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In a capitalist society, value is measured in dollars and cents. But the resources we take from planet Earth can't be repaid in any kind of financial currency, and we're already paying the price for the debt we owe.

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So the question on many people's minds is "Can we even have ethical consumption under capitalism?" In this episode, we find out that despite having differing opinions on the answer to that question, we often agree on the solutions for what comes next.

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Listen to hear how our community answers the title question, economist and sociologist Juliet Schor helps us plan for what comes next, and Commons founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal explains how modern and historical boycotts can be tools for collective action.

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➡️ If you want to vote with your dollar, join our April challenge in the Commons app (available in U.S. and Canada) This Earth Month, we're avoiding the brands spending millions to block climate progress.

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Here are some of the people you'll hear from in this episode:

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Episode Credits

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• Listener contributions: Shai, Nicole Wiegman, Tessa Maurer, Paulina Acosta, Haley Kline Murphy, Marina Savarese, Bhaskar, Haley, Maya Roman, Marta De Prisco
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

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Citations and Further Reading

• What GDP does and doesn’t tell us
• Earth Overshoot Day
• Target Loses Web Traffic As Costco Gains On Feb. 28 Economic Blackout Day
• Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in U.S.

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Full Transcript

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Katelan Cunningham (00:00):

Hello and welcome to season three of Second Nature. I'm so happy to be back and I'm happy that you're here. This is a podcast from Commons, if you haven't heard of it, commons is the app that over 100,000 people are using to realize the power of our collective spending and to find sustainable brands they can trust. And on this show, we talk to people about how they're living sustainably in an unsustainable world. It's the first episode of a new season. So we thought we'd ease you in with a really low key topic, you know, something very chill. We wanted to answer that tiny little question at the root of so many climate conversations. Can there be ethical consumption under capitalism?

Katelan Cunningham (00:52):

It's a question that of course is not tiny at all. It's huge. It's one of those questions that creates a laundry list of if this, then that scenarios. It's a question that requires us to open a dictionary before we can even get on the same page. It's a big thinking kind of question that could either squeeze the boundaries around your perceived realm of possibility or totally blow them away. I'm hoping for the latter. I'm your host Katelan Cunningham, and I'll be guiding you with small steps ever so gently through this very big question and there's no time to lose. So let's get to it.

Katelan Cunningham (01:35):

Capitalism is the reigning economic system here in the Western world. It's basically a system where private companies determine the supply and demand of goods and services with the aim of making profit at the root of it. Capitalism is, well, I mean it's all in the name. It's all about capital. Capital is the property or financial assets owned by a company or a person. And the value of that capital is measured by pretty much one thing, money. And you might be thinking, yes, obviously money equals value, but stick with me for a second with this. Money companies buy supplies and equipment and labor and all of those things from the machinery to materials, to people power. They all run on natural resources, fuel to run a factory, cotton, weave a shirt, even water to run data centers. All of that comes from planet Earth. Think about that. We are building businesses made from the earth and earth. It runs on a natural balance between sun and soil and plants and fungi and oceans. But the countries that are largely determining the fate of earth and profiting the most from it, they run on money.

Katelan Cunningham (02:54):

So there's this sort of currency exchange issue because mother Earth, she doesn't value money at all. Yet amidst the free market and the constant supply and demand of stuff and services, we don't consider Earth as a stakeholder even though we keep taking all this stuff from her. On top of all that, a healthy US capitalist system, it needs to grow the GDP at a rate of about two to 3% each year with how the system works. Now, that growth requires taking more and more from the earth every year to maintain a healthy economy. But again, a healthy economy does not equal a healthy earth. In fact, quite the opposite. There's even a huge disparity in the amount of people who benefit from a healthy economy. From 1980 to 2016, over 25% of all new income from global GDP growth went to just the richest 1% of people.

