Here's a bone-chiling report from a recent meeting of the Ecological Society of America. One of the presenters calculates that "if everyone on Earth adopted American lifestyles overnight, we would need four extra worlds to supply their needs."

He traces the origins of the consumerist frenzy to intentional decisions made by the U.S. government in the early 50s, quoting economist Victor Lebow as saying in 1955: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate".

"Ever-increasing rates" are, by definition, unsustainable. As often happens, this was a decision made according to short-term considerations that will have disastrous long-term consequences. As our collective attention-span grows ever shorter, we seem ever less capable and tolerant of the long-term thinking good governance requires.