Margaret Atwood on the talent for insatiability
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Margaret Atwood - The New York Times
MARGARET ATWOOD: So the talent for insatiability kicks off around 1950, the most recent wave of it. In the ’30s, the virtue was not to waste things. And in the ’40s, that became very much more accentuated because not only did you not waste things, but you saved certain things up because it was the war effort.
So you saved elastic bands. You saved fat in little tin cans. I don’t know what they did with it. You saved newspaper. You saved tin foil. You saved all of those things up. And then they had war salvage drives, and you donated all of those things. You saved up your clothes. You donated them to Europe for people who didn’t have clothes. You never threw things out. And then in came the consumer society, and that has pretty much driven to — because everything is joined at the hip with the energy force driving that civilization. And if you want to read about that, you can get a book called “Art and Energy” by Barry Lord. So every energy source produces a culture which is connected to that energy source.