~ A Christmas Message ~
The Gift of Death
"...Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care... Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it..."
By
George Monbiot
There’s nothing they need,
nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you
buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a
silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable
zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called
Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this
significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.
They seem
amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second,
embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill.
For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic
stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission
the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard
discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer
economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1).
Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon
condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence
(breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming
unfashionable).
But many
of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become
obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no
utility in the first place.
An electronic drum-machine t-shirt;
a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an
individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a
sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing
dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after
Christmas Day.
They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a
snigger or two, and then be thrown away.
The
fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the
impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed
for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and
combined into compounds of utter pointlessness.
When you take
account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other
countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for
more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2).
We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath
thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in
eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades
of ever diminishing marginal utility(3).
Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden
cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking
fish.
This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming
epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by
advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has
happened to us.
In 2007,
the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by
poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4).
No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich
people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their
food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth.
It’s
grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in
industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world
through pointless consumption.
This boom
has not happened by accident.
Our lives have been corralled and
shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force
countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments
cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to
stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these
policies stop and ask “spending on what?”.
When every
conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have
disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly
useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are
harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to
our doors.
Grown men
and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this
rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always
knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an
electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5).
An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and
son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus
7’s special features(6).
The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of
selling them to you.
The growth
of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures
that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats.
In the
US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to
the top 1% of the population(7).
The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor,
simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for
those who already possess more money than they know how to
spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this
earth are diminished.
So
effectively have governments, the media and advertisers
associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say
these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule.
Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the
panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to
associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8).
When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as
lunatics.
Bake them
a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke,
but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you
care. All it shows is that you don’t.
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