Katelan Cunningham (03:54):

So to some capitalism feels like a cage and we can't truly live sustainably and ethically until we break out of it completely and try something totally different to others, it's like a, I don't know, like a like a pile of blocks and we have the blocks. We need to make a better version of capitalism. We just need to stack them up differently. It's not a perfect metaphor, <laugh>, but you get the idea no matter which camp you find yourself in. Many of us are still faced with difficult decisions trying to find the least bad way to live in a system where bad and good are measured in dollars and cents rather than earthly resources. And speaking of resources, I have not thought about that word the same ever since. Hearing from S Shyla in Washington DC,

Shaila (04:50):

When we see the planet through its resources, it becomes an exploitative relationship.

Katelan Cunningham (04:58):

So that's got me wondering how can we think of the Earth's water and plants and animals and fungi, not as an all you can consume buffet of resources, but instead like cohabitants worthy of our care and attention because ultimately our ability to live healthy lives is eternally tied to theirs. Of course, we wanted to know what you think we asked you. Can there be ethical consumption under capitalism? And understandably, our community is a bit divided.

Nicole Wiegman  (05:35):

Ethical consumption to me means being connected to the entire lifecycle of that which we consume. And yes, I do believe it's possible under capitalism

Tessa Maurer (05:48):

By definition, I would say no.

Speaker 5 (05:50):

Yeah, I definitely think that there can be ethical consumption under

Haley (05:54):

Capitalism. I do not think that there can be ethical consumption under capitalism.

Marina Savarese (05:59):

It's something really, really difficult to achieve. It's kind of a huge question that will need a huge answer.

Nicole Wiegman  (06:08):

If we can as the consumer be connected to the origin story and the end of life story of that which we consume, we can then take responsibility for the part we play in the center of it all.

Tessa Maurer (06:24):

Anything we consume under a profit seeking system that demands growth for the sake of growth supports a system that's incompatible with the resources of a finite planet. So the only way for us to consume things ethically would be to look outside that market system. It's very easy to look at this question and be tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water and not tackle the problem at all. And this is exactly the kind of response that is most serving of the capitalist system we're in. Capitalism wants us to say, forget it, it's too hard. I won't think about it.

Marina Savarese (06:58):

As individuals, we can do what is in our possibility to consume in a better way. But the idea that individual choices can change all the system, it's pure fantasy. So we really need to act like a collective organism to fight and try to reach a more ethical world in general.

Bhaskar (07:21):

It's easier to get people excited about buying from ethical brands of course, but encouraging them to consume less overall requires a deeper, more introspective change. It requires a great deal of consumer awareness. And while that could be challenging, it is not impossible.

Haley (07:39):

I know a lot of people who have started moving away from the big box stores and Amazon and they're now supporting smaller local minority owned women owned businesses instead. And I think that is great from a harm reduction standpoint and as a stepping stone to a bigger and more impactful solution, like I think it's wonderful. But I don't think finding alternative ways to consume is the most impactful solution because consumption itself is the problem.

Speaker 5 (08:16):

There are always underground systems, community systems taking place while a larger force or power overtake society. And that gives me a lot of hope.

Katelan Cunningham (08:36):

Every year we hit a milestone here on planet Earth called Earth Overshoot Day. If you haven't heard of it this day basically marks the point in the year when we've used up all the earthly resources we should for that year. Ideally Earth overshoot day wouldn't come till the very end of the year. But in 2024, at least here in the us, we used up all of our annual resources in August. That's been the trend for the past couple of decades, at least here in the us. But in the seventies, which is not too long ago, earth overshoot day actually did come at the end of the year. It is very much within reach for us to still change our ways. But to be fair, it can be really hard to imagine a world other than the one that we're living in, perhaps a society where capitalism isn't driving so much strain on our planet or maybe a society outside of capitalism altogether, which is why I called up Juliet Shore. Juliet is an economist and sociologist who teaches at Boston College. She's the author of plenitude, the Economics of True Wealth, and more recently, four days a week, the life-changing solution for reducing employee stress, improving wellbeing, and working smarter.

Katelan Cunningham (10:01):

Hi Juliet.

Juliet Schor (10:02):

Hi. Great to be here.

Katelan Cunningham (10:04):

Thanks so much for coming on the show. I have tons of questions for you and we've had so many good questions from our audience, starting with some folks in our community think that ethical consumption under capitalism is possible and some folks don't think it's possible, but they do all agree that we need to make some major changes, which kind of leads us with this question of if not capitalism, if not in its current form, what other options do we have? And so we got this question from Maya in Chicago.

