The Climate Emergency Needs No Holidays
“People, so the
thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants
and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already.”
George Orwell, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946)
For the past twenty five years or more, I generally have not
celebrated holidays, at least not in any traditional sense. There are a variety
of reasons that I opted out of these festivities, some deeply personal. Mostly,
I could not abide the existential emptiness of trying to connect with others or
achieve happiness through consumerism.
But more, in committing my life to the causes of ecological sustainability,
environmental health, and justice, the maintenance of any modicum of integrity precluded
my participation in the conspicuous consumption of resources and energy as well
as the needless generation of excessive waste that all holidays entail. I found
solidarity with those who had withdrawn before me, who promoted Buy Nothing Day in
response to the massive consumerist orgy known as Black Friday, and who sought
to bring meaning back to December 25th with Buy Nothing Christmas.
As a teen and young adult, I was probably as much of a
consumer as any average American. Shopping, no doubt, functioned as an attempt
to fill some emotional or psychological void in my life. Of course, it never
succeeded. I look back and cringe at my younger self (for this and so many
other reasons), but try to chalk it up to human imperfection and youthful
ignorance. Thankfully, I grew up.
While more and more people seem to be aware of our myriad
ecological emergencies and while polls show that a majority of Americans are worried
about our planetary climate crises, you’d be hard pressed to truly notice
that concern. Everywhere you look, consumer capitalistic life appears to be
chugging mightily along, business as usual.
Particularly at this time of year, voracious shoppers crowd
parking lots with their gas guzzling SUVs and salivate at the latest gadgets,
toys, and countless consumer “goods.” In trance-like states they obey the
dictates of mass media and marketing to purchase presents, cards, gift wrap,
and an endless array of ornaments and trinkets. For the financially fortunate
who have the ability to participate, most of the gifts they receive are wholly
unnecessary accessories in their lives; they need nothing more. Holiday adornments and acts of (consumer) gift-giving may
produce momentary, fleeting gratification, but the fact is the Earth cannot
withstand our superfluous, manufactured over-consumptive whims any longer.
Christmas serves as a one of the most glaring examples of
the excessive wastefulness of holidays because it incorporates just about every
overindulgent, ecologically unsound practice common to all types of consumer
capitalist celebrations. It begins with trips to stores, usually in carbon
spewing automobiles. It continues with the purchase of many gifts that are
often useless and almost always unnecessary – so much stuff, which, like
99% of consumer products, ends up in a landfill within six months. Then,
remember that the packaging that surrounds a good percentage of products is often
plastic and trashed immediately after opening, partially accounting for the nearly
25 million tons of excess garbage produced in the Thanksgiving through Christmas
season. Additionally, there are the single-use bags in which our purchases
are carried. For some reason, most people do not think of utilizing
cloth/reusable bags at any place but a grocery store. Thus, untold hoards of sacks
are discarded as neglected byproducts. If you don’t go to a store yourself but
instead order products online, yours will be one of an estimated 800
million packages delivered by mail within the U.S. in the 2019 holiday season,
all requiring boxing and wrapping and immeasurable use of fossil fuel energy. And
that’s only the beginning of the inventory of unsustainable consumption and waste.
Christmas lights in
the U.S. alone consume more energy during the holidays than some poorer nations
consume in total energy all year. All of this energy consumption is merely
for ornamental purposes. Further, there seems to be no quantitative accounting
for all of the resources squandered to create the innumerable other flashy
decorative items hung around homes and on trees.
Speaking of trees, upwards
of 30 million trees are felled for Christmas in the U.S. each year, while an
estimated 75 million trees are cut down in Europe. Not even accounting for
all other celebrating nations or continents, at least 100 million trees are
lost every year to Christmas, at a time when planting
new trees is considered one of the most viable means (with virtually zero
negative consequences) of combating climate change. Obviously though, even better
than planting new seedlings - which Christmas Tree farmers do every year, but
in ecologically unsound monocultures - is leaving
trees in the ground, as older trees sequester far more carbon dioxide than
saplings.
Mass media, being indebted to
corporate capitalism, love to promote all of the rituals of our societal
celebrations, especially shopping. We are made to believe that purchasing
products is our duty and obligation as human beings, when in reality,
consumerism is one of the primary drivers of climate catastrophe, and it imperils
us as a species. As a nod to our ecological emergency, articles and television
broadcasts encourage a “green” holiday. They tell us that we can be better, “greener”
consumers by choosing one type of tree over another, by choosing some types of
products over others, by choosing certain modes of consuming over others. They
offer appeasing yet altogether hollow tweaks to consumerism. What they will not
tell us is what we really need in order to be ecologically sound human beings. We
don’t need so-called “green” consumer substitutions which only exacerbate our
climatic condition. We need elimination. We need NO flashy adornments, NO
extraneous junk, NO
Christmas trees, NO shopping, NO undue consuming.
Anyone who is serious about subverting
climate chaos and ecological devastation should realize that we no longer have
the luxury to partake in frivolous or trivial resource- and energy-intensive endeavors.
There is no more time for highly consumptive and polluting practices. In fact,
there never was such a time. Certainly it is a joy to see children delight in
holiday traditions, but they relish these rites because they have been trained
to. Children are adaptive and resilient, and they find pleasure in the simplest
of things. Most children feel happiness from the love and comfort of the people
around them. Holidays need not be dour or dull. Life will not end if we forgo
consumer capitalist customs. (Though, ironically, biological life is
increasingly poised to end sooner rather than later if we continue our wanton
consumption.) There are plenty of engaging, enriching, enjoyable, ecological
activities from which we can create traditions anew. (See examples in the links
in the second paragraph above.) We need to lead our children to them.
Our climate and ecological emergencies require adult
responsibility, not childish, fleeting, candy-coated corporate consumerism. We
delude ourselves in thinking we may continue these wasteful, polluting practices
in a sustainable world. As adults we pretend that we know what is important in
life, but our actions belie our words. We preach matters of substance but constantly
succumb to shallow pursuits. It’s time to adopt a realistic adult perspective.
It’s time to grow up.
In the past, I’ve been disparaged as a radical and neo-Luddite.
I am under no misapprehension that my individual “rebellion” has accomplished anything
at all to alter the trajectory of our ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions
and toxic contamination. But several billion human beings who are willing to
relinquish gratuitous holiday habits might just produce a positive ecological effect.
And once we abandon our unsustainable celebratory traditions, we might start to
reject more dispensable consumerism in our daily routines, too. If we were all to become radical, rebel neo-Luddites,
then none of us would be radicals nor rebels nor Luddites at all. We would be normal,
average, human adults facing the climate emergency head-on.
Granted, radical systemic social and economic alterations are
imperative to even attempt to carry us through our climate calamity and
ecological emergency. But the plutocrats at the reigns of our political and
economic systems have proven time and time again that they refuse to even
conceive of the radical changes required to drastically reduce our exploitation
of natural resources. Indeed, their lives are sustained by precisely the
opposite. Our solutions will not come from the top, so we must start from the
bottom. Paradigm shifts – such as wholly new archetypes for holiday festivities
– could be the seeds planted, the radicles
(roots) that lay the foundation for upward growth toward more sustainable
systemic change.
The climate emergency needs many new paradigmatic seeds, but
it needs no more (traditional) holidays.
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