Whether you have a huge house, drive a Hummer or overeat, you are committing the same wrongdoing. It is reckless overconsumption of resources.
I am not guilty of that. My energy bill is $30 a month. I live in a small unit, take public transportation and am very physically fit. I am here to tell you that this is a wholesome lifestyle, and I do not miss the more prosperous lifestyle one bit.
When I was writing against obesity, I was accused of being shallow and of thinking with my penis. However there are more weighty arguments against obesity than that it is unsightly. The real problem with obesity, once again, is that it is overconsumption of resources – overconsumption to the point that it is no longer even good for the person doing it.
Will one person overeating cause problems to the environment? Unlikely. However when we have half of America being obese, we have a real problem. We have unsustainable consumption. And that is a moral issue, affecting our children.
The same is with less visible reckless consumption. Huge houses, Hummers, and further down the line, take up vast resources. People are at a pressure to overconsume. It is ridiculously equated with responsibility, which it is totally not. The responsible thing to do is to live humbly and leave the world a better place than you have found it. Overconsumption is in fact irresponsibility.
Once on an Internet forum a woman complained that many people there had property that fit into a paper bag. Apparently she thought that that is wrong. It is not. We do not overconsume. We do not pollute. And any number of us are hard enough workers.
Why on earth would people be under pressure to do something as irresponsible as overconsumption? Maybe because the economic might of a nation is measured as GDP, and GDP rises when people spend money. But GDP rises also when someone goes to a hospital for an operation. Not all ways to raise GDP are equally ethical. If it means that people are forced into a lifestyle that they do not want, where they have to overconsume, then that is not an ethical way to raise the GDP.
A much more ethical way to raise the GDP is through implementation of better technologies, such as the Hydrogen Transmission Network (http://htnresearch.com). Here is a technology that makes sense both economically and environmentally. And putting it into place will be a true act of responsibility – moving energy and water consumption to non-polluting sources, so that people can have everything they have now and much more with vastly fewer destructive effects.
As for obesity, it appears that some people are predisposed to it. However when obesity rises by a factor of two in two decades, then we have a demographic problem. Now, even people who wouldn't have been obese in the past are becoming obese. This is bad in a number of ways, the biggest one once again being that it is overconsumption.
So I want to call attention to these problems. The solutions for these are not hard at all. Mine has been to reduce consumption to a more manageable level. And it is also to put into place technologies that do not pollute or exhaust resources, so that people can have what they have now and more with vastly fewer destructive effects.