An ad pops up in social media that catches your eye. You weren’t shopping for anything, but you click on it. A couple of clicks later, your phone autofills your shipping address and credit card number. Shipping is free and, before you quite realize what you’ve done, well, you’ve bought something. Or perhaps you purchased clothes online but, to make sure you get the right fit or style, you order more than one size or color, as 63% of American online clothing shoppers do. You can return your impulse-buy or unwanted garments because most online retailers offer free returns. In 2024 in Canada and the United States, almost a quarter of online clothing sales were returned. In 2023, Americans returned 15% of all items ordered online, clothing and everything else, worth $248 billion dollars.

The ease of online transactions makes them a major driver in the modern consumer economy. The environment, however, pays a steep price. Retail returns in the U.S. generated 24 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022 and sent 4.27 billion tons of unwanted items to landfills. Amazon alone generated 69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023. Hard statistics are difficult to come by, there is no doubt but that e-commerce generates substantial amounts of cardboard and plastic packaging and a far higher carbon footprint than goods purchased at a store.

E-commerce is of course only one part of the current environmental crisis. Eight billion people are putting the natural world under immense stress. The oceans are overfished. Plastic pollution is choking fish and wildlife. Tropical rainforests are falling to make way for palm-oil plantations and cattle ranches. Pesticides are decimating insects and the birds that eat them. Species around the world are declining and vanishing at an accelerating clip. The oceans and atmosphere are warming and ice caps melting. Coral reefs are dying. The dismal list goes gloomily on and on.

Monument to Five Thousand Years of Temptation and Deception X, 2022, Reclaimed ocean plastic, paint, fishhooks on panel in wood and plexi case, 27.75 x 48.75 x 4". (Photography courtesy of Danny Perez) by Duke Riley

This is not where we were supposed to be today. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned 62 years ago against overuse of agricultural chemicals. In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed the Clear and Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act, regulated toxic chemicals, created OSHA and the Superfund, and much else. President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Then the American environmental movement lost steam. Since the Clean Air Act of 1990, no major U.S. environmental legislation was passed until the climate and environmental provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. For three or four decades we have pretty steadily lost ground in solving the world’s environmental crises. The burning question is why making progress on intensely pressing issues has been so difficult.

Who is to blame?

We hear two fundamental responses to this question. People like Bill McKibben, E. O. Wilson, and Elizabeth Kolbert have told us that we are all complicit. It’s a matter of personal choice. If each of us would just behave, believe, buy, and ballot more responsibly and more morally, we could save the world.

Others, like Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, and Jason W. Moore, argue that blaming “us” is too easy and unfair. They hold capitalists responsible, whose quest for seeking greater profit and greater control of labor gave us the global environmental crisis. The implications of this position are far more radical and far-reaching, as it indicts capitalism as an economic system.

We can’t really all let ourselves individually off the hook, I don’t think, but undeniably the invisible hand of capitalism is pushing us in the wrong direction. Broadly speaking, though, the culprit isn’t really capitalism, which has existed in various forms for millennia and is with us always. But when industrial capitalism veered into consumer capitalism, we roared off merrily down the path we find ourselves on. North Americans made this turn in the 1920s, Europeans in mid-century, and the rest of the world by century’s end. So bright and happy was the road that it took decades to understand we were heading directly into a deep, dark, uncharted swamp.

One and a Half Domes, Yosemite by Ted Orland

To illustrate what exactly happened in the 1920s, let’s begin with a naked lightbulb that shines dimly at the end of a cord hanging in a fire station in Livermore, California. It is the world’s most famous lightbulb, with its own Website, its own 24-hour Webcam, and its own Wikipedia page. It has been the subject of dozens of national news stories. This Centennial brand bulb, made by the Shelby Electric Company in the 1890s, has been glowing faithfully and almost continuously ever since it was installed in 1901. Other Shelby bulbs of similar vintage are also still functioning.

An immortal lightbulb is an environmentalist’s dream. Think also of all the other products we might have that could last practically indefinitely and never go out of style. Pollution from manufacturing and transport would decline. Energy would be saved that would have been expended acquiring and transporting raw materials, manufacturing finished items, transporting them to stores and consumers, and taking used articles to the dump. Natural resources would be left in the ground. Landfills would be fewer and emptier.

