There's a substantial and rising probability that the majority of Americans WILL cut down their buying relatively soon, only not by choice.  Our overdue mortgage is likely to be foreclosed soon, and bankrupts have very little spending money.

All wealth, which makes consumption possible, rests on a foundation of natural capital.  The increment of new natural capital available for use each year is about 1/400th of the amount we consume.  All the other forms of our material wealth were fixed when the earth coalesced from galactic debris.  Only energy allows us to turn dirt into wealth and comfort.

However, each year, we burn through about 400 years worth of that natural capital, which is what all our other wealth depends on.

(As an unintended consequence, we are close to exhausting our  natural endowment in a benign and stable climate.  Simply dealing with this one consequence of consumerism--which is a matter of life or death for hundreds of millions of people, possibly billions--will further deplete our stores of wealth.)

To treat the question posed, by definition there is no such thing as sustainable consumerism, because inherent in the term consumerism is consumption beyond that needed to sustain life while remaining within the limits of current (natural) income.

To steal a metaphor that others have used, asking whether there is such a thing as sustainable consumerism is like asking whether the lifestyle of an heiress like Paris Hilton could be sustained if she spent, each year, all the current income from her trust funds AND 399 times as much from the principal in the trusts.  No matter how large the fortune, the answer is no.

This topic is often discussed in broad strokes with regard to what we as a culture on this continent or in this hemisphere need, or will have to do. For many of us it's mostly common sense, but I think an important, if not essential step toward an adaption that will reduce the damage our civilization creates should focus more on reducing the distance our money travels. This is not a new idea of course. E.F. Schumacher brought his economic principles to the U.S. and Europe back in the 1970s with the publication of "Small Is Beautiful" (Economics as if people mattered). Even before Schumacher was the Austrian economist Leopold Kohr, who broke ground with the principles of "human scale" and breaking up large nations into smaller entities back in the 1940s and 50s.

We can easily point our fingers at massive industries and demand they make the changes we want so we can continue our lives of comfort and convenience, but I also believe unless we shift our thinking away from the "bigger is better" syndrome, we fail to see the tree in the forest. We can forcast all we want about the future, but the truly effecient and practical change will only occur by weeding our own garden. In other words the most powerful changes are the ones we make personally and inside our immediate communities and environment.

I currently think it is irrational and naive to believe we can sustain the modern American lifestyle with the usual optimistic faith in technological innovation. I am optimistic, but my optimism is that we can change our minds before a catastrophic breakdown enforces it. It would certainly be less painful if we orchestrated our own social deconstruction, as opposed to picking up the pieces for a reconstruction.    

A E Fister

and still the most important. The biggest problem with green consumerism is the "more is better" baggage it drags along with it. We're already seeing this in the marketing of "green" homes by often well-meaning people who just don't get that the idea is actually to reduce our environmental footprint. A 6,000 s.f. McMansion recently won the Texas "green home of the year" award based as far as one can tell entirely on the sheer volume of "green" product bolted to it, without regard for its actual environmental performance.

The message of any kind of consumerism is "consume more". The message of environmental sanity has to be "consume less while living better".

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Umm, at the risk of sounding silly, aren't we all consumers? We need to consume to live, in simple biological terms, since we are not plants (which also consume minerals). The problem with 'consumption' is consumption in the American sense. So 'sustainable consumption' is entirely possible, just not at current levels with as many people as we have. Maybe not, maybe it is sustainable the way it is, many technocrats would propose as much.

And 'sustainable consumption' by who? The rich will always have their consumption sustained at much higher relative levels, no matter what the rest of the society does. This is a silly topic. 'Green consumption' might be a better conversation starter.

atreyger, replacing "sustainable" -- a word that, despite overuse, does have a technical, knowable meaning -- with a content-free adjective like Green DOES make the discussion silly.

The term "consumption" and "consumer" did not attain wide usage until the beginning of the 20th C. when the skeleton of the consumer culture began to take shape (automobility, early forms of credit cards, installment loans by stores to enable purchases, innovations in display, the first of the great department store chains, etc.)  Before then, calling someone a consumer might get you punched, because you just called them the Devil.  (See "Land of Desire," a great book about the rise of consumer culture as seen through the lens of Wannamakers in Philadelphia.)

If you look at The Natural Step, it provides a roadmap for sustainable living, which necessarily includes use of raw materials from nature--but not in amounts that overwhelm nature's ability to reincorporate them in natural cycles.  

In fact, that's a decent definition of consumption vs. use:  when you act as a consumer you create waste that cannot be handled by the natural systems that evolved over millenia to ensure that every "waste" product was actually a useful food for another organism.

So agreed that there is no such thing as sustainable consumption.  But that only requires that we change how we use the fruits of the earth, not that we ignore the concept of sustainability.