Antinuclear

Utterly useless Christmas presents are helping to trash the planet

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

 This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and by the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.This boom has not happened by accident.

 When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless.

Trashing the planet for a talking piggy bank http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/trashing-the-planet-for-a-talking-piggy-bank-20121212-2b9vh.html#ixzz2F4vYvlY2 December 13, 2012 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 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 Map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the 12th day of Christmas they’re in landfill. For 30 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 per cent remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold on to are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (wearing out or breaking quickly) or perceived obsolescence (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 iPhone 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. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath
thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smartphone
upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. 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 by the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.This boom has not happened by accident.
Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it.
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,” a woman in a TV ad for an electronics outlet says. ”Well you
shouldn’t”, replies the narrator. An ad for a Google tablet shows a
father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the
Nexus 7’s special features. 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 the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US
in 2010, a remarkable 93 per cent of the growth in incomes accrued to
the top 1 per cent of the population. The old excuse, that we must
trash the planet to help the poor, does not wash. For a few decades of
extra enrichment for those who already possess more 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. 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.

December 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, energy