced oil is the growth inthe world’s population by about 900 million people per decade, the largestabsolute increase in human history (Gallopin et al., 1997). By the end ofthe 20th century the world population passed 6 billion and is expected toreach 9.1 billion by 2050, if global heating, the peaking of oil, wars orglobal epidemics do not intervene. And the world went urban on 23 May2007, this being ‘transition day’, when the world’s urban populationexceeded the rural for the first time.1 One consequence is that the propor-tion of the world’s population that are poor is inexorably rising, with theproliferation of massive ‘global slums’ according to Davis (2006; Homer-Dixon, 2006: 65).

The following are some of the dramatic consequences of these inter-dependent developments (see Dennis and Urry, 2009, and Homer-Dixon,2006, for further detail). First, there is an increase in the number and scaleof ‘failed states’ (and failed ‘city states’ such as New Orleans in late 2005).These states are unable to cope with oil shortages and the droughts, heat-waves, extreme weather events, flooding, desertification and so on. Theirinstabilities spread across borders, affecting neighbouring regimes throughforced migrations, weakened public health and degraded conditions of life(Paskal, 2007).

Second, rising sea levels will involve the flooding of roads, railways,transit systems and airport runways in coastal areas, especially throughsurges brought on by more intense storms. This will disrupt the global traveland communications patterns established in the 20th century, beginningfirst in the world’s paradise islands (for example, through the potentialdestruction of the Maldives) and beaches (which may also lose out throughbecoming unbearably hot as is now feared in the Eastern Mediterranean).It will also disrupt the supplies of food and other basic resources.

Third, there will be insecurities in the supply of clean water. It iscalculated that a temperature increase of 2.1°C would expose up to a stag-gering 3 billion people to water shortages. This is partly because only 0.77percent of all fresh water, less than 0.007 percent of all the water on theEarth, is available for human use. And modern food production is colossallywasteful of water. So there are huge demands from growing populations forwater, especially from those living in the rapidly growing mega-cities who





have to buy and transport, often using carbon-based systems, their food andwater from outside the city.

And, fourth, there are increasingly significant problems of foodsecurity as a result of flooding, desertification and generally rising graincosts. The diversion of agro-fuel production has already helped to increasefood prices, leading to large protest marches. This pattern is being repeatedin many poorer countries around the world. Further, much food productiondepends upon carbon fuels in order to seed and maintain crops, to harvestand process them and then to transport them to market. As the cost of carbonproduction increases through shortages of oil, food could be priced out ofthe reach of much of the world’s population. And yet, at the same time, thereare more extensive food miles. A Swedish study found that the food milesinvolved in a typical breakfast (apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream,orange juice, sugar) equalled the circumference of the Earth (Pfeiffer, 2006:25). These consequences are far worse in the poor South since there is herea ‘climate of injustice’, especially with the potential engendering of up to50 million environmental refugees as early as 2010 (Adams, 2005; Robertsand Parks, 2007).

High Mobility SystemsHow then did the genie of climate change get let out of the bottle? It isa problem, as noted above, of the 20th century. In that century a numberof powerful high-carbon path-dependent systems were set in place, lockedin through various economic and social institutions. And as the centuryunfolded those lock-ins meant that the world was left with a high, growingand contradictory carbon legacy. Electricity, the steel-and-petroleum car,and suburban living and associated consumption are three of thoselocked-in legacies. The 20th century is wreaking its revenge upon the21st century and massively limiting the choices and opportunities avail-able within the new century. And to slow down, let alone reverse, increas-ing carbon emissions and temperatures requires the total reorganizationof social life, nothing more and nothing less. The nature of ‘social life’ iscentral to the causes, the consequences and the possible ‘mitigations’involved in global heating. Yet, in the major analyses of climate change,there are no good analyses of how to bring about transformed low-carbon human activities that could come to be locked-in and move societies into a different path- dependent pattern (although see analysesin T. Jackson, 2006a).

Indeed, most analyses of climate change are written by scientists forother scientists or for governments. They are uninformed by social science,except economics, although Rial and his co-authors emphasize the need forresearchers to build bridges across artificial disciplinary boundaries (2004:33). This neglect of social science is true of the very significant SternReview, which was written by an economist and does not analyse how variedsocial practices are organized over time and space, and the complexities ofsystem transformation (see Lever-Tracy, 2008; Urry, 2008). Changing human





activities is viewed by Stern as a matter of modifying individuals’ economicincentives, especially through variations in tax rates (Stern, 2007: Part IV).

