Buy products that support local craftspeople and entrepreneurs, or buy Fair Trade or otherwise-certified products that help poor people thrive in developing countries or ensure sustainable management of resources. It takes a bit more planning than just going for the hot-ticket home entertainment center, but it might leave a positive lasting legacy.
Whatever you do this Black Friday, consider its effects on the planet. How many resources, how many fossil fuels have been used up to make the products you’re buying? My personal hero was the famous environmentalist David Brower, who built the Sierra Club and founded Earth Island Institute, on whose board I now serve.
He died in 2000. More than forty years ago, Brower pointed out that we don’t really inherit the earth, so much as borrow it from future generations, against whom we are “committing grand larceny.”
“Ours is a chain letter economy, in which we pick up early handsome dividends and our children find their mailboxes empty,” he once said, a generalized metaphor that seems frighteningly real in this culture of unparalleled greed. In short, we’re getting all the stuff and our progeny will get a planet left uninhabitable by climate change and resource exhaustion.
More than a hundred years have passed since Brower’s birth. That may seem like a long time to us, but as he regularly pointed out in his short speech called “The Sermon,” it is but an instant in the geological span. Brower compressed the age of the Earth (more than four billion years) into the Biblical Week of Creation.
In that metaphorical light, the dinosaurs were around for five hours or so, humans have been here but a few minutes, and a hundred years represents only a small fraction of a second. In that last blink of an eye in geological time, Brower explained, we’ve used nearly all the resources ever consumed by human beings, depleted our soils and forests and fisheries by half, destroyed countless species and perhaps irrevocably altered the climate.
“There are people who think what we’ve been doing for the last fraction of a second can continue indefinitely,” Brower used to say. “They are considered reasonable people, but they are stark raving mad.”
Remember his words on this year’s Black Friday, when you’re tempted to take home a shopping basket full of stuff.