A recent examination of our ambivalence about material prosperity comes in the provocative and richly imagined new essay collection Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture and the Pursuit of Happiness, edited by Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt. Fascinated with the "painful and thumping heart of the rapacious American appetite," Rosenblatt brings together an unusual array of voices to examine the personal, social, environmental, and economic costs of priming this yearning-charged pump.

Because material overconsumption does so much harm to what Stephanie Mills calls our "furred, feathered, finned, fanged, and fungal relations," it's not surprising that the book emphasizes the environment, with three essays by environmental heavy hitters Mills, Bill McKibben and David Orr. Well known for their thoughtful forays into topics such as sustainable design, ecological restoration, and mass tv culture, these three do not disappoint by delivering simplistic jeremiads against the restless getting and spending that has laid waste to many parts of the world. Orr uses the sense- and soul-satisfying qualities of a letter opener carved by an old friend to open a discussion about remediating the consumer economy's ugliness, inefficiency, and anonymity. McKibben, who lives in a small town in the Adirondacks, discusses a proposal to rid the area of seasonal black fly outbreaks using a new biological pesticide. McKibben introduces the intriguing notion that the objects of consumption can just as easily be experiences as material objects. The anti-fly campaign, he writes,

is simply one more manifestation of our deep consumer urge. We want to consume bite-free air; we want to consume our cedar decks and our pools and our gardens free of any complication or annoyance. We want to consume them when we want (not just on windy days) and how we want (bare-chested, with no damn bug veil).

Still, those who would deride our wish for comfort need to read the book's brief history of the dangers and drudgery of housework in America, by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley. For instance, in the days before the domestic washing machine, Smiley writes, "clothes had to be soaked, blued, soaped, bleached, boiled, rinsed, wrung out, hung out, starched, and ironed, and several of these operations had to be done more than once." Not surprisingly, she says,

feminism and consumerism are tightly linked. The freedom to be educated in something other than home economics and the freedom to earn money, to have a vocation, to have an avocation, to engage in all the useful and useless activities of our historical moment, depend on the lightening of the domestic load through contrivance, technology and the use of nonhuman, nonanimal power. The key observation of our time, it seems, is that others all around the world wish to have this freedom as well, and the key question is, How can they get it?

Adelheid Fischer is co-author of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region (North Star: 1998), winner of the 1999 Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing. She is working on an environmental history of the north shore of Lake Superior.