Around the world, though, there are various organizations and statesthat are clear that there is a limited window of opportunity within whichclimate change could be slowed down. James Hansen argues that: ‘We areon the precipice of climate change tipping points beyond which there is noredemption’ (quoted in Pearce, 2007: xxiv). After that window of opportu-nity the various ‘human activities’ generating increased carbon emissionswill make further warming of the planet inevitable and probably cata-strophic. This is similar to how what Lovelock (2006) terms the revenge ofGaia is producing ‘global heating’. Climate change is the outcome of enormously powerful systems that are rather like a ‘juggernaut’ careering atfull speed to the edge of the cliff (Giddens, 1990). And slowing down thejuggernaut even slightly requires the engendering of equally if not morepowerful systems than those that are currently powering it towards this fastapproaching abyss (see the various ‘catastrophist’ analyses above).

In this article I focus upon high-carbon mobility systems (see Urry,2008, on the specific implications for car systems).While in 1800 people inthe US travelled 50 metres a day, they now travel 50 km a day (Buchanan,2002: 121). Today world citizens move 23 billion km each year; by 2050 itis predicted this will increase fourfold to 106 billion km (Schafer and Victor,2000: 171). Carbon use within transport accounts for 14 percent of totalgreenhouse emissions and is the second fastest growing source of such emis-sions. There has been the development of social practices which presup-pose huge increases in the speed of travel (by humans) and in the distancescovered (by both goods and humans), although not so much in the timeactually spent travelling.

Forms of life, we might say, are now ‘mobilized’. The growth of newkinds of long-distance leisure, the establishment of globally significantthemed environments, the growing significance of car and lorry transportwithin China and India, the rapid growth of cheap air travel, and theincreased ‘miles’ travelled by the world’s 90,000 ships, by manufacturedgoods, foodstuffs and friends, all index such mobilized forms of life (seeLarsen et al., 2006, on ‘friendship’ miles). Girardet summarizes by suggest-ing that we no longer live in a ‘civilization’ but in a ‘mobilization’, of naturalresources, people and products (1999: 12).

Central, then, has been the reconfiguring of economy and society around‘mobilities’. There is an emergent ‘mobility complex’, a new system ofeconomy, society and resources spreading around the globe (see Urry, 2007).Long-distance movement for tiny numbers of the population is not new; whatis now distinct is the development of a ‘mobility complex’. This involves anumber of interdependent components that, in their totality, remake consump-tion, pleasure, work, friendship and family life. These various components are:

■ the contemporary scale of physical movement around the world■ the diversity of mobility systems now in play





■ the especial significance of the self-expanding automobility system andits risks

■ the elaborate interconnections of physical movement and communica-tions

■ the development of mobility domains that by-pass national societies■ the significance of movement to contemporary governmentality■ the development of places of excess that have to be travelled to■ the development of a language of mobility, the capacity to compare and

to contrast places from around the world■ an increased importance of multiple mobilities for people’s social and

emotional lives.

Bauman argues that, as a consequence of this complex: ‘Mobility climbs tothe rank of the uppermost among the coveted values – and the freedom tomove, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fastbecomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times’(1998: 2). In particular, consumption in the ‘rich North’ towards the end ofthe 20th century escapes from specific sites, as populations are mobile,moving in, across and beyond ‘territories’. As significant numbers of peoplemove around and develop personalized life projects through being freedfrom certain structures, so their consumption patterns and social networksare extended and made more elaborate. Many lives come to be less deter-mined by site-specific structures, of class, family, age, career and especiallyneighbourhoods (Beck, 1999; Giddens, 1994). The site-specific disciplin-ing of consumption is less marked. At least for the rich third of the world,partners, family and friends are more a matter of choice, increasinglyspreading themselves around the world. There is a ‘supermarket’ of friendsand acquaintances, and they depend upon an extensive array of inter -dependent systems of movement in order to connect with this distributedarray of networks by meeting up from time to time within distinct places(Larsen et al., 2006). Paralleling this is the way that touring the world ishow the world is increasingly performed, with many people being connois-seurs and collectors of places. This connoisseurship, and hence the furtheramplification of mobility, applies to very many places and practices, suchas good beaches, clubs, views, walks, mountains, unique history, surf, musicscene, historic remains, sources of good jobs, food, landmark buildings, gayscene, party atmosphere, universities and so on (Sheller and Urry, 2004).

