Abstract
While reading The Gospel of Sustainability: Media, Markets and LOHAS by Monica M. Emerich, I kept reminding myself of the meaning of the word “gospel”—as in “good news”—and questioned how it applied to sustainability. By the end of the book, I decided that in this case it did not apply to “sustainability” in any unique way, but rather to capitalism’s insidious ability to turn what, at the core of “sustainability,” should imply a reduction of consumption into more of the same. This point is one that Emerich is aware of in passing and yet neither adequately addresses nor resolves despite seeking to examine “LOHAS on its own terms—the claim that capitalism can be commanded to shed its historical forms and to take on different ones that will be able to address multiple social concerns in new ways” (p. 9). But I may have gone ahead of myself, as you may still wonder what LOHAS are (as I was), and if they are able to challenge capitalism, then why haven’t you heard of them!
The irony of my own ignorance of LOHAS—the Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability—is that in many ways I am “one,” as in I am someone who cares about “health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice” (p. ix) and who makes decisions about what to consume and or not to consume based on my “ethics of living on a small planet” (p. ix). However, for me the goals are to consume less, to not support large corporations regardless of how “green” their products are claimed to be, and to integrate my social and ecological concerns into what I would argue is a perceivable practice that demonstrates my overall ethics. I italicize the word because Emerich’s lack of empirical evidence that LOHAS, as promoted by the media and the market and as practiced by many consumers, is a challenge to capitalism or that significant aspects of capitalist production (extraction, labor, processing, etc.) have structurally changed. I remained unconvinced as to how this might be the case even when I read her last sentence affirming, “I believe LOHAS could become a viable partner in the sustainability movement by representing and educating market interests, building on a platform of integrative spirituality of sustainability as proof of our creative thinking” (p. 203). But for me, “believing” isn’t sufficient.
In returning to Emerich’s overall goal, she “treats LOHAS as a window onto processes of social change, as a certain kind of appeal for a moral and spiritual reordering of the world that comes through media and market organizations” (p. viii) and in this “moral and spiritual reordering” “LOHAS is a positioning of sustainability as a spiritual endeavor” (p. xiii), that uses “religious sensibilities in a different way” (p. xvi). Really? I immediately thought about Marx’s commodity fetishism (mentioned on p. 125 but not linked to her own analysis), Eddy Bernays’ “torches of freedom,” Victor Lebow’s goal, “that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, or ego satisfaction, in consumption” and questioned her claim that LOHAS constitute anything new.
Certainly, instead of building our identities around, say, “Coca-Cola” versus “Pepsi,” LOHAS encourage us identify with the type of eggs we eat, although I remained equally unsure as to whether or not it makes any difference and how this constitutes anything new. For unlike with Michael Pollen in An Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) when he follows up on his “free-range chickens” and finds the term mostly euphemistic, with Emerich no such evidence is offered to allow us to make an informed opinion either way. Therefore, perhaps both because of and inspire by Emerich’s 18 years involved in LOHAS her book reads more like promotional material, as opposed to a critical analysis. For although she claims to treat LOHAS as a “discourse” recognizing that it’s “articulation…includes class, gender, age, domicile, and race” (p. 10) these social signifiers remain peripheral to her analysis and are even ironically dismissed as having any currency. To illustrate, she states that “where once identity was prescribed by virtue of one’s race, gender, religion, social class, language, citizenship, we can choose just as easily to base our identities on our favorite Harry Potter character if we so choose” (p. 53). Once again I thought, really? For if this was truly the case, then surely the “good news” wouldn’t be “the sustainability of capitalism” but rather that our entire socioeconomic system had radically changed. Alas, such a view, as well as the larger perspective of the book, can be seen as just another marketing ploy.