Nick Thorpe urges environmentalists to reconsider their approach to things:
The ‘new materialism,’ as it was dubbed in a report by the New Economics Foundation in 2012, challenges us to love our possessions not less but more – to cherish them enough to care about where they came from, who made them, what will happen to them in the future. Environmental campaigners are, in a similar spirit, slowly redefining themselves less by what they’re against (global warming, fossil-fuel extraction, runaway consumerism) than what they’re for: a healthy and balanced relationship with the material world that sustains us in all its delicate, interconnected beauty. But it’s a philosophical, even spiritual position, too. If we could truly cherish the things in our lives, ‘retain the pulse of their making,’ as the British ceramicist Edmund de Waal puts it, wouldn’t we be the opposite of consumers?
The Dish 