http://www.alternet.org/story/144223/
Are You Brave Enough to Say No to a High-Stress Holiday?
By Bill McKibben, Grist.org
Alternet: November 30, 2009
The problem with Christmas is not the batteries. The problem isn't even
really the stuff. The problem with Christmas is that no one much likes it
anymore.
If you poll Americans this time of year, far more of them regard the
approaching holidays with dread than anticipation. It has long since become
too busy, too expensive, too centered around acquiring that which we do not
need. In fact, it's the perfect crystallization of the American economy --
the American consumer experience squeezed into a manic week, a week that
people find themselves hoping will soon end so that on Jan. 2 they can
return to the mere routine hecticity of their lives.
From that central truth, a few propositions follow:
Replacing regular stuff with green stuff isn't getting very close to the
root of the problem. If for some reason you need to give someone a motorized
spice rack, then a motorized spice rack with a more efficient motor is quite
clearly better. But it's also quite clearly beside the point.
Stuff itself is a problem less because of its environmental toll (though
that is quite high) than because it's increasingly meaningless. Think of
your friends. Are many of them lacking in stuff? Or is the first question
that forms in their minds when a new gift arrives from under the tree:
"Where am I going to put this?"
But this pleasure gap allows for a concentrated opportunity to begin
rethinking our economic life. If stuff isn't valuable anymore, what is?
Time, clearly. A gift of time -- a coupon for a back rub, or a trip to the
museum, or a dinner prepared someday in the future -- is a gift whose
exchange rate is figured in a stronger currency (if you're an economics
major, think euros vs. dollars). Or gifts can come embedded with time
already spent: a jar of homemade jam, a stack of firewood in the back yard.
Gifts can also be reconfigured to remove some of the hyperindividualism that
marks our consumer society. Ask yourself what you'd rather receive: another
thing, or a homemade card saying that, say, a cow had been purchased in your
name and was now providing milk for a Tanzanian family that hadn't had milk
before. (Note: this line of reasoning is probably especially strong for
those of us who are Christians, and recall that the occasion we're
celebrating is the birth of a man who said to give all that we had to the
poor.)
Since Christmas has long been in the business of baptizing consumption, it's
a good place to start eroding consumption's allure. Newfound pleasures from
a simpler holiday -- some silence, some companionship -- suddenly start to
seem attractive. Maybe that attraction will remain with us yea even unto
February.
That would be good, because our environmental problem, at root, isn't that
the stuff we're buying uses too much energy or too much plastic, or that its
paint has lead in it, or that it's been shipped too far. Our environmental
problem is that we consume way too much because we've agreed to try and meet
basic human needs -- status, respect, affection -- with material ends. And
no time more so than at Christmas, when Santa rides in on a Norelco razor.
It's a kind of joint conspiracy that few of us dare break out of, even
though we all understand at some level that it's not working. What if you
don't give your kids a "proper Christmas"?
But the second you do break out of it -- the second your family becomes one
of those that exchanges used books at Christmas, or decides to follow St.
Francis' Yule tradition of wandering the park and throwing seed so that the
birds too could celebrate, or makes it an annual custom to serve turkey
dinner at the homeless shelter -- then you start sharing in the deep human
secret that consumer society is set up to obscure: the things that please us
most are almost always counterintuitive. We need to be out in the cold air,
we need to think about others, we need to serve.
There are, of course, some who will say that a course like the one I'm
describing here will damage the economy -- that anyone who proposes a
different Yuletide is a "grinch." (This, by the way, is a major literary
faux pas. Close reading -- even cursory reading, or even viewing the annual
television special, will remind one that it was in fact the grinch himself
who believed that Christmas came in a box. He turned out to be wrong, as the
Whos of Whoville, those communists, made clear.) You could answer those
people by saying, "Well, it won't all happen at once, and the economy will
have time to adjust." Or you could answer by saying, "Maybe you're right.
