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If we break it down to monetary value, Americans consume more in a day than most of the world's population consumes in a year. That's the gasoline and car you get around in. It's the electricity bill you pay for the hair dryer, alarm clock, and fridge. It's heating and air conditioning, buying new clothes, eating food and throwing away the packaging. It's the water in your tap, and it's the bottled water from the convenience store. It's falling asleep with the TV on, pens and ink, playing music on your laptop and mp3 player.

This is not the time for guilt or justifications. This is the time for education.

Consumption rests on advertising. Advertising rests on some long-standing truths about human nature, and it is more widespread today than ever. The principles of advertising are used in politics, the evening news, the Blue Bell ice cream commercial on the radio, and every attempt to separate you from your dollars in exchange for a product or even a feeling. Feelings are the basis. Marketers understood many decades ago that humans are mostly emotional creatures. For all of our efforts to appear as the 'wise men', Homo sapiens, most people still rely on subconscious-driven emotions to make daily decisions and decisions that will affect all of the Earth for the foreseeable future.

Blue Bell knows this. Perhaps you've heard the throaty country song that appears in their radio spots. It appeals to country living with lyrics about things being so simple back then when mom would call us in for some homemade ice cream. Of course, this is far from the reality of today's ice cream manufacture where cows are fed hormones and antibiotics to pump out more milk than normally possible, high fructose corn syrup is an ingredient in every tub, and those tubs are filled with creamy goodness in a lifeless factory by machines and a few underpaid employees. The product is not sold by telling you the virtues of the product, rather you are asked to remember the way you might imagine homemade ice cream tasting, remember a wholesome country childhood that you probably never had, remember and link those memories to the product however far apart they may be in real life. Nearly all advertising uses this fundamental rule. To sell clothes we put them on sexy bodies that have been made up and then airbrushed in unnatural poses. To sell cereal we dab white glue on the flakes and have paid actors tell us how good a bowl full of sugar, corn syrup, and wheat starch is. Oh yeah, and the actors

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