Contemporary capitalism thus presupposes and generates someincreasingly expressive bodies or habituses relatively detached from propin-quitous family and neighbourhoods. They are emotional, pleasure-seekingand novelty-acquiring. Such bodies are on the move, able to buy and indulgenew experiences located in new places and with new people. This developsthe ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). So as people escapethe disciplinary confines of family and local community based on slowmodes of travel, they then encounter a huge array of companies thatcomprise the experience economy. Capitalist societies involve new forms of





pleasure, with many elements or aspects of the body being commodified (forthose that can afford such services). Expressive capitalism develops into amobile and mobilizing capitalism, with transformed and, on occasions,overindulged bodily habituses. At the same time, many other people areemployed in ‘servicing’ such habituses, often also on the move (see Lashand Urry, 1994, for early formulations of this mutual dependence). Thereare many ways in which the body is commodified in and through it movingabout and being moved about, through what might be described, in the late20th century, as ‘binge mobility’, both domestically and internationally.

Excess CapitalismLate 20th-century capitalism generated ‘excess capitalism’ and this signifi-cantly magnified the high carbon consumption of the ‘rich North’. Such ashift in consumption can be examined by reference to the changing placesof leisure. The early development of seaside resorts in northern Europeprovided original places of pleasure (see Walton, 2007, on ‘riding onrainbows’ at Blackpool). These sites of working-class mass pleasure werepremised upon a number of strong and marked contrasts, between work andleisure, home and away, workspace and leisure space, and ordinary timeand holiday time. Pleasure derived from these contrasts, to be away for aweek from domestic and industrial routines and places. Such places ofleisure and pleasure provided a chance to ‘let your hair down’ for a weekin a site of carnival before returning to normal (Shields, 1991). And thatpleasure was highly regulated through the co-presence of one’s family and,to some degree, one’s neighbourhood, who also travelled at the same timeto the same place. Leisure we might say was neighbourhood-based evenwhere the neighbourhood was temporarily on the move.

This was, I want to suggest, ‘disciplined’ pleasure with conspicuousconsumption specific to individuals. Discipline came to be realized withinspecific sites of confinement such as the family, local community, school,prison, asylum, factory, clinic and so on (Foucault, 1976, 1991; Goffman,1968; Lacy, 2005). Individuals moved from one such site to another, eachpossessing its own laws, procedures and mode of regulation. Surveillancewas based upon fairly direct co-presence within that specific locus of power.The panopticon was ‘local’ and more or less directly visual. Power was inter-nalized, face-to-face and localized within that site. And consumption wasspecific and regulated through each site, including the family and the‘neighbourhood’. It was based upon slow modes of travel (except for theoccasional annual break to Blackpool and other places of temporarypleasure). These disciplinary societies with their high levels of spatial andfunctional differentiation reached their peak in mid-20th-century Europeand North America.

But over the 20th century another system of power emerges, whatDeleuze terms societies of control. Here power is fluid, de-centred and lesssite specific (1995). The sites of disciplinary confinement become less physically marked. Critiques of the effects of ‘institutionalization’ led to the





closure of former places of confinement. Treatment and correction increas-ingly take place within the ‘community’, but a community involving fastmodes of travel and which is not so much neighbourhood based. Surveil-lance is less face-to-face. Many sets of social relations are not spatiallyinternalized within specific sites. Gender relations are less confined to thefamily, work is both globalized and in part carried out in the home, school-ing partly occurs within the media and so on. States increasingly utilizecomplex control systems of recording, measuring and assessing populationsthat are intermittently on the move, beginning with the passport but nowinvolving a ‘digital order’ increasingly able to track and trace individuals asthey move about seeking new places of excess (Torpey, 2000).