Unfortunately, immortal lightbulbs exemplified an economic problem so serious that it helped cause the Great Depression. In the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism arose from the notion of mechanizing production to produce more goods more cheaply. Repeatedly, though, supply overran demand, contributing to regular economic downturns.

Still, by the 1920s, a cornucopia of marvelous consumer devices tempted the growing middle class: automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, water heaters, electric sewing machines, electric mixers, vacuum cleaners, and much more. All of them made life a great deal easier. They ended middle-class dependence on servants.

But they were durable. A home only needed one of each. By 1927, the market for durable goods was saturated. Demand slackened. When the stock market crashed in 1929, people put off buying major new items. Inventories grew. Factory orders dropped. Unemployment rose, demand dropped more, factories closed, banks failed, and down the spiral we went into the deepest depression in modern history.

Producers realized they needed to increase demand to keep up with productivity. This brings us back to the problem of immortal lightbulbs. Corporate management recognized the problem. In 1924, lightbulb manufacturers formed an international cartel and standardized the life-expectancy of bulbs at 1000 hours. Overnight, lightbulb owners became perpetual lightbulb consumers. Planned obsolescence was born. In coming decades, durable goods became a good deal less durable.

In the same year of 1924, another corporation came up with an effective new strategy to get consumers to replace a durable good more often. Half of all automobiles were Ford Model T’s when Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors introduced annual model-year changes in styling and features, in a choice of bright colors, to encourage consumers to buy the latest model. The Model T was a good, well-built car, and Henry Ford saw no need to produce different models or offer any color but black. Now, however, a neighbor’s new GM in the latest model made other cars on the block look dated and less desirable. With this fiendishly successful strategy, in a few short years, GM’s sales shot past Ford’s.

Just Plain Forever, 2019, Shell Mosaic (sailor's valentine) (on panel in mahogany frame, 49.5” x 49.5”) by Duke Riley

Some new consumer items of the 1920s were disposable and were never meant to be durable.

Disposable goods have a perpetual market. After the U.S. military supplied safety razors to doughboys in the First World War, their popularity rose quickly in the 1920s, the first common product designed to be used and thrown away. Disposable Kotex pads and disposable Kleenex handkerchiefs followed in 1920 and 1924. The one-way route from manufacturer to dump was blazed.

To further encourage greater consumption, businessmen figured out new ways of giving consumers quick gratification of their desires even though they did not have cash in hand. Businesses aggressively offered the installment plan for everything from clothes to radios. Department stores introduced the charge card in 1928, ancestor to the postwar credit card, so some could buy without any cash in hand at all. GM, followed by other auto manufacturers, created credit companies to loan buyers the money to buy new cars. Here, again, Henry Ford was morally opposed to enticing people to buy something they could not afford and so lost more ground against his competitors. Ford’s was a lost cause. Not having enough cash no longer prevented consumers from buying.

Luring people to buy new goods or replace old ones with newer, more stylish models, even going into debt to do so, is the job of advertising, which came into its own in the Twenties. The adman was the hero of the age, whom Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and many others credited with the decade’s prosperity. Advertising genius Bruce Barton published The Man Nobody Knows in 1925, which argued that Jesus Christ had been a brilliant salesman and business executive.

Using new techniques, many of which were inspired by the new field of psychology, advertisers used sex and status to sell luxuries or novelties that soon became necessities or stirred dissatisfaction that led to replacing old items with new ones. Hand in glove with advertising, mass media proliferated in the 1920s and delivered ads to nearly everyone. Mass magazines like Time and Life showed up on newsstands everywhere. Movies played in every town of any size. Radio beamed into nearly every consumer’s home. Few Americans escaped the influence of the adman.

Conservationists’ program of careful use to keep resources for future generations lost ground. Advertising, consumer capitalism’s essential propaganda wing, promotes values antithetical to conservation. In the 1920s, for the first time, mass-market media and mass entertainment seriously competed with family, religion, schools, and peers as sources of values. Traditional moral values of sobriety, self-denial, industry, thrift, and community do not sell consumer products. Instead, advertisements and mass entertainment promote pleasure, self-gratification, entertainment, consumption, and the individual. So effective have advertisements been that anyone touting the older values today sounds positively priggish. We are all consumers now.

