With another Buy Nothing Day fast approaching we caught up with Kalle Lasn founder of the world-renowned anti-consumer bible - Adbusters Magazine - to ask what consumption has to do with the environment and if we can buy our way out of the global ecological mess.
The Buy Nothing Day Campaign, organized by Adbusters Media Foundation, is held each year in North America on November 28th and internationally on November 29th. Buy Nothing Day originated as an attempt to get consumers to slow down a bit on the shopping frenzy that begins the day after American Thanksgiving and continues until Christmas. However, what started as a local movement has gone global with Buy Nothing Days operating around the world. Buy Nothing Week and Buy Nothing Christmas are also two anti-consumption spin-offs that have evolved as the developing world becomes increasingly aware of the ramifications of overconsumption.
Is Buy Nothing Day still relevant to our society?
At the Media Foundation we are brainstorming about that right now – we think it is still relevant, but we are not quite sure how to explain that to people. We started almost 20 years ago and in the early days Buy Nothing Day was really a shocker, now everyone seems to understand it. Now everyday feels like Buy Nothing Day with the economic crunch. But we still are spending more than we earn, we haven’t fully learned the lesson.
Some companies try to fool you into thinking you can be a good person by buying a hybrid or some other green product but it doesn’t work like that.
How is Buy Nothing Day growing?
Buy Nothing Day is a very successful social marketing campaign. Last year it happened in over 60 countries around the world. Now we have added a ‘s’ to Buy Nothing Day – so it becomes Buy Nothing Days. We are hoping Buy Nothing Day will stop being just a day where you don’t shop, but will evolve into consuming less everyday. Buy Nothing Day is a good campaign or idea for people that have never thought that much about the dark side of consumerism.
How is consumption linked to our current environmental problems?
Overconsumption is the mother of all environment problems. I can’t think of a single environmental problems that can’t be traced back to consumption - everything is linked to consumption. If we want to solve our environmental problems we need to solve our problems of consumption.
Something needs to change for the one billion rich people on the planet who consume more than 80% of the world’s resources.
Why do people think they can shop their way out of the environment crisis?
There still seems to be a future for Buy Nothing Day, despite this crunch, look at the spectacle of us, how we are in debt personally and at a governmental level. We simply don’t want to confront our global footprint. We are in truly in denial about the ugly side of our consumption. I don’t think we can buy our way out of this ecological crisis. Something needs to change for the one billion rich people on the planet who consume more than 80% of the world’s resources.
Some companies try to fool you into thinking you can be a good person by buying a hybrid or some other green product, but it doesn’t work like that. People need to understand that we don’t need to just consume differently, we need to consume less.
Currently climate change is lurching completely out of control. A series of light crunches just may put humanity on a sustainable path.
What will it take for people to realize they need to consume less?
I must admit, I don’t think we are going to be talked out of the way we live. Something much more ominous needs to happen. In spite of all the people that are trying to talk to us about the ecological crisis, it is going to take some sort of catastrophe to wake us up. If it does turn into something like what happened in 1929, it might make us wake up to the consumption binge we have been on for the last few generations.
Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with a real crunch time – not something truly ugly – but I feel that for the rich 1 billion on the planet – it will be great for us to live through a crunch or series of crunches. Certainly 17 years of Buy Nothing Day hasn’t really done it – it got people thinking about consumption, but these campaigns are not going to solve the major environmental problems. We will need something more. As a culture we still seem to be very far from waking up.
Do you remain optimistic?
As I said, I don’t think a crunch needs to be negative. I wonder if it is so terrible to go through a recession. From my viewpoint, if you are an environmentalist, a recession is just a period when we are living more lightly on the planet, when we are consuming less, this is not a bad thing.
I think we need to think differently about what a crunch really means, maybe a serious of light crunches is exactly what we need and perhaps this can help us avoid a very big crunch. Currently climate change is lurching completely out of control. A series of light crunches just may put humanity on a sustainable path.
Buy Nothing Day is on November 28th in North American and November 29th internationally: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd
Check out the latest issue of Adbusters Magazine - Big Ideas of 2009 - is on stands now. Adbusters Magazine: http://www.adbusters.org/
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