And this undermining of neighbourhoods was given a hugely enhancedemphasis with the development of ‘neo-liberalism’ as the predominant formof economic and social restructuring over the past 20 to 30 years. This globalizing doctrine spread out from its birthplace in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago through the extraordinary influ-ence of the ‘Chicago boys’ (Harvey, 2005a, 2005b; Klein, 2007). By 1999Chicago School alumni included 25 government ministers and more than adozen central bank presidents (Klein, 2007: 166). Neo-liberalism assertsthe power and importance of private entrepreneurship, private propertyrights, the freeing of markets and the freeing of trade. It involves de -regulating such private activities and companies, the privatization of previously ‘state’ or ‘collective’ services, the undermining of the collectivepowers of workers and providing the conditions for the private sector to findever-new sources of profitable activity. Neo-liberalism seeks to minimize therole of the state, both because it is presumed that states will always beinferior to markets in ‘guessing’ what is necessary to do and because statesare thought to be easily corruptible by private interest groups. It is presumedthat the market is ‘natural’ and will move to equilibrium if only unnaturalforces or elements do not get in the way, especially through countless‘gambles’ being freely made on alternative futures (Sheller, 2008a: 108).Neo-liberalism elevates market exchanges over and above all other sets ofconnections between people. It asserts that the ‘market’ is the source ofvalue and virtue. Any deficiencies in the market are presumed to be theresult of imperfections of that market.

However, states are often crucial to eliminating these ‘unnatural’forces, to destroying through ‘shocks’ many pre-existing sets of rules, regu-lations and forms of life that are seen as slowing down economic growthand constraining the private sector (Klein, 2007). And sometimes thatdestruction is exercised through violence and attacks upon democraticprocedures, as with Augusto Pinochet’s first neo-liberal experiment inChile in 1973. On many occasions, the freedom of the market is broughtabout by the state that is used to wipe the slate clean and to imposesweeping free-market solutions. These have been found from 1973 onwardsacross most of the world. The state is central to what Klein (2007) termsthe rise of ‘disaster capitalism’.





Harvey, moreover, describes neo-liberal processes as involving ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2005b: ch. 4). Peasants are thrown off theirland, collective property rights are made private, indigenous rights arestolen and turned into private opportunities, rents are extracted frompatents, general knowledge is turned into intellectual ‘property’, there isbiopiracy, the state forces itself to hive off its own collective activities, tradeunions are smashed, and financial instruments and flows redistribute incomeand rights away from productive activities.

This neo-liberalism has become the dominant global orthodoxy,articulated and acted upon within most corporations, many universities,most state bodies and especially international organizations such as theWorld Trade Organization, World Bank and the International MonetaryFund. Harvey summarizes how neo-liberalism is ‘incorporated into thecommon-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand theworld’ (2005a: 3).

And one output of neo-liberalism over the past two to three decadeshas been to generate capitalist places of consumption excess. These ofteninvolve ‘dispossessions’, of workers’ rights, of peasant land-holdings, of thestate’s role in leisure, of neighbourhood organizations, and of customaryrights. Each such place or zone of excess is characterized by a sub-set ofthe following characteristics. There are distinct zones that are travelled to,often made possible by large infrastructural projects; there are gates control-ling entry and exit; they are highly commercialized with many simulatedenvironments; there is only pleasure, no guilt; norms of behaviour are un -regulated by family/neighbourhood; there are liminal modes of consump-tion; bodies are subject to commodification; there is digital control; thesesites are increasingly globally known for their consumption/pleasure excess;and they are sites of potential mass addiction. Davis and Monk refer to theseplaces of consumption excess as ‘evil paradises’, with many examples nowto be found around the contemporary world (2007).

People are thus forced from site-specific forms of surveillance to morevaried forms of activity, often distant from neighbourhood and involvingmultiple kinds of movement in order just to keep up. So everyone who canrequires a more expensive bundle of goods and especially services in orderto be able to participate without deficiency. Sen argues that to lead a lifewithout shame:

. . . to be able to visit and entertain one’s friends, to keep track of what isgoing on and what others are talking about, and so on, requires a more expen-sive bundle of goods and services in a society that is generally richer. (citedin T. Jackson, 2006b: 374)

The spreading of consumerism to multiple forms beyond neighbourhoodthus gets ratcheted up, since most other people’s social practices also movebeyond neighbourhood. It is increasingly necessary to move about and toacquire consumer goods and services that are from ‘elsewhere’. This is





because large numbers of one’s workmates, friends and family are alsoorganized in social practices that are also organized ‘beyond neighbour-hood’. This necessity to depend upon huge amounts of energy to movepeople and objects on a huge scale in order to live what may seem to be no‘better’ a life is thus a massive contradiction of contemporary capitalism,somewhat analogous to that examined by Hirsch in his classic analysis ofthe self-defeating nature of leapfrogging in relationship to positional competition that leaves everyone no better off (1977: 39–40).

