Credit: Flickr/Adam Wells. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
At this time of year, the over-consuming lifestyles of the affluent world are impossible to ignore. Brightly-lit shops are bursting with festive foods and expensive indulgences, while seasonal songs play in the background of shopping malls to keep us spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need, in order to make impressions that don’t matter.
The frenetic commercialism of Christmas continues to escalate despite all the warnings from climate scientists that Western lifestyles are destroying the planet. We still buy enough Christmas trees in the UK alone to reach from London to New York and back, and the card packaging that’s thrown away could cover Big Ben almost 260,000 times—not to mention the 4,500 tonnes of tin foil, two million turkeys, 74 million mince pies and five million mounds of charred raisins from rejected Christmas puddings that are discarded in the UK come January. The mountain of e-waste from discarded electronic items—many of them bought as unwanted gifts—is projected to reach ten million tonnes by 2020.
Just pause for a moment and picture the scale of that waste, along with the ecological destruction it represents. Christmas is merely an exaggerated illustration of the gross materialism that defines our lives in a consumerist society.
