Stop before you shop

I recently heard a woman on the radio boasting that she had gone for an entire week without buying anything. I immediately scoffed. “What’s the big deal?” I said to my husband, who reminded me that it’s virtually impossible to go for even a day without buying something—mindlessly spending money for a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a tank of gas, or purposefully going to a store for something we’re sure we “need”—a crock pot, a blue blouse, a heart-rate monitor.

To raise consciousness about shopping, a growing number of people take part in Buy Nothing Day, which falls annually on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the opening day of the holiday shopping orgy and therefore one of the most lucrative days for the retail business.

Buy Nothing Day highlights Western culture’s ingrained behavior of unbridled over-consumption. The event slogan, “Spend less, give more,” isn’t just about refraining from spending for one day: it’s about fostering a commitment to consume less so that collectively we use fewer of the world’s resources and produce less waste.

Why should you spend less?

The 20-minute video, “The Story of Stuff” ( storyofstuff.com ) written by Annie Leonard, explains how the “materials economy” works by extracting natural resources, producing items in factories, distributing them all over the world, consuming them in the marketplace and finally, disposing of them. Unfortunately, when I excitedly clutch my newly prized purchase and cart it home, I’m oblivious to the implications of this process.

In the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s natural resources have been consumed. Used up. Gone forever. To make PDAs, CDs, DVDs, CPUs, shoes, disposable diapers, Barbie Ford Mustang, waffle irons… and on and on and on. The United States has five percent of the world’s population but consumes 30 percent of the world’s resources to satisfy our insatiable desires, stoked by the advertising industry, for possessions—in many cases to purchase more of what we already have.

Synthetic, toxic chemicals used in the production of all these glittery, shiny, new and improved things poison our air, water, soil and our bodies. The food with the highest levels of toxic contamination is human breast milk.

Is it worth the cost? Apparently not. Although Americans spend three to four times as many hours shopping as do Europeans, 99 percent of all the items they buy ends up as trash within six months. Each person in America creates four-and-a-half pounds of garbage a day, twice as much as we each made 30 years ago. It is a comforting illusion to think that when the garbage truck carts our trash away, it disappears, but in reality it goes either to landfills or gets incinerated, polluting the ground, air and water and contributing to climate change.

Every single thing you’ve ever bought has ended up or will end up as garbage. Think about that before your next trip to the store.

But what about the holidays?

The economy has suffered its worst meltdown in history. Families face foreclosure on their homes and unemployment is rising. Yet people still cling to the myth that the holiday season isn’t the holiday season without over-consumption. It’s time to rethink the assumption that more plastic gew-gaws crammed under the tree, the better the celebration, regardless of the credit-card debt incurred and the damage to the planet.

Visit buynothingchristmas.org for clever ideas that won’t cost a lot of money and will reduce your carbon footprint.

How about this for a wish list: a subscription to an organic CSA farm, anything handmade by a local artist, a tree planted anywhere on earth in my name, carbon credits for travel for the upcoming year, solar panels, and this big-ticket item: a composting toilet…

- Marcia Nehemiah