Giddens (2007a) analyses such patterns as stemming from anincreased ‘freedom’. And part of that is the freedom to become ‘addicted’,to be emotionally and/or physically dependent upon excessive consumptionof certain products and services of global capitalism, legal, illegal or semi-legal. Places of excess that get travelled to are places of potentially signifi-cant addiction. Giddens suggests that compulsive behaviour is common inmodern society because it is:

. . . linked to lifestyle choice. We are freer now than 40 years ago to decidehow to live our lives. Greater autonomy means the chance of more freedom.The other side of that freedom, however, is the risk of addiction. The rise ofeating disorders coincided with the advent of supermarket development inthe 1960s. Food became available without regard to season and in greatvariety, even to those with few resources. (Giddens, 2007a)

One astonishing global statistic is that there are now over 1 billion obesepeople, more or less equal to the number of those who are underfed andundernourished (Homer-Dixon, 2006: 198). Overall, the proliferation ofchoices involves multiple mobilities, the having available of an astonishingarray of food, products, places, services, friends, family and gambling. Thereare thus many potential addictions ‘beyond neighbourhood’. High-carbonsystems have come to ensure such plentiful and increasing choice. And aseveryone experiences the ‘pleasures’ of such choice, so all come to becoerced into similar practices in order to ‘function without deficiency’ asSen puts it (see T. Jackson, 2006b: 373–4). All get coerced into being ‘freeto choose’, with even the oil man President Bush using the language ofaddiction to refer to the future unsustainable American way of life based onoil and an addiction to consumption (see Whybrow, 2005, on ‘when more isnot enough’).

And the currently iconic place of excessive addictive choice is Dubai,as it has moved from being a major producer of oil to a major site of excessconsumption, especially of the oil to get people there and to fuel the sitesof consumption excess (see the YouTube video on Do Buy). It is said to bethe world’s largest building site, with dozens of megaprojects including thepalm islands, the ‘island world’, the world’s only 7 star hotel, a domed skiresort, the world’s tallest building (Burj Dubai) and carnivorous dinosaurs(Davis, 2007). This is a place of monumental excess, where the goal is tobe number 1 in the world. If Dubai is to be the luxury-consumer paradiseof the Middle East and South Asia ‘it must ceaselessly strive for visual and





environmental excess’ (Davis, 2007: 52). And it achieves this through architectural gigantism and perfectibility with simulacra more perfect thanthe original. Dubai might be described as a vast gated community of excesswith state and private enterprises being virtually indistinguishable (Davis,2007: 61). This is a place of vice, of overconsumption, prostitution, drinkand gambling, where the only guilt in this nominally Islamic country is overnot consuming to the ‘limit’. This is all made possible by migrant contractlabourers from Pakistan and India who are bound to a single employer andsubject to totalitarian control. Indeed, labour relations in such places areexcessively exploitative, although this is carried to the extreme in Dubaiwhere almost all labour is imported and workers’ passports are removed onentry (Davis, 2007: 64–6). This is truly accumulation through dispossession(Harvey, 2005b).

There are many other examples of such neo-liberal exemplars ofexcess (see examples in Cronin and Hetherington, 2008; Davis and Monk,2007; Gottdiener, 2000). Sheller describes such processes within theCaribbean, one of the original places of paradise. Here the ‘all-inclusiveresort’ carves out spaces for liminal consumption largely cut off from thesurrounding territory and from local people, apart from those providing‘excess services’. Gated and often fortified, they secure temporary consump-tion of excess away from the prying eyes of both locals and those back athome. Indeed, on occasions whole islands are gated and provide securedsites for consumption. Crucial also to much Caribbean tourism are hugecruise ships, which are floating gated communities again organized aroundconsuming to excess. The largest cruise ship in the history of the world hasrecently been launched by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. It includes 1815guest staterooms, the first-ever surf park at sea, cantilevered whirlpoolsextending 12 feet beyond the sides of the ship, a waterpark complete withinteractive sculpture fountains, geysers and a waterfall, a rock-climbing walland the Royal Promenade with various shops and cafes all located withinthe middle of the ocean (www.royalcaribbean.com, accessed May 2008; seealso Sheller, 2008b).

