Action Briefing Dec 2003 - Jan 2004
	The Newsletter of Birmingham Friends of the Earth

Birmingham Friends of the Earth's Buy Nothing Day action 29th Nov 2003: Seven placard-bearing Santas parading through the City Centre. Pictures at www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/282245.html

Santastic! Buy Nothing Day 2003

Did you know your household pays over £500 a year for advertisers to convince you to love shopping? Buy Nothing Day is one day a year when you get a chance to switch off from shopping and tune into life. It's easy: just spend a day without spending!

Birmingham Friends of the Earth's Santa Parade took to the streets on International Buy Nothing Day, 29th November. Seven Santas bore aloft colourful placards bearing ironic advertising slogans such as "Buy More, Be Happy", "Work! Spend! Don't think!", "Money CAN buy you love", "If it's Branded, then it must be good" and "Buy It! Give It! Bin It!"

Other bizarre sights included Santa's queuing for the bus; surrounding individual shoppers in a shoal of Santa's; a Santa Conga; dancing to a busking steel band; and posing under the "Happy Christmas Birmingham" lights.

Resources
The average person in the UK uses nearly three times what can be supplied by the planet, and consumption is increasing. If people around the world used resources at the same rate as the average US citizen, we’d need the resources of six planet Earths to sustain ourselves! The rich Northern countries, whose populations comprise only 20% of the world population, are consuming over 80% of the Earth’s resources, causing immense environmental damage and pollution, as well as an unfair distribution of wealth between rich and poor, both between and within rich and poor countries alike.

In economic terms, 'progress' is chiefly defined as a sustained increase in a country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), essentially a measure of how much money changes hands. The UK's GDP is over one and a half times higher than it was in 1972. But during the same period, violent crime has quadrupled, the incidence of asthma has tripled, and car traffic has almost doubled. If you use a measure of progress which takes into account factors such as people’s health, the state of the environment, and equality, as well as economic growth, you find a steady, persistent decline in national well-being since 1970. Is this progress?

Limits
In a world without environmental limits, everyone could consume as much as they wanted. But as soon as we accept that there are limits, we have to address how limited resources are distributed.

The problem isn't just that vital resources, such as oil, are being over-exploited but also that the current (mostly Northern) patterns and rates of resource extraction and processing, manufacturing and energy use are overloading the environment's capacity to absorb waste, pollution and greenhouse gases.

Research by Friends of the Earth suggests that to stay within environmental limits, consume only our fair share of resources and produce only our fair share of pollution, the UK would eventually have to reduce its overall consumption of raw materials and energy by around 80%.

Technology and improved efficiency have a major role to play, but its no good making, say, TVs twice as efficient if four times as many of them are sold because the efficiency gains will be cancelled out by the number of products consumed. At the moment, our economy and culture is set up so that this is precisely what will happen. The real obstacles we face are political and cultural, not technical.

We need to tend more towards local self-reliance. This does not mean an end to world trade, but it means more local production for local consumption. Small-scale, local businesses keep wealth in the local area, retaining local jobs and a stronger sense of community. An increase in local business, and in repair and reuse, will create more jobs and preserve more skills than a throw-away culture.

What should Government do?

1. Set ambitious targets to reduce resource consumption;
   
2. Adopt a measure progress in terms of people’s well-being, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW);
   
3. Put less tax on job creation and more tax on waste and virgin material use. This would encourage growth in, for instance, repair industries requiring skilled workers but not so many materials;
   
4. Make manufacturers responsible for taking products back at the end of their lives for repair, reuse or recycling.

Andy Pryke

Take Action
By the time you read this, Buy Nothing Day 2003 will have been and gone. So why not declare your own personal “Buy Nothing Day”, and tell your friends why. Visit www.buynothingday.co.uk/

Before you buy a product, think ‘is it really needed?’ Ask the retailer how long it will last and whether it can be repaired, reused and recycled. Try, when possible, to buy seasonal and local products (to reduce pollution from transport), and for imported products like coffee, choose goods with the Fairtrade mark.

A recent article in New Scientist magazine revealed that the latest research into happiness has found that the more consumer goods you buy, the more you think you need to make you happy. The happiness promised by consumerism is always out of reach. (New Scientist, 4th Oct 2003, Vol.180, Issue 2415, p44. Available online after registering at www.newscientist.co.uk)