Transitions Beyond a Consumer Society
By David Sims
The Second International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) co-sponsored by the Mitchell Center took place on the UMaine campus June15-17. The theme of the conference was “Transitions Beyond a Consumer Society” and was attended by experts and scholars from 20 different countries and included observers from the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Founded in 2008, SCORAI provides a forum for scholars and practitioners striving to understand the drivers of the consumerist economy in affluent technological societies; to formulate and analyze options for post-consumerist lifestyles, social institutions, and economic systems; and to provide the knowledge for emergent grassroots innovations, social movements, and public policies.
Cynthia Isenhour, UMaine assistant professor of anthropology and Mitchell Center associate, is a SCORAI board advisor and served as conference co-chair and local coordinator. Isenhour volunteered to serve as co-chair and local coordinator because she attended the first SCORAI conference in 2013 at Clark University in Boston and was, put simply, “blown away.”
“I had never been to a more interdisciplinary conference,” Isenhour says adding, “SCORAI is a network of about 1,000 scholars from around the world, representing a wide array of disciplines from the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences. Together, we are all united by our interest in the challenges that emerge from unsustainable global consumption patterns but recognize that such a complex problem can not be considered, much less solved from one disciplinary perspective.”
She adds that in the wake of connecting with many scholars at the first SCORAI conference, many of them have become her collaborators and coauthors. “Together we can approach these problems in much more sophisticated and complete ways,” she says adding, “and this same type of collaborative approach is the reason I continue to enjoy my work with the Materials Management Research Group at the Mitchell Center.”
Isenhour notes that the Mitchell Center sponsored one of the four conference keynote speakers, Lucia Reisch, professor of consumer policy at the Copenhagen Business School, member of the German Council for Sustainable Development and advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet on sustainability and consumption, because her talk, “Implementing Sustainable Consumption: The Science Policy Interface,” mirrored the Mitchell Center’s work on science, policy, and community partnership. Mitchell Center director David Hart co-introduced Reisch along with Caroline Noblet of the UMaine School of Economics and the Mitchell Center.
To hear Reisch’s keynote speech, visit the SCORAI Youtube site.
Other keynote speakers included: John Ehrenfeld retired director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment and former executive director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology; Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist, political ecologist, and Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona; and William Rees is a bio-ecologist, ecological economist, former Director and Professor Emeritus of the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. Their keynotes can be viewed by clicking on their names above.