Altering the Ideology of Consumerism: Caring for Land and People Through School Science

Abstract

On a daily basis, news media report on consumer spending, advertisements entice youth to buy into products as a form of identity marketing, and pop-culture heroes/ heroines define themselves through branding product endorsements. At the same time, advertisers track Internet searches and spending habits to collect data and bring consumers individually-targeted advertisements for instantaneous consumer gratification and to increase company revenue (Cameron 2013). Absent from these consumerist practices is consideration of the significant ethical dimensions of buying , consuming, and discarding-ethics which might examine: Where do goods come from? Where do they go (and for how long) after they are discarded? Where do the resources for goods come from? What are the costs and benefits to land and people in this economic process? In this chapter, we confront the consumerist status quo by exploring ways that school science learning experiences can provide youth with avenues for critiquing this entrenched ideology. We propose that one such lens for critically questioning consumerism can emerge within an ethic of caring or developing empathy for land and people. We understand this ethic to be multidimensional and contextual-ized, yet in this chapter we emphasize caring for land as embracing our human and more-than-human interrelationships, and caring for people as socio-politically and economically located. We proceed by first describing how consumerism has become a dominant ideology as well as an often under-interrogated way of life in the context of neoliberal reforms. We call attention to how unfettered consumerism has had