So while consumerism is the love of buying things, materialism is the love of the things themselves – and that’s an important distinction. Bottled water consumption has been growing steadily for the past decade, except when it declined during 2008 and 2009 during the global financial crisis. Despite its decline in those years, no reports of deaths through dehydration due to a shortage of bottled water were reported. And the best way to prevent human consumption patterns from doing enormous environmental harm is to cure our culture of the disease of affluenza. This is an edited extract from Curing Affluenza: How to buy less stuff and save the world by Richard Denniss (Black Inc, $27.99)

Source: The Guardian October 29, 2017 16:52 UTC