Speaker 10 (10:33):

So my burning climate question is what would be the best systems to help the environment in place of capitalism? We know that capitalism is really damaging to the environment. So can capitalism and the environment ever coexist?

Juliet Schor (10:52):

We need to change it. We all understand that the kinds of changes that we make, whether we'll still call what comes out the other end capitalism or not, I don't know. Yeah. But what we do need to do is we need to organize and we need to build power that will allow us to do a number of really important things. One of them is the climate and energy transition. So if we think about ecological sustainability, we've gotta get off fossil fuels, we've gotta transform agriculture. There are a few like really big things that we need to do without which you know, we're gonna have civilizational collapse and just really a lot of terrible things happening. So, right. Whether we think that's capitalism at the end of the day, I don't know. There are countries within a sort of quote unquote capitalist framework that are successfully involved in energy transition.

Juliet Schor (11:56):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So they tend to be smaller, but it is happening. And the question of whether they can sort of expand beyond climate and energy to also deal with the, you know, biodiversity crisis and some of the others. I think they can, they, they tend to be the smaller ones. Uh, you've got Ecuador, you've got Denmark, you know, so it's a variety of countries that are doing it. The other important thing about it is that it is happening through government action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and I know many people sort of feel like forget the government, they're hopeless. We've gotta just do it at the local level. We've gotta do it as individuals and we do have to do it as individuals, but we are not gonna succeed just as individuals.

Katelan Cunningham (12:46):

A lot of folks want to know like what are the really big substantial ways that I can do my part to move in the direction that we need to go? I thought that Haley's question from Colorado Springs was very apt for this. She asked,

Haley (12:59):

It seems to me that capitalism is in direct conflict with the wellbeing of our planet in pretty much every way. But it's also the system that we're stuck using. And so I am thinking about what ways I can leverage those elements of capitalism to my advantage or to my goals being that I want to be a more ethical human being.

Juliet Schor (13:29):

I should preface what I'm about to say and also follow up what I just said by saying I'm a person who has spent her entire career making critiques of capitalism. So I'm not here speaking as someone who's like, oh, I don't think critiques of capitalism are legitimate or something. Not at all. It's really more a question of someone who, you know, I went to graduate school in the 1970s, I've been in this business of critique for a long time. Yeah. You make a critique and you articulate an alternative at the same time. So for Haley, I think the issue is what are you doing that is undermining the aspects of the system that's really problematic. So when you say you wanna harness the parts of capitalism that can be effective, right? My first thought was, well, does that mean you wanna start a business? You can do that a business with a good product or something like that.

Juliet Schor (14:31):

Or does it mean you wanna organize a labor union at your workplace? Because one of the things we know is that countries with strong labor unions and more equality have much better climate outcomes. So I have a whole series of papers that I've done that show that countries where there's more concentration of income and wealth at the top, whether we're talking 10%, 5% or 1%, they emit a lot more carbon, right? So from a climate point of view, inequality is a big negative. I mean, as a person trained in economics and now in a sociology department, so I'm kind of looking at inequality in a number of different dimensions. You know, if I could wave a magic wand and make one change, I mean most climate activists would probably say something like, put a huge carbon tax on to, you know, drive carbon out of the system.

Juliet Schor (15:29):

That's true, that would be good. But inequality, it's sort of the thing that's implicated in just about everything. And so we have so much research, like more equal societies have better health, they have better wellbeing outcomes, people live longer, you know, better environmental outcomes, better economic outcomes. If I were building a model to predict all sorts of things and I had to pick one variable, it's the one I would pick. And you know, for me that's a little bit hard 'cause I've spent my life studying working hours and that's another very powerful variable. But actually inequality also drives working hours. <laugh>,

Katelan Cunningham (16:11):

This makes me wonder about actually a question that we got from Marta in London. Um, she kind of brought up the fact that, you know, like you said, there's the idea of a carbon tax and a lot of how we measure environmental impact is weighted in carbon similarly to how we weight wealth with money. But this of course leaves some big aspects out of the picture. So Marta asked,

