The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
make it easier to live well with nature.29
Fortunately, Joe and Jo College live in an environment that allows reconsideration and reconstruction of the way we live in the world: the college campus. Unlike most Americans in the workaday world, college students could easily wake up to systems thinking—to see the systems that operate beneath the surfaces of everyday life and to change them. In the college environment of hope and opportunity, why not practice the mapping and modeling of natural systems, including the altered stocks and flows that result from our ordinary consumption? Why not pay attention to the inputs and outputs of our natural and cultural systems, and to feedback loops in nature and culture? Why not consider the cultural resources that we have to change the systems we live in, aligning our human systems with the ecosystems of nature? Why not make our lives mean something?30
Academic success won’t mean much in a world of ecological failures, and a college degree won’t be so advantageous on a planet warmed by five degrees. The grade we get in biology won’t matter that much if we compromise the planet’s biological systems. Cleanliness may still be next to godliness, but it won’t seem so special if it sucks up the world’s freshwater supplies. Putting on a cosmetic face in the morning may make us more attractive, but it won’t matter much if the guy of our dreams is full of flame retardants or other cancer-causing chemicals. Indeed, if we’re not careful and committed to environmental activism, we might find ourselves up shit creek without a paddle.
Our biggest environmental impacts don’t usually happen before breakfast, but if we woke up to our place in the world, we would see the amazing intricacy of nature and our part in it, and the amazing damage we can do without thinking. We would begin to understand the nature of college culture, including the power of habit, the power of example, and the power of institutions. And we would begin to use this new knowledge of our culture to change the nature of our relationship with the natural world.
2
The Nature of Stuff
You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
Eric Hoffer
Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an everincreasing rate.
Victor Lebow, “Price Competition in 1955”
Our secret plan is this: We’re going to go on consuming the world until there’s no more to consume.
Daniel Quinn, “On Investments”
Since the earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature’s diversity is gone?
Donella Meadows, as quoted in Simple Prosperity (2008) by David Wann
Showered, shaved, and ready to take on the day, Joe and Jo College assemble what they need for class, in rooms that are overflowing with stuff: beds and desks, dressers and lamps, futons and lounge chairs, couches and carpets. The closets are crammed and the dressers are packed. Shoes are made for walking, but right now they’re just hiding under the bed. Electrical devices abound—TVs, stereos, computers, game consoles, refrigerators, clocks, phones, and iPods hum around the room—while books line up on shelves and stack in piles on the floor. Easy Mac and ramen noodles are stocked on other shelves, complemented by drinks in the fridge.1
In college and elsewhere, we’re stuffed. Caught in the haze of our morning routine, however, we don’t think too much about any of it—it all seems natural and necessary.2 If we asked a few questions, though, we might notice some interesting things about how we think about the things we own, and “the ways in which consumers [like us] are constructed along with the goods and services [we] are expected to require.” We might note that the first lessons of college take place in dorm rooms, not classrooms, and that dorm rooms teach mainly about American material culture and materialism. We could even go deeper, tracing the environmental pathways of our possessions and exploring different possibilities for conserving the nature that’s inevitably in our stuff.3
The Social Construction of Necessity
Most student rooms and apartments conform to the expectations of what we might call “the standard package.” Though this “package” corresponds more or less to college recommendations about what to bring, it conforms even more to the expectations of college culture, a culture increasingly shaped by the marketing and ministrations of commercial culture.
In the American system of supply and demand, advertisers are the people responsible for supplying the demand, and they’ve recently discovered that “Back to College” is a lucrative market in several ways.4 Marketers realize that college students socialize each other in the art of consumption, so it’s important for them to teach students how to teach each other. Starting around the year 2000, therefore, retailers created “Back to College” as a fully merchandised market niche, offering American consumers another occasion for giving and getting. Retailers as diverse as Target, Wal-Mart, IKEA, The Container Store, Linens ’N Things, and Bed Bath & Beyond began to educate students with catalogs, websites, e-mails, “College Nights,” and gift registries, as well as flyers advertising freebies and student discounts. This “consumer education” has been an overwhelming success: By 2006, the National Retail Federation estimated that back-to-college spending would reach thirty-six billion dollars, making it the most lucrative shopping season in America after the winter holidays.5
In 2007, Amazon.com offered a website for students heading to campus, calling college “the final frontier (of your education, anyhow).” They offered interactive photos of “three student habitats: the Sweet Suite, the Dude’s Den, or the Study Space.” The pink-and-flowery Sweet Suite was for coeds. The Dude’s Den was a guy’s room. And the Study Space was gender neutral. As an online shopper dragged her mouse over the pictures, pop-ups explained the accessories and necessities of college life. Laptop computers appeared in all three rooms. “You can’t do college without a computer,” a pop-up asserted. “How can you stretch a 2-page paper to three pages if you can’t make incremental changes to the margins and font size?” Refrigerators also seemed to be part of the standard package: “Primitive peoples preserved food for later consumption by drying, curing, and salting. Good information to retain for your anthropology midterm, but we recommend a more modern method called ‘a fridge.’ ” Amazon advised girls that it’s a “new season, new school, new look, new you,” and invited them to “outfit yourself in the latest, the cutest, and/or the comfiest.” It reminded guys that they need video games: “Grab a couple rounds of Big Brain Academy on your DS Lite between classes, or slaughter your buddies in Halo 3. Ah, catharsis.” For every consumer category, Amazon offered a variety of choices and a lot of things to buy.6
The whole idea is to create a space where the student feels at home—and that involves creature comforts. In America, home is where the heart is. But Americans make a house a home by filling it with things that express our lifestyle and