Holidays, Capitalism and the Environment
During Christmas this year I had a revelation that scared me — Christmas may possibly be the worst of all the holidays when it comes to its negative impact on the environment.
The most obvious impact of Christmas is the planned obsolescence of some products, the constant need to buy a new shiny toy. Replacing your phone every year, buying a new computer, your external hard drive breaking down; we’re really in a constant cycle of having to buy new shit all the time. Keeping up with the Joneses has so many of us by the metaphorical balls, we keep falling for Apple keynotes, we keep thinking we need the new iPhone-whatever.
The thing that really hit me this year was all of the indirect impacts the Christmas season has on our planet. The carbon emissions from all the travelling people do during the holidays, all the driving to and from the mall to shop, all the meat that we eat during the season, the packaging and wrapping paper that gifts come in, all the energy wasted on Christmas lights. If we placed all of our Christmas cards alongside one another they would stretch around the world 500 times (citation).
We are so caught up in performing Christmas in its largest form, its most obnoxious and pompous form that we forget the greater implications of our actions. Western society has become so obsessed with the grandiose. Our naivety and ignorance could be the end of us, we’re slowly digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
I can’t say that I was better than anyone else this Christmas in terms of my negative impact on the environment, but I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to chill out on the meat and wrapping paper next Christmas. A lot of the things that we get so sucked into doing because of tradition are killing our planets.
