A climate conscious Christmas?

"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."

--George Monbiot

This quote from George Monbiot from his Guardian article particularly struck me when I was considering my Christmassy blog post over the last few days. Although his attitude towards the Christmas mass consumerism does seem to me to be leaning towards the unnecessarily dour side (i.e. have all the gifts in landfill by the 12^th day of Christmas), I can empathise with his wider point. Having had the misfortune of experiencing Oxford Street anywhere near Christmas time, the issue of frantic mass consumerism was apparent to me. According to climate psychologist Rosemary Randall, the average Brit now has a carbon footprint three times larger than the average in the 1950s, and I’m surprised it isn’t more (Randall, 2011).

In several countries, consumerism is being used as a tool to recover from economic stagnation, most significantly being in the Netherlands (Kopnina, 2014). However, what is considered consumerism needs to be analysed, and environmental concerns considered if a movement away from the current paradigm is to occur. There have been many theories proposed in order to change the dominant economic practise, such as ‘ecological modernisation’ (EC), ‘postmaterialist value theory’ (PMVT) and the ‘Environmental Kuznets curve’ (EKC). In turn, these involve:

• EM: natural resources can be used for growth and development – an anthropocentric view.
• PMVT: greater wealth leads to greater environmental values.
• EKC: in early industrialisation materials are used intensely, up to a threshold of development were structural economic changes lead to a lessening in material use.

However, in reality these ideals have barely been considered, as the “material saturation level of ‘developed’ societies is far from sustainable” (Kopnina, 2014). What ideally needs to change is the level AND type of consumerism practised, meaning the pure volume of materials consumed and the increased consideration of the whole production chain.

All of these theories show how the issue of sustainable consumerism is still anthropocentric, which links to the proposition put forth by Crutzen in 2002, that we are living in a new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. He proposes that since 1784 (Watt’s steam engine) that humans have altered the environment so much that we are now the dominant force affecting most of the earth, therefore it warrants a new geological epoch as the earth system is vastly different from previous states. Fundamental in this shift is the use of fossil fuels and non-renewable energies which has vastly contributed to the dominance of humans in the earth system. This is why renewable technology is vital to the economic and cultural change required to prevent further ecological and environmental damage, of which Christmas consumerism is only a part!

Along that theme, a rather large Christmas present given to the Humber region recently, has been the announcement of the government approval of the ABLE Marine Energy Park which will be a huge enterprise area dedicated to the manufacture, assembly and repair of offshore wind turbines to supply the huge plans for wind farms in the North Sea. This will provide around 4000 jobs for the area and ideally act as a catalyst for the whole region to become a renewable energy hub (www.ableuk.com).

This move in the Humber region has been welcomed across the board and hopefully will act as an example both nationally and globally, to encourage the economic shift to a more environmentally conscious system, accompanied by the appropriate cultural change, which over time, could lead to a rather different Christmas!