More generally, Sheller argues that such developments are paradig-matic of recent trends, effects of neo-liberal developments of migration andreturn visits, resort development and new forms of select tourism, and thesplintering of public infrastructures. She particularly investigates oneplanned development involving ‘starchitect’ Zaha Hadid on the island DellisCay in the Caribbean. This is aimed, we might say, at the ‘private jet-set’,those who accumulate houses and servants as others accumulate cars.Sheller (2008b) summarizes how entire Caribbean islands are being curatedinto exclusive resorts for the super-rich, and removed from the control andgovernance of local communities and their governments. Elsewhere shedescribes how ‘Atlantic City is not alone in spawning a virulent form ofcasino capitalism and real-estate speculation; it is just one example of awider global trend in economies of excess, spectacle, and speculation’ ofthe sort I have elaborated here (Sheller, 2008a: 123).





It might be said, though, that this kind of ‘casino capitalism’ onlypertains to a small sector of the world’s consumers, to the super-rich, andis thus not of wider economic, social and political significance. But this isnot the case. First, conspicuous consumption generates places in whichmany other people have to work, often for very low wages and in degradingconditions. Moreover, most of the consumption excesses I have examinedhere are productive of vast amounts of illegal or semi-legal work. Second,these places set up exemplars of development which developers elsewhereseek to emulate in order to produce more mass-market versions of suchiconic places of excess. Third, these places often attract the super-rich‘offshore’. This reduces the tax-take of states and reduces the level and scaleof public provision. Fourth, these developments exclude many people andhence reduce the availability of public space worldwide, as for instance withthe way that many beaches throughout the world are semi-closed to ‘locals’.Fifth, these places further support and extend the mobility field and hencefurther heighten inequalities. Sixth, these dreamworlds for the super-richprovide models of lives that, through multiple media and global travel,inflame the desires for similar kinds of often addictive experience from partsof the world’s population. As Davis and Monk argue:

On a planet where more than 2 billion people subsist on two dollars or lessa day, these dreamworlds enflame desires – for infinite consumption, totalsocial exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality –that are clearly incompatible with the ecological and moral survival ofhumanity. (2007: xv)

Finally, these places are a yet further extension of the hyper-high-carbonsocieties of the 20th century, through their gigantic building, their profli-gate use of energy and water, and the vast use of oil to transport people inand out.

Excess has been used in this analysis to capture a series of shifts: fromlow-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of disciplineto societies of control, and from specialized and differentiated zones ofconsumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess in placesof waste. Veblen famously analysed wasteful consumption (1912: 85, 96).The possession of wealth is shown by the wasting of time, effort and goods.In order to be conspicuous it must be wasteful. He applies this notion to theconsumption practices of individuals. As we have seen, what happens inthe neo-liberal phase of capitalism is the transformation of whole cities’,regions’ or islands’ economies/societies into centres of ‘wasteful’ productionand consumption. Much capitalist production in the neo-liberal era takesplace without regard to need or public good. So the scale and impact of‘waste’ production has moved dramatically upwards, especially so with thiseconomy of waste focusing upon gambles on the future, whether on thecasino table or global commodities or junk bonds or sub-prime mortgages.It is a kind of casual production and consumption as places come and go,





being produced and then used up (as Sheller, 2008a, shows with AtlanticCity). One consequence of such systemic production and resulting highstatus from the consumption of excess and waste is to generate furtherupward shifts in carbon emissions.

Furthermore, Bataille talks of the ‘excess energy’ that cannot bedeployed for a system’s growth but which nevertheless has to be used up,rather like the heat that has to be used up thermodynamically in so-calleddissipative structures (1991: 20). This he refers to as the ‘accursed share’,the surplus energy that a system must expend through luxury goods andwasteful consumption. It is, from the viewpoint of general economy, func-tionally necessary (Sheller, 2008a: 110). But with regard to the overall rela-tionship of the economy with its environment, it is waste. In the neo-liberalperiod these systems of excess production and consumption have becomedominant as societies of discipline morph into societies of control, andspecialized and differentiated zones of consumption morph into mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Thus economies and societies of suchan accursed share, of excess, have moved ‘the world’ in seemingly in -exorable fashion towards more extensive carbon consumption and intopossibly irreversible climate change. The adaptive and evolving relation-ships between enormously powerful systems, especially those of a de -regulated economy and excessive forms of consumption, are catastrophicallycareering at full speed, it seems, to the edge of the abyss.

