A central conundrum in the need to infuse a long-term perspective into climate policy and other environmental decision-making is the widespread belief that humans are inherently short-term thinkers. An analysis of human decision-making informed by evolved adaptations—biological, psychological and cultural—suggests that humans actually have a long-term thinking capacity. In fact, the human time horizon encompasses both the immediate and the future (near and far term). And yet this very temporal duality makes people susceptible to manipulation; it carries its own politics, a politics of the short term. A “legacy politics” would extend the prevailing time horizon by identifying structural factors that build on evolved biological and cultural factors.

Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earth's life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful?

If analysts of political and ecological economy take seriously critical trends in environmental degradation and accept social responsibility for contributing to the reversal of such trends, they must go beyond the descriptive and predictive to the prescriptive, beyond marginal environmental improvement to sustainability, beyond cooperation and efficiency to sufficiency. Cooperation and efficiency principles are useful when biophysical underpinnings remain intact. Otherwise, sufficiency principles—restraint, precaution, polluter pays, zero, reverse onus—address the defining characteristics of current trends, namely environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion. They engage overconsumption. They compel decision-makers to ask when too much resource use or too little regeneration risks important values such as ecological integrity and social cohesion, when material gains now preclude material gains in the future, when consumer gratification or investor reward threatens economic security, when benefits internalized depend on costs externalized. Under sufficiency, one necessarily asks what are the risks, not just in the short term and for immediate beneficiaries, but in the longterm and for the under-represented.

In affluent societies, evidence suggests that public concern and activism about “the consumption problem” is growing in many corners of everyday life—even in the paragon of the consumer society, the United States. These emerging concerns have an environmental dimension, but also embrace issues of community, work, meaning, freedom, and the overall quality of life. Yet the efforts of individuals, groups, and communities to confront consumption find little guidance or sympathy in policy-making, environmental, or academic circles—arenas dominated, perhaps as never before, by a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of the sanctity of growth. Given our dissatisfaction with fragmentary approaches to consumption and its externalities, we highlight the elements of a provisional framework for confronting consumption in a more integrated fashion. We stress in particular the social embeddedness of consumption, the material and power-based linkages along commodity chains of resource use, and the hidden forms of consumption embedded in all stages of economic activity.

If social scientists are going to make a contribution to environmental policy-making that is commensurate with the severity of biophysical trends, they must develop analytic tools that go beyond marginal improvement and a production focus where key actors escape responsibility via distanced commerce and the black box of consumer sovereignty. One means is to construct an ecologically informed “consumption angle” on economic activity. The first approach is to retain the prevailing supply-demand dichotomy and address the externalities of consumption and the role of power in consuming. The second approach is to construe all economic activity as “consuming,” as “using up.” This approach construes material provisioning in the context of hunter/gathering, cultivation, and manufacture and then develops three interpretive layers of excess consumption: background consumption, overconsumption, and misconsumption. An example from timbering illustrates how, by going up and down the decision chain, the consumption angle generates questions about what is consumed and what is put at risk. Explicit assignment of responsibility for excess throughput becomes more likely.