A few years before the tipping point we realized our insanity. We were so oversupplied that if all industry stopped (except agriculture) for fifty years we'd still have all the consumer goods we needed to live a comfortable modern lifestyle. We had enough electronics, ovens, spoons, bowls, bedding, clothes in our homes and in stores all over the world to just hunker down and let our planet recover. We didn't need ninety percent of the products being produced but we were allowing ourselves to be conned into buying them and in so doing "voting" for the destruction of earth. Our obsession with "new" and "keeping up with the neighbours" was going to kill us all, ruin the planet for the generations to come. Most folks abandoned the malls and supermarkets, instead seeking out ethical products only when they had need of them. Saving the earth was our joint mission in all of our different cultures...