In these ways, a new consumer economy overtook the older producer economy. The era of Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt gave way to the age of Alfred Sloan and Bruce Barton. The builders of the nation’s basic steam-and-steel infrastructure had finished their work.

Moreover, an energy transition from coal to oil and gas began in the United States in the 1920s, inaugurating an era of cheap, plentiful energy. Unlike the price of labor-intensive coal, petroleum’s cost was not tied to wages. No armies of laborers digging under the earth were needed to pump oil or move it through pipelines to distant cities. Wages rose even as oil prices did not and disposable income grew. Wage-earners could buy ever more energy and ever more consumer goods. Electrification of urban areas and, later under the New Deal, of rural regions not only lit more light bulbs but powered an ever-growing array of household electric appliances and made a huge impact on transportation and manufacturing.

Record economic growth made the Roaring Twenties roar. The essential thing about consumer capitalism is that it must grow or die, and it grows through continually increasing production and marketing of nonessential goods. This was new in world history. Consumption—acquisition of things beyond basic needs—has existed around the globe wherever people accumulated more than they needed for subsistence. Consumerism arose in the West with the expansion of empires and wider availability of luxuries. Consumer capitalism took shape in the 1920s to remedy saturation of the market by encouraging consumption. It finds ways to make it easier and more desirable to buy things and thus accelerates movement of money from one person to another. This puts more dollars into more hands more often, raising incomes and living standards. Every one of us benefits from its bounty.

The transition from industrial capitalism to consumer capitalism changed the nation’s relationship to resources and the environment. The nineteenth-century world of industrialization sparked the rise of the conservation movement, which pushed for parks for the masses and conservation of natural resources. Skies black with smoke and waters foul with industrial and human waste were regarded as local issues. The parks and conservation movements sought to restrain industrial capitalism, not challenge it.

Consumer capitalism vastly accelerated the strain society put on the natural world and baffled conservation’s advocates of restraint. Over the twentieth century, the economy developed an insatiable appetite for ever greater quantities of products and energy. Consumer capitalism’s hunger for resources transformed environments around the world. Tropical forests paid an especially high price as they fell to make way for plantations of sugarcane for the West’s sweet tooth, bananas for its breakfast tables, coffee and tea for its work breaks, rubber for its automobile tires, wood for its furniture and floors, cattle for its hamburgers, and palm oil for its processed foods.

Water and air pollution rose with the flood of consumer goods. Streams of waste issued from households and industry. The makeup of the waste grew more toxic, too. Until the 1920s, household items were made from something in nature. Cellophane and Bakelite heralded the coming age of nonbiodegradable plastics and artificial materials produced from dangerous chemicals. Today these chemicals and plastics abound not only in oceans, waters, land, and air, but even within our body’s organs and cells.

Not conservation, but depression and world war held consumer capitalism down for almost two decades. After World War II it burst forth again like a racehorse from the gate. The strategies of the 1920s to get consumers to buy reached new levels of sophistication. The introduction of credit cards in the 1950s, Internet one-click shopping in the 1990s, and contactless payments in the 2010s make it ever easier to buy.

Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, corporations moved manufacturing to poor nations with large pools of cheap labor and weak environmental regulations. With the financialization of capitalism, corporations found it easier and more profitable to invest in other corporations than in modernizing American steel mills and factories, which closed at a relentless pace. American, European, and Japanese skies and streams grew clearer at the expense of air and water quality in China, India, and Mexico. The Ganges today is a fetid sewer and air in Beijing, New Delhi, and Mexico City often unbreathable.

By the end of the century, large corporations and concentrations of capital had grown enormously powerful in both the economy and politics. Through television, the Internet, and then smartphones, their ads push consumerist values constantly and everywhere. We are immersed in a sea of corporate propaganda, inculcating consumer values in everyone from morning to night, from birth until death. Like characters in ads, TV, or film, we all aspire to individual fulfillment and expression of our individual identities. And we seek to gain those goals by buying things.

