When you live in a consumer society, a great deal of your actions and your social life, your political life, and even your identity are mediated by the things you purchase. There's almost no other game in town. So if you're going to wear a t-shirt, you might as well buy one that's made of organic flax or something.

And if you don't buy things, that's another way of expressing your identity. You can't not breathe the air, and the air is consumption, so if you decide not to buy stuff, you have a different identity--the identity of the anti-consumer. It's a trap. There's no way out of it. ...

If you just look inward, anticonsumerism is, like private consumption, a private enterprise. And that's my objection to it: The way it's constructed, anyway, by a lot of people ... it's seen as something that you do on your own. You have a private reward and a spritual reward from it, and that's enough. And if enough people just do that and gaze at their navels and declutter their lives and throw out stuff in the back of their closets, somehow we're gonna fix the ozone layer [laughs], and that just doesn't happen. For one thing, it's hard to do. It's too much to ask of people to stop consuming stuff all on their own. The other thing is that it's not enough. [We need] great big policy solutions that are both national and international to solve environmental and social problems. Only through collective force and cumpolsory participation in this kind of thing is it going to work.

There's this idea that frugality means abstaining from pleasure--you certainly had to give up some things you really enjoy, like going to the movies. But I also liked your idea that overindulgence can also be a socially important act.

My great objection to the anticonsumerist movement is that it tells people that excess, ecstasy, and appetite are immoral, and that the reason we have too much is that we have too much appeitite; we just want, want, want. And while it's true that advertising does encourage us to keep wanting the next thing and the newest thing and throw out the old thing, I feel that we don't want enough. Our desires have been so channeled into consumer pleasures that the great ecstasies, the great freedoms ... are missed when we're out there looking for just the right pair of shoes and just the right handbag....

You make a great point about how it also keeps us from being active and questioning citizens, as opposed to just an army of consumers

In order to really change things, you have to be sort of utopian--you have to really think that things could be very, very different than they are. That requires clearing your mind, but it also requires wanting a lot more than anybody tells you you can have. You can't get that [big] stuff on your own--you can't buy it--you have to go out and find other people to try to build it together, and that's why community is about. Social movements, as Che Guevara said, are in the end about love. You find other people to care about, and together you find things that you care about, and together you go out and [say], Damn it all, we're going to try and get it anyway. It's easy to channel up and use your desires by focusing on the stuff you can buy.