Yes, we all need to learn how to reduce the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ we have.  Our culture is hell bent on training avaricious consumers.  The advertising industry teams up with the media industry in ensuring that generation after generation of people will power an ever-growing rate of consumption.  But all that consumption represents the use primarily of fossil fuel stocks for the life-cycle of everything that we produce and consume: the mining, transportation and refinement of the resources (including the required fossil fuels themselves); the design, synthesis, manufacture, packaging and distribution of the products; the support of human infrastructure for every step of these processes; the collection and (hopefully) proper disposal of the waste from each of the preceding phases, as well as that of the product itself once used…  And the preceding is clearly just a small illucidation of the entire life-cycle of the ‘typical’ product…

The ultimate ’bottom line’ if there ever was one is the heretical notion that we must, as individuals and as a culture, learn to reduce our appetite for ‘stuff’.  We can clearly do with less ‘stuff’.  The garages and attics full of ‘stuff’, the booming ‘self-storage’ industry to accomdate our incredible urge to accumulate, the ever-growing mounts of trash in our landfills all bear testiment to our collective need to consume less ‘stuff’.  It’s not going to be easy to learn how, but learn how we must.

Here’s a good series of books to get you further along this ‘paradim shift’ of less consumption, Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher.   And here’s a link to The E.F. Schumacher Society - Linking people, land, and community by building local economies.