FuturesSo, if global heating continues to escalate through positive feedback loopsthen there is a limited range of possible scenarios for the future (see onscenarios Foresight, 2006; Forum for the Future, 2008; Gallopin et al.,1997). One possible scenario for the middle of this century is what Foresight terms ‘Tribal Trading’ and what elsewhere I term ‘RegionalWarlordism’ (Urry, 2007: ch. 13). This scenario involves the substantialbreakdown of many mobility, energy and communication connectionscurrently straddling the world. There would be a plummeting standard ofliving, a relocalization of mobility patterns, an increasing emphasis uponlocal warlords controlling recycled forms of mobility and weaponry, andrelatively weak imperial or national forms of governance. There would beincreasing separation between different regions, or ‘tribes’. The first placesto be washed away would be paradise beaches, islands and other coastalsettlements of excess (see Amelung et al., 2007, on the implications ofglobal climate change for tourism flows). September 2005 New Orleansshows what this scenario would be like for a major city in the rich butunequal ‘North’ (see Giddens, 2007b: 156–7; Hannam et al., 2006). Systemsof repair would dissolve, with localized recycling of bikes, cars, trucks,computers and phone systems. Only the super-rich would travel far, andthey would do so in the air, within armed helicopters or light aircraft, withvery occasional tourist-type space trips to escape the hell on Earth in space,the new place of excess (The Economist, 2004; see also Cwerner, 2006).





Those who could find security in gated and armed encampments would doso, with the neo-liberal privatizing of collective functions and the furthergating of zones of excess pleasure. Elsewhere I elaborated two other possiblescenarios for 2050, local sustainability and a digital panopticon (Urry,2008). The likely outcomes are increasingly constrained by adaptive andco-evolving systems and the emergent contradictions that the world hasinherited from the 20th century.

Diamond (2005) notes how environmental problems have in the pastproduced the ‘collapse’ of societies. And he suggests that human-causedclimate change, the build-up of toxic chemicals in the environment andenergy shortages will produce abrupt, potentially catastrophic effects in the21st century. Increased urbanization, growing resource depletion, popula-tion expansion and accelerated climate change constrain the possibilities ofre-engineering future mobilities and energy uses so as to avoid such ‘societalcollapse’. But it may already be too late because of those high-carbon soci-eties of the 20th century and their enduring path-dependent impacts. Leahymaintains, after reviewing potential energy sources available in the 21stcentury, that there ‘is no way forward without a drastic reduction inconsumption and production. As far as energy is concerned, the reductionhas to be maintained indefinitely’ (2008: 480; see also Homer-Dixon, 2006:250).

Twentieth-century capitalism generated the most striking of contradic-tions. Its pervasive, mobile and promiscuous commodification involvedutterly unprecedented levels of energy production and consumption, a high-carbon society whose dark legacy we are beginning to reap. This contradic-tion could result in a widespread reversal of many of the systems thatconstitute capitalism as it turns into its own gravedigger. As Davis and Monkapocalyptically argue: ‘the indoor ski slopes of Dubai and private bisonherds of Ted Turner represent the ruse of reason by which the neoliberalorder both acknowledges and dismisses the fact that the current trajectoryof human existence is unsustainable’ (2007: xvi). Excess pleasure wouldseem to be breeding an exceptional excess of disaster; this is another illus-tration of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’. In the 21st century, capitalism isnot able to control those powers that it called up by its spells and set inmotion during the unprecedented high-carbon 20th century, which reachedits peak of global wastefulness within the neo-liberal period.

Specifically with regard to mobilities, there will not be an end tomovement. But there may be much less movement chosen for connoisseur-ship and to establish co-presence, and much more to escape the heat,flooding, drought and extreme weather events. Climate change will, it seems,generates tens of millions of ‘environmental refugees’, sweeping around theworld and scratching to get inside one or other set of gates before they areshut for good. The sorcerer has indeed conjured up some spectacular spellsfor 21st-century magicians to deal with.





Note

1. See: http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2007/may/104.html (accessed 28 May 2008).

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John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University.Recent books include Mobilities (2007), Aeromobilities (co-edited withS. Cwerner and S. Kesselring, 2009), After the Car (with Kingsley Dennis,2009), Mobile Lives (with Anthony Elliott, 2010). [email: [email protected]]





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