Marta De Prisco (16:30):

How do we move beyond carbon accounting? Yeah. To prioritize social value, diversity, net gain,

Juliet Schor (16:36):

You know, better environmental efforts, outcomes, better economic outcomes, important. If I were building on the social side, there are a whole series of metrics that have been used by social scientists and others to try and broaden out from GDP. So you have gross happiness indicators and you have the genuine progress indicator and you have the former president of France who, who had a big commission to kind of give us an alternative to GDP with multiple indicators. And those are things like life expectancy and literacy and inequality and so forth. So we do have a lot of those things. They're just sort of mostly confined to the scholarly community and they're just not as well known. But that's the social side. On the biodiversity side, of course we do have the IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature puts out the Living Planet report. They have biodiversity indicators, so those are out there too. They're just not getting as much attention. There's a big biodiversity effort underway at the global scale similar to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is, you know, the key scholarly body that's sort of driving the, a lot of the climate negotiations and they are negotiating on biodiversity pretty much as we speak.

Katelan Cunningham (18:06):

We get a lot of questions at commons. I mean, I think, I feel like this is, this is a common theme and a lot of just people who wanna live more sustainably, you have this question of ethical consumption under capitalism, but then there's, well even if I did this, even if I Caitlyn consumed ethically, what's the point? If not everyone else is doing it. What's the point of my small part if I can't change the system or if the system isn't changing at all? And I just kind of wondered personally and academically how you think about that internal conflict for yourself and how you think about it kind of in the work that you do.

Juliet Schor (18:39):

So I think the first thing to say is, to me it's a little bit like voting. I don't vote because I think my vote is gonna make a difference because I'm one of millions and millions of people, right?

Katelan Cunningham (18:53):

Right.

Juliet Schor (18:53):

I vote because it's an expressive act. It's important to me to be the kind of person who votes and so forth. To some extent, I think consuming in ways that align with your values is a little bit like that, which is, I wanna live my life in a way that's consistent with my values. But actually what I researched is that it's a lot more important than that. So I've always been a person who thought social change doesn't come about because individuals change, you know, and they, they change their consuming habits or their lifestyle habits. It comes about when larger numbers of people come together, build power and force change, whether it's in the corporate sector or whether it's the government, wherever it is, that's how social change happens. It happens because people join social movements. Whether that's, you know, when we think about the civil rights movement, we think about the women's movement, the environmental movement, et cetera. So what is the relationship between being an ethical individual consumer and those movements? And that's what I studied. And there are two really important things. One is that there's a whole genre of literature and sociology that says, oh, individual ethical consuming just takes people away from being activists and joining social movements. And that turns out to be totally false.

Katelan Cunningham (20:18):

Okay, good

Juliet Schor (20:19):

<laugh>, I mean the people know and a lot of evidence about that, including from my, my own studies. But the other thing is also important, whereas activists then begin to transform their personal practice. And there are two parts to this. One is, and this is the part I can speak to as a, you know, from my own personal experience as someone who got involved in ecological issues and climate decades ago, that as I began to live a more sustainable life and really changed what I did in my daily life, it just feels good and it propels my commitment. They're very synergistic in that way. But there's another way which is that if you are going to be active on an issue, if you're gonna speak out and try and make change and you're gonna, you're gonna try and get your community to have a climate action plan or you're gonna try and get your family to get outta their gas guzzling cars or whatever it is, eating so much beef or whatever it is they're doing, unless you're walking the talk, you are gonna be seen as a hypocrite and you are not gonna be affected.

Juliet Schor (21:23):

Look what happened to Al Gore with his, you know, $7,000 a month electric bill. You'd have to walk your talk, right? So if you wanna change the world, personal practice is really important. They really go together.

Katelan Cunningham (21:40):

Yeah, I love that. And I find that it does make you happy. And I think it also starts, like, an example for me is that I've been trying to deal with my food waste problem. I felt like I was sort of throwing away too much food and all that. And I've kind of tried different strategies. I start noticing it more outside of my household as well. Like if you're a journalist, it becomes your beat, right? Where you start noticing that thing in different places and then you start realizing like, oh, this candidate that I wanna vote for is gonna like roll out composting in our city. And that becomes more important to you because it's not just sort of an abstract concept of something that's interesting to you or that you think is good, but it's something that you feel very invested in in your own life. Like you have a stake in this and it's not just something that you think would be cool <laugh> if everyone cared at the same time.

