Buy Nothing Day

by poputonian

This email came in from Hello Cool World, where I purchased the enlightening (or should I say harrowing) DVD The Corporation:

As we toil to make the Blackspot venture bear fruit, we think it’s a good strategy to occasionally pause and take stock of all of the ideals that motivated all of this effort in the first place. That’s why we hope you’ll join us this Friday or Saturday (November 24th and 25th) in celebrating the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day.

This year’s Buy Nothing Day has a special poignancy. Never before have our emerging environmental crises been planted so firmly on the lips of the policymakers and the general public. Rather than screaming from the fringes, high-profile economists and scientists are sounding the warnings in respected journals and the halls of parliament — warnings that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we are setting ourselves up for the most massive and widest-ranging market failure the world has ever seen.

All of this points to a profound need for a shift in the way we see things. Recycling, protecting our waterways, driving hybrid cars — all the old environmental imperatives — are great, but it’s becoming obvious that they don’t address the core problem: we have to change our lifestyles, we have to change our culture, and we have to consume smarter and consume less.

This is the message of this year’s Buy Nothing Day, and there are only a few days left to get that message out onto the streets. From the quietly sublime to the crazily anarchic, the ways in which you can mark BND are only limited by the imperative not to spend. Strut your stuff as if the fate of whole planet is resting in your hands, because even if each of us only does one small thing to contribute, tens of thousands of small things sure add up!

At the BND campaign headquarters – that’s http://www.adbusters.org/bnd – we’ve already featured upcoming actions in Japan, the UK, Canada, and the USA, with more to come from all over the world, including Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Hungary, Spain and Sweden. You can also download posters and other resources, as well as connect with activists in your own little corner of the globe.

Remember: Make a scene. Make people laugh. Make them think. If you have to, make them angry. Just get out there.

I won’t be harrassing anyone who wants to shop, but I am happy to buy nothing.

Actually, I think I’m going to give 1491 a try. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a while waiting its turn. A couple of people mentioned it in my prior post, which caused me to take a closer look.

Fire in the fireplace (it’s 35 degrees here), couch, coffee, book, iPod, human.