A sustainable environment means consuming less, not differently. Retail therapy is losing its appeal.

Women love shopping, don’t they? Everyone knows we were born to do it; that left to our own devices we like nothing better than spending all day in some changing room, leaving our menfolk slumped outside in abject boredom. Except it’s not true. Only 29% of women actually say they enjoy shopping, according to the retail analysts Mintel.

Women have been conditioned to envisage shopping as a lovely treat even though the reality of trudging round shopping malls falls far short of the dream. It’s years since I got any kind of real high from the high street. Now the sheer scale of choice feels exhausting, while the business of piling up stuff at home for the sake of it – yet another cushion, dress or lipstick – increasingly borders on the obscene.

… getting to zero emissions means not just consuming differently … but consuming far less

Perhaps this odd, deflated feeling is just a middle-aged thing, a sign of having acquired more than enough over the decades. But for whatever reason, this week’s warning from Sir Ian Boyd,  outgoing chief scientific adviser at Defra, that getting to zero emissions means not just consuming differently – switching to sustainable cotton T-shirts, say – but consuming far less, strikes a chord. 

Going green has to be about reducing what we buy, reusing what’s already there, and reimagining our habits rather than just rebranding them.

The counter-argument, of course, is that this kind of mindless shopping keeps people in jobs every step of the way; from manufacturing to distribution, marketing, managing, taxing and selling. When Boyd talks about privileging a sustainable planet over economic growth, that’s a polite way of describing a future where living standards (in the economic sense at least) will be lower than they would have been; a world of prosperity foregone, with real consequences for real people, and especially those on low incomes. 

But Boyd puts his finger on an awkward truth, which is that we can’t go on blundering towards environmental disaster while telling ourselves that this is what makes us happy, when that simply isn’t true.

Fast fashion fixes that get worn a few times and then thrown away are arguably forgivable in 19-year-olds, who still aren’t sure who they are yet and want to dress up as someone new every Saturday night. But not for those of us old enough to know better.