Juliet Schor (22:26):

Yeah. I spent a lot of years studying consumer culture and one of the big things that I look at is sort of social influence. How, you know, one person doing something influences other people doing it and, and we have nice studies of like solar panels, like within neighborhoods, right? Somebody picks them up and then the next one and then it starts to grow. Or electric cars, I mean, I got the very first model Prius that, you know, frumpy little thing. The next thing I know my brother's, I didn't say a word to him. The next thing I know my brother's buying one. And that's a place where consumption is like really different than a lot of other topics because it does spread like that, right? And so yeah, be an influencer, not just online, but also in your real life. Because real life stuff also matters. I mean, I really see it in my own town where there's an area that has a lot of older, some of them are Victorian houses. Somebody on the street repainted into all the vibrant colors and you know, kind of suddenly it went from just being a monochrome and then the next house in the next house, suddenly the whole neighborhood, everybody has repainted. That's part of how we make change. It's not the only way we make change. We need the government, but those pockets start to then create more pressure to go upward.

Katelan Cunningham (23:45):

I love that visual. I love that we should all be painting our houses in more colorful colors, if not just to make ourselves happy, but to spread some change through the neighborhood. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Juliet Schor (23:58):

Oh my pleasure. It was really fun. Uh, such great questions from your listeners. And it, it's really great that you're talking about these issues. We, we need a lot more talk about these issues.

Katelan Cunningham (24:13):

No matter where you stand on this argument of capitalism, it's clear that a lot of us are not happy with many of the companies that are calling the shots. It seems like there's a new boycott on social media every week. Now, whether the solution is a new kind of capitalism or an altogether new type of economy, we're going to have to make some big changes to get there. And as long as money's coming in, most big companies are unfortunately not going to make these changes on their own. Collective momentum is a truly vital tool to making some big shifts happen. I mean, it's worked before and I feel like we're at a great moment to tap into that. So I called up Commons founder, Sanchali Seth Pal to chat about the proven power of collective action. Welcome back, Sanchali.

Sanchali Seth Pal (25:03):

Glad to be back.

Katelan Cunningham (25:04):

So we've been talking a lot lately at Commons about the power of boycotts and I mean, it seems like everyone is,

Sanchali Seth Pal (25:11):

They're a really powerful tool in a capitalist economy. Boycotts can create major disruptions to cash flow.

Katelan Cunningham (25:18):

And we don't like that.

Sanchali Seth Pal (25:20):

Well, big companies certainly don't <laugh>, uh, when we're trying to boycott, we're trying to cause a disruption and show companies that we mean business. So boycotts are typically a means to an end. We're demanding that a company makes changes before we buy from them again,

Katelan Cunningham (25:35):

Right? I mean, when we look back at history, the idea of boycotts were these sustained collective actions. Like we talked about the Montgomery bus boycott in the ripple effects episode last season where black people stopped riding the bus for over a year in Montgomery and the bus companies lost tens of thousands of dollars and it forced them to desegregate the buses. But the way we're talking about boycotts now, it's different because they feel more like sprints instead of marathons because they're only lasting like a week or a day or a month. Do you think that these shorter boycotts have the same effect as a longer standing boycott?

Sanchali Seth Pal (26:12):

Probably not. They're not as well defined. In your example, the Montgomery bus boycott, the black community came together and said, we're not giving the buses our money until they're desegregated.

Katelan Cunningham (26:23):

Yeah. So there was like, there was an ultimatum basically.

Sanchali Seth Pal (26:26):

Exactly. And you don't bend until your demands are met. So ideally an Amazon boycott would look like we're not shopping at Amazon until they, you know, meet all of our sustainability demands, like switching to entirely renewable energy. But of course Amazon has become so ubiquitous that it's run many local stores out of business. So in a lot of cities it's super hard to get necessities without Amazon.