Environmentalists attacked consumer capitalism’s environmental impacts, but have grown comfortable with consumer capitalism itself. Environmentalists’ language puts less emphasis on communal values. People concerned about the environment offer individualistic solutions. If only all of us recycled, ate organic, changed to LED lightbulbs, and bought electric cars, environmental problems would vanish. Or perhaps if we all embraced so “green spirituality,” our collective reverence for the earth would lead to the ecological Millennium. Green energy and energy efficiency have become our holy grails. The focus on energy’s source deflects attention from our profligate energy use and the proliferation of electronic devices in our lives. But using less energy would mean consuming less, which neither government nor business is going to promote.

For their part, corporations do sometimes promote traditional values—if they deflect responsibility and cost away from themselves. The anti-littering campaigns of the American Ad Council is a classic example, funded by corporations like Coca-Cola that sell products in throwaway containers. How virtuous to take personal responsibility and keep American beautiful, making unnecessary any pesky bottle deposits or regulation of disposable items. In the same way, recycling symbols appeal to our moral aversion to waste while they assuage guilt from the consumption that left us the item to recycle in the first place. Never mind our low rate of recycling and the absence of a market for most recycled material anyway. Companies eagerly slap labels on products like natural, organic, healthy, and fair-trade and do “greenwashing,” selling virtue while still encouraging consumption.

Where investors and corporations see opportunity for profit, they contribute productively to solutions to environmental problems which do nothing to challenge the sway of consumer capitalism. Thus, with important government encouragement but without direct government investment, electric vehicles, solar cells, and wind turbines, for example, have made dramatic advances that no one had foreseen.

At the same time, those corporations and billionaires who view environmentalism as a threat to profits have invested great sums to defeat environmental regulation. Beginning in the New Deal, with Alfred Sloan at the forefront, they built a vast, extensive network of institutes and thinktanks that promoted unrestrained, unregulated capitalism. This network has successfully undermined public support for governmental regulation. These libertarian and rightwing institutions deliberately spread false information, or spread doubt about the science of acid rain, atmospheric ozone depletion, global warming, and even Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Periodically, as in 1981, 2001, 2017, and again this year, American governments take office that, beholden to these interests, are hostile to regulation and roll back progress in controlling environmental problems.

There is no doubt that consumer capitalism produced huge wealth, lowered prices, and in the long run has made life easier and longer. However, it also produced environmental dangers that include exhaustion of resources, dramatic simplification of ecosystems and reshuffling of species, and rapidly mounting waste. The international bombshell Limits to Growth of 1972, with its impressive graphs and computer simulations, caused a great deal of soul-searching. It predicted that growth would become unsustainable in the foreseeable future. Something must be done or global society would starve from resource dearth and choke on pollution. Thirty years later, an updated edition concluded that the world was adhering closely to curves predicted in 1972. The economic growth that consumer capitalism generates is bumping into the environmental problems that it causes: global warming, exhausted soils, deforestation, pollution, and extinctions.

What can be done? Consumer capitalism is undoubtedly to blame for the environmental crisis. Just as undoubtedly, consumer capitalism has given us a good life. It cannot do so forever, unless some wizard conjures a version that uses less energy and fewer resources, because, by its very nature, consumption must grow for consumer capitalism to live. We cannot simply stop consuming. That would bring us back to 1933 in a hurry. All the LED lightbulbs, electric cars, and organic kale in the world cannot change that.

In the 1920s, we North Americans climbed onto a glittering, flashing merry-go-round. It began to pick up speed. Now we find ourselves on a wild ride, endlessly whirling dizzily round and round. No one yet knows how to get off.

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Mark Stoll teaches environmental history and the history of religion. He is an avid hiker and backpacker, a traveler, a fan of rock and classical music, a student of languages, and a professor of history at Texas Tech University. He recently published Profit: An Environmental History, an environmental history of capitalism, from Polity Books. He is also author of Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, from Oxford University Press. Stoll has degrees from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin. Between degrees, he lived a decade in San Francisco and traveled a year in India and Sri Lanka. For the 40th anniversary of the journal Environmental History, the editors selected Stoll’s “Milton in Yosemite: Paradise Lost and the National Parks Idea” for its list of “path-breaking scholarship that has shaped our field.”

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