In a world where human-made stuff outweighs nature and absorbs our attention how can we lighten up?

For thousands of years, we humans have been a busy bunch. We’ve built, designed, invented, cultivated, and created. For these efforts we now have shoes and saucers, houses and highways, skyscrapers and satellites. I type this on a portable computer filled with technology unimaginable one hundred years ago. That’s the blink of an eye in world time.

And we’re still going at it—building, designing, innovating, recreating, and consuming. In fact, according to a 2020 article from BBC News, “For every person in the world, more than their body weight in stuff is now being produced each week.” Helen Briggs, BBC Environment correspondent, tells us that in that same year, “the combined weight of all the plastic, bricks, concrete and other things we've made in the world will outweigh all animals and plants on the planet for the first time.”

Add to this the psychological weight of stuff, from the gadgets that demand our attention to the time and focus required to maintain it all.

That’s really heavy. 

"It is a reason for all of us to ponder our role, how much consumption we do and how can we try to get a better balance between the living world and humanity." — Dr Ron Milo, Weizmann Institute of Sciences

Weighing the costs

Why does it matter if human-made objects outweigh natural ones? What does it cost us?

According to the BBC article, one reason that human-made is outweighing nature, is that there’s simply less nature these days. Much of what we produce requires natural products we get from trees, plants, and animals. And with fewer trees, ecosystems have fewer places to grow and thrive.

There’s also a deeply human heaviness at play. We all likely have precious and well-loved material possessions. And yet we find ourselves drowning in stuff that just doesn’t mean that much. We have been so collectively overwhelmed with stuff that a small 2004 book about tidying up became an international best seller and 2019 Netflix special. 

Not only does stuff diminish the natural world and tax our attention, it also pulls our focus away from each other. We’ve all experienced moments in the midst of other humans who might be talking but are consumed instead by worlds packed into a gadget—the great irony of the promise of a connected world. We’ve all probably also noted the extra time we must spend working in order to maintain all of this.

What would it look like to stop? To need less and use less and spend the time and attention on our communities instead?

Can we really lighten up?

We’ve started with the idea that we might lighten the burden of stuff on the planet, at least. Since 1960, the U.S. has increased the percentage of trash we recycle—from 6.4 percent in 1960 to over 30 percent today. That’s a start for sure, though with more people on the planet each year, we’re still producing more trash.And it doesn’t decrease the production of consumer goods, but opens up the market for more in the form of recyclable goods.

So we’ve started to reuse more—perhaps a larger step in the right direction. As everything from reusable bags and containers to cloth diapers and dinner napkins have reentered our homes, we theoretically buy fewer disposable, nondurable things. And this, too, is an important step to slow the depletion of natural resources.

Our next big challenge then is to reduce. As we move from buying short-lived, recyclable goods, to longer-lived reusable stuff, perhaps we can also rethink buying altogether.

In a world where human-made stuff outweighs nature, neighborhood Buy Nothing lists have sprung up to encourage sharing resources we already have (you can start one if you don’t have one). And much of what we need and want may be waiting like unearthed treasure at a local thrift store or vintage mall. 

Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe what we really need to buy is nothing. That won’t always be true, but in those moments when we realize it is, when we’ve saved ourselves the time and money and effort sunk into stuff, maybe we can then reinvest that attention into ourselves and our communities.