And maybe the economy isn't therefore quite as rational and as obvious as we
would like to believe, if in fact it depends on a corrupted celebration of
Jesus' birth to stagger on for another year."
The second answer appeals to me. We need a kiss to break our enchantment,
and a kiss (a coupon for a kiss! Or a dozen!) is a perfectly fine gift to
give for Christmas.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The
Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence
at Middlebury College in Vermont.
© 2009 Grist.org All rights reserved.
"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that the
leaders have to courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but
have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less
wasteful."
--Wendell Berry
***
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/03-0
Copenhagen Climate Change Talks Must Fail, says Top Scientist
Exclusive: World's leading climate change expert says summit talks so flawed
that deal would be a disaster
by Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian/UK; December 2, 3009
The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger
of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future
generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ended in
collapse.
In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent
climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations
would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from
scratch.
"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track
because it's a disaster track," said Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard
Institute for Space Studies in New York.
"The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess
the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will
spend years trying to determine exactly what that means." He was speaking as
progress towards a deal in Copenhagen received a boost today, with India
revealing a target to curb its carbon emissions. All four of the major
emitters - the US, China, EU and India - have now tabled offers on
emissions, although the equally vexed issue of funding for developing
nations to deal with global warming remains deadlocked.
Hansen, in repeated appearances before Congress beginning in 1989, has done
more than any other scientist to educate politicians about the causes of
global warming and to prod them into action to avoid its most catastrophic
consequences. But he is vehemently opposed to the carbon market schemes - in
which permits to pollute are bought and sold - which are seen by the EU and
other governments as the most efficient way to cut emissions and move to a
new clean energy economy.
Hansen is also fiercely critical of Barack Obama - and even Al Gore, who won
a Nobel peace prize for his efforts to get the world to act on climate
change - saying politicians have failed to meet what he regards as the moral
challenge of our age.
In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the
compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analagous to
the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced
by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot
compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and
reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."
He added: "We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is
really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual."
The understated Iowan's journey from climate scientist to activist
accelerated in the last years of the Bush administration. Hansen, a
reluctant public speaker, says he was forced into the public realm by the
increasingly clear looming spectre of droughts, floods, famines and drowned
cities indicated by the science.
That enormous body of scientific evidence has been put under a microscope by
climate sceptics after last month's release online of hacked emails sent by
respected researchers at the climate research unit of the University of East
Anglia. Hansen admitted the controversy could shake public's trust, and
called for an investigation. "All that stuff they are arguing about the data
doesn't really change the analysis at all, but it does leave a very bad
impression," he said.
The row reached Congress today, with Republicans accusing the researchers of
engaging in "scientific fascism" and pressing the Obama administration's top
science adviser, John Holdren, to condemn the email. Holdren, a climate
scientist who wrote one of the emails in the UEA trove, said he was prepared
to denounce any misuse of data by the scientists - if one is proved.
Hansen has emerged as a leading campaigner against the coal industry, which
produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other fuel source.
He has become a fixture at campus demonstrations and last summer was
arrested at a protest against mountaintop mining in West Virginia, where he
called the Obama government's policies "half-assed".
He has irked some environmentalists by espousing a direct carbon tax on fuel
use. Some see that as a distraction from rallying support in Congress for
cap-and-trade legislation that is on the table.
He is scathing of that approach. "This is analagous to the indulgences that
the Catholic church sold in the middle ages. The bishops collected lots of
money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement
despite its absurdity. That is exactly what's happening," he said. "We've
got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as
usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what
they can get through offsets [sold through the carbon markets]."
For all Hansen's pessimism, he insists there is still hope. "It may be that
we have already committed to a future sea level rise of a metre or even more
but that doesn't mean that you give up.
"Because if you give up you could be talking about tens of metres. So I find
it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it's too late. In
that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet?
You want to minimise the damage."
. James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren is published by Bloomsbury.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
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