Katelan Cunningham (26:51):

Yeah, and I mean, I think we've become really reliant on living our lives with how convenient Amazon is.

Sanchali Seth Pal (26:58):

Definitely. I mean, the Montgomery bus boycott was very inconvenient for people, right? They used the bus for getting to work, for doing all of the things they needed to do. But today we've become so accustomed to convenience. We need to get comfortable with inconvenience. So

Katelan Cunningham (27:16):

With these shorter, more time bound boycotts, do we feel like they can really do anything or like move the needle?

Sanchali Seth Pal (27:23):

Maybe they can. I think it's possible. They send a targeted reminder to companies that we, their consumers have power. They rely on our money to operate. And if we don't like what they're selling, we're not buying. The other part of it is we're practicing spending our values ourselves. We're kind of teaching ourselves to get used to the inconvenience of a boycott. It's hard to go cold Turkey on Amazon, for instance. So maybe you just start by boycotting Amazon for a week and during that week you finish the book you're reading, so you want a new one. And instead of buying it on Amazon, you decide I'm gonna go check out my local bookstore instead. Or I'm gonna go to the library. And while you're there, you might get a great recommendation from an employee and you have this great community interaction. You support your local economy instead of Amazon. And you're like, this isn't so hard. That

Katelan Cunningham (28:11):

Sounds lovely.

Sanchali Seth Pal (28:12):

Exactly. And it feels really good. Better than getting another Amazon package on your porch that you have to open and then get rid of the packaging

Katelan Cunningham (28:19):

<laugh>. Yeah.

Sanchali Seth Pal (28:20):

So there's hopefully habits you can build in that short period of time that become behavior that sticks.

Katelan Cunningham (28:27):

Alright. So we can basically learn how to be better consumers by not relying on Amazon. And if a short term boycott is what gets us to do that, that's great. But what if we really did wanna stick with it? If we wanted to sustain a boycott until companies met our demands, what would some of those sustainability demands look like?

Sanchali Seth Pal (28:45):

Great question. In comments, we tend to think about sustainability demands in three categories. There's stuff you can do to make the company more sustainable. There's stuff you can do to help your customers live more sustainably. And then there's things you can do to change the industry. You're working in

Katelan Cunningham (29:00):

Level a list of three. Tell us more.

Sanchali Seth Pal (29:02):

Okay, so when it comes to the company, we're talking about the brand's operations, for example, a fast fashion brand. They'd need to make changes to the materials they use, how they source those materials, the energy they use in manufacturing, energy and water, and then how they transport and package those items. Then if they've made some significant changes to their supply chain, they should also be thinking about how they set their customers up to be able to make sustainable choices. Are they promoting over consumption or impulse buys with how they market their products? Are they offering repair services and upcycling? Do they have resale programs? Do they help you get rid of things at the end of their life? Got

Katelan Cunningham (29:38):

It.

Sanchali Seth Pal (29:38):

And then more broadly, how are they working towards a more sustainable industry overall? Are they being transparent with their reporting? Are they working with industry groups who are helping to reshape the industry overall? Are they actually supporting lobbyists who support fossil fuel subsidies or are they financing candidates who vote against environmental policy? These are some of the more systemic things that companies can do through their money and their influence.

Katelan Cunningham (30:02):

Do we have evidence that these types of boycotts that we've been doing can move us in the direction of like any of these company, customer and industry sort of initiatives that we wanna see from companies?

Sanchali Seth Pal (30:15):

They're honestly really new, so we don't have clear signals that they're working yet, but we do have some early hints that they could be making a difference. For example, target.

Katelan Cunningham (30:25):

Yes. A lot of folks are boycotting them right now because they pulled back on their DEI initiatives.

Sanchali Seth Pal (30:30):

Exactly. Target was on the list of the economic blackout boycott on February 28th this year, and they're really feeling it that day. They had an 11% drop on in-store visitors and website visits were down by 9%.

Katelan Cunningham (30:45):

Can we talk about Tesla for a minute?

