Screw "greening" your Christmas, make it sustainable instead
Someone sent me what has to be the fourth or fifth listing of the ways I can "green" my Christmas the day before today and I've approximately had it. To a one, every of these lists involved approaches I could either spend more money than I would otherwise on unattractive crap or new and ingenious methods for me to put on a hair shirt in public and thereby show my "green" bona fides to passersby. Please.
Human civilization faces a few very actual and very urgent environmental issues. Left unchecked, a number of those have the ability to develop into outright crises and that they need to be treated decisively and without delay. All of them can be traced to an American (and increasingly more international) sample of consumption. It's not just a depend of amount of that intake both, it is greater a hassle of that intake's inefficiency.
The contemporary "green" movement was no doubt founded with the best intentions, but the more of its popular expression I see the less enthused about it I become. These Christmas lists I've been seeing are a terrific case in point. The problem is excess and inefficient consumption. So the solution cannot be more consumption. Buying a $75 Christmas tree ornament made from an old sock is still buying more unnecessary stuff. It's a more sustainable idea to just keep using the Christmas tree ornaments you already have.
The overpriced "green" trinkets and gewgaws being pitched around the internet are just another manifestation of this consumption problem. What needs to change is the impulse to buy stuff for the sake of buying stuff. "Green" consumerism is still consumerism.
A better way to think about your role in the face of these looming problems is to commit to using scarce resources wisely and efficiently. That goes for all scarce resources: energy, land, water, time and your money. Make a commitment to yourself and at the same time a co-commitment to the people with whom you share the earth.
So in place of a gaggle of simple minded lists of the way to have a "inexperienced" Christmas, why no longer simply stop buying crap? Stop substituting things for your time for and emotional availability to the human beings you like. Gift giving is a amazing custom, certainly one of my favorites in truth. But how clever is it to head broke each December?
"Green" ideas for this or any time of yr start with the nice intentions, however all too quick come to be the social equal of methadone. Buying crap is still shopping for crap, regardless of its recycled content material. So do not buy crap. See? No hair shirt.