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November
24 - The busiest shopping day of the year?
We're not buying it
By Lisa
Rayner - Tea Party Publisher
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"Earth
Provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not
every man's greed." - Mahatma Gandhi |
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Seeking
a more meaningful life? A life filled with friends, family
and neighbors, enjoyable work and a beautiful community?
Celebrating Buy Nothing Day the day after Thanksgiving is a
new alternative to the overcommercialization and
overconsumption of American life.
The
day after Thanksgiving is traditionally one of the busiest
shopping days of the year. Rather than spend quality time
with friends and family, many people rush out to congested
malls and stores to buy holiday presents.
In
one of the materially richest societies in the history of
our species, we frequently substitute material acquisitions
for more meaningful pursuits. Vital human needs like
affection, intellectual stimulation and spiritual growth
become secondary to material gratification.
Enter
Buy Nothing Day. Created eight years ago in the Pacific
Northwest, the "holiday" has blossomed into
"a worldwide celebration of consumer awareness and
simple living," proclaims the day's biggest supporter,
Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine. In 1999, people in over
30 countries participated in a multitude of activities
designed to increase people's awareness of the human and
ecological impacts of our overconsumption.
Every
year, Adbusters approaches the three major TV networks, ABC,
CBS and NBC, with Buy Nothing Day "uncommercials."
Every year they have been turned down. CBS has replied that
the uncommercials threaten "current economic policy in
the United States." However, CNN Headline News has
chosen to air the spots after their "Dollars and
Sense" program since 1996.
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There
are many downsides to organizing our lives around the
pursuit of more and cheaper stuff. For one, our
material abundance has a tendency to be relative.
Frills have a way of turning into necessities that are
required to offset other less satisfying aspects of
our lives. We have telephones, e-mail and fax
machines, but we live away from friends and family,
even if they are only on the other side of town, so
these are often the only ways to keep in touch. Most
of us drive cars equipped with stereos, air
conditioning, telephones and other features that were
not even available twenty years ago, but we spend more
time in our cars commuting to and from work because of
increased sprawl. We can buy special machines that
play a variety of soothing sounds like ocean waves,
but there are more traffic noises and fewer bird songs
outside the window. |
While
quality of life initially rises with increased economic
affluence, soon there are diminishing returns for each
additional dollar we receive. And after a certain point,
each increase in material affluence begins to reduce our
quality of life. The time that buying, storing and
maintaining material goods requires takes away from the
fulfilling of our nonmaterial needs. We must work longer
hours to pay the bills, spend more time cleaning our
ever-larger houses or pay someone else to clean, and so on.
Studies
of economically poorer countries like India show that an
increase in material wealth increases well-being because
basic needs like healthy food are better met. But in
financially wealthy countries like the United States and
Japan, where most people's basic material needs are already
met, the correlation between income level and happiness and
well-being is negligible.
The
University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center has
been polling Americans on how happy they feel since 1957,
when our material affluence was at half the level it is
today. Over the years, the percentage of people reporting
that they are "very happy" has declined from 35 to
30 percent.
Environmental
Studies Professor Donella Meadows talks about how we try in
vain to fulfill "nonmaterial needs materially."
Needs like friendship, empathy and a deeper meaning to life
are frequently "met" through newer and fancier
material goods. Of course, this never works. No amount of
material overabundance can compensate for a lack of
fulfillment of nonmaterial needs. Advertising helps to both
create and exploit these unmet needs. Buy Nothing Day
highlights this paradox and urges us to look deeper.
Do
you know what makes you happy? Is the paid work you do
enjoyable and fulfilling? Do you like it so much that you
would do it even without pay? Do you enjoy your non-monetary
work? Do you think that your work contributes to everyone's
well-being? Are all the products of your work ecologically
sustainable?
What
do you find most enjoyable and worthwhile about daily life?
Are you satisfied with your life outside of work? Do you
have enough time to have a life outside of work? Do you
have satisfying relationships with yourself, your
family, your friends and others in your community? Are you
making meaningful contributions to community life? Is your
community a good place to live? Answering these questions
and seeking to live a more meaningful life will improve not
only our own lives but also the lives of countless others.
Only
part of our material abundance comes from increased economic
efficiency, such as gains in labor productivity. The rest of
it comes off the backs of others. In developing countries,
laborers in sweatshops often toil for pennies a day in
unhealthy conditions. Many workers in the United States earn
less than a living wage, forcing them onto public
assistance.
Ecological
destruction for the sake of cheap goods will impoverish us
in the long run. Human-caused habitat destruction and
exploitation of valuable species is causing mass species
extinctions and losses in ecosystem diversity. In addition,
many of us buy cheap meat, eggs and dairy products produced
on factory farms. Animals suffer terribly in the confinement
and filth of these prisons. Only by short-changing others
and the Earth in all these ways are we able to accumulate so
much for ourselves.
Ecological
footprinting is a procedure developed to assess how much
land area individuals, families and communities need to
maintain the energy and material needs of their lifestyle.
The average American presently requires 25 acres of land to
provide for his or her lifestyle. There currently exists a
global average of 5.5 acres per person, including wilderness
areas. In order for all six billion people alive today to
achieve the same level of affluence as the average American,
we would need three additional Earths.
The
Flagstaff Activist Network is sponsoring a day-long local
Buy Nothing Day celebration November 24th. See the Flagstaff
Tea Party calendar for further details.
For
more information about Buy Nothing Day, visit www.adbusters.org.
To
learn more about ecological footprinting, see Our Ecological
Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, a 1996 book
by ecological footprinting creators William Rees and Mathis
Wackernagel.
To
calculate your household's ecological footprint, you can
download an Excel spreadsheet at www.esb-.utexas.edu/drnrm.
An 11-year resident of
Flagstaff, Lisa Rayner holds an Interpreation of Natural
Resources degree from Northern Arizona University. She
is a master gardener and permaculture consultant. She
is also the author of Growing Foods In the Southwest
Mountains.
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Flagstaff Tea Party
P.O. Box 22324
Flagstaff, AZ 86002
Ph: (928) 774-5942
Fax: (928) 222-0153
Advertising: (928) 606-7186
E-mail: ftp (at) flagteaparty (dot) org
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