Sanchali Seth Pal (30:48):

Yeah. This is an interesting one because people aren't really boycotting the product. They're boycotting the work that Elon Musk, the CEO is doing since Trump brought him on to head up Doge and they are really taking action. People are protesting at dealerships, they're selling their vehicles, they're selling their Tesla stock, and the stock has dropped. It's dropped 50% since December.

Katelan Cunningham (31:10):

That's massive. Okay. So if people care about sustainability, what are the companies that we should be looking at? What are the companies that we should be boycotting?

Sanchali Seth Pal (31:19):

Yes, it's really important to have a prioritized list 'cause we can't boycott everything all the time. So for Earth Month in particular, we have a big call to action through a collective challenge in the Commons app. That's all about brands that are obstructing climate policy at the highest levels.

Katelan Cunningham (31:34):

I'm really excited about this one.

Sanchali Seth Pal (31:36):

Yes, we are excited too. We're highlighting the biggest consumer brands that are using their money to support lobbyists, trade associations, and political candidates that are acting against pro climate policy. Our demand is that these companies use those advocacy and lobbying efforts to support ProPlan trade associations, avoid fossil fuel lobbyists and support climate candidates.

Katelan Cunningham (31:58):

And the list is out now. So we will drop that in the show notes.

Sanchali Seth Pal (32:02):

That's right. I hope everyone will join the challenge in the app and help us send a signal to these brands.

Katelan Cunningham (32:07):

I can't wait. Thank you, Sanjai.

Sanchali Seth Pal (32:09):

You're welcome.

Katelan Cunningham (32:19):

I think we can all agree that it can be hard to live sustainably in an unsustainable world, especially when that world is driven by capitalism. Sometimes it causes me to get caught in this kind of doom spiral because when I dig into even my most ethical purchases, I don't have to dig that deep to realize how they're connected to fossil fuels. Like even if I walked to my local farmer's market every week for all my groceries, those farmers drive their food to the market and their trucks run on fossil fuels. And even if they grow organic and skip synthetic fertilizers, they probably use machines that also run on fuel or electricity powered by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels feels like the big boss at the root of so many supply chains. So much of our economic growth relies on them, and it feels like fossil fuels and capitalism are like inextricably linked. You could live outside this system if you bought some land and built an eco house and grew all your own food and stuff. But that of course brings us back to the inherent issues of wealth inequality that come with capitalism because who can afford that?

Katelan Cunningham (33:34):

This line of thought, understanding how your food and products are made, it's an important part of living more ethically and sustainably. But as I've just shown here, it can quickly devolve into said doom spiral.

Katelan Cunningham (33:50):

Thankfully, I've learned from our fabulous, insightful community some lovely ways to put on the brakes and keep myself from sliding down the spiral. If your answer to the question of can we have ethical consumption under capitalism is a resounding no. I hope you don't let it stop you from participating in collective action. We need you to call out the bad guys, refuse to support them, support the good guys, trying to steer us in a better direction. If your answer to the question is a resounding yes, I hope you'll continue to look outside of money centric solutions as well. That can look like participating in clothing swaps, turning your food scraps into free compost, or joining your local Buy Nothing group. We did a whole episode on this last season. It's great. You should check it out. When we do need to buy stuff as we all do, like it or not, the Commons app can help. You can browse hundreds of brands to see how our sustainability experts have rated them. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To our listeners who are always ready to tackle the tough questions today, you heard from

Shaila (34:57):

Hilah. I'm in a K tank in Piscataway land, sometimes referred to as Washington c I'm Mar Brico from London, uk, Hailey, Colorado. Maya Roman from Chicago.

Nicole Wiegman  (35:09):

Nicole Wiegman in northern Arizona.

Marina Savarese (35:11):

Marina Savarese in Spain, and Livorno Italy

Paulina (35:17):

Paulina in the San Francisco Bay area.

Tessa Maurer (35:21):

Tessa Maruer Savona, Itay.

Bhaskar (35:23):

Hi, I'm Bhaskar in Toronto, Canada.

Katelan Cunningham (35:28):

This episode was edited and engineered by Evan Goodchild. It was written and produced by me, Katelan Cunningham. Next Wednesday on the show, we're trying on the idea that donating clothes may not be the most sustainable option.