Plenitude means the quality or state of being full, completeness, great sufficiency, abundance.
It does not mean insatiable or wasteful.
Changing how we spend our time is the key to reducing environmental impact, creating more jobs and giving us all a better life.
If we have more time, we can do more things and make more for ourselves. If we are less exhausted and needing to buy less, everything can come into balance.
Our narrator, economist and best-selling author of the book Plenitude, Juliet Schor says here: "It's a way to reclaim a human scale to our economy."
Responding to our current moment, her concept of Plenitude puts sustainability at its core, but it is not a paradigm of sacrifice. Instead, it's an argument that through a major shift to new sources of wealth, green technologies, and different ways of living, individuals and the country as a whole can actually be better off and more economically secure.
This brilliant animation offers a vision of what a post-consumer society could look like, with people working fewer hours and pursuing re-skilling, homesteading, and small-scale enterprises that can help reduce the overall size and impact of the consumer economy.
And as the author points out, and as we like to continually point out on Nextworldtv: This is not a utopian fantasy -- these very changes are already happening, getting stronger every day.
--Bibi Farber
This video was produced by the Center For A New American Dream