9 Christmas Gifts You Can Give to Your Mother ... Earth

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted December 17, 2008.

9. Stop Buying Stuff

If it's one thing the holidays can be sure to provide, it's a desire to buy lots of stuff we don't really need. Let's start with clothes. Author Stan Cox writes about how much Americans spend on clothes:

The average annual shopping haul swelled from $1,550 per household in 2002 to $1,760 last year. That spending spree was prompted in part by what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says was a 30 percent drop in real apparel prices over the past decade. With cheap imports allowing a dollar to buy more, the physical bulk of garb purchased by the average household has risen 18 percent in just five years.

All this shopping means we each discard around 68 pounds of clothing each year. This of course, stresses landfills, but as Cox points out, the most harm comes from producing clothes with pesticide-laden cotton and synthetic fabric that "consumes petroleum, blows out greenhouse gases and spews wastewater-bearing organic solvents, heavy metals and poisonous dyes and fiber treatments."

And it's not just clothes that are a problem, our consumer goods, in general have huge environmental impacts, especially because most of it comes from overseas. Cox writes:

In and near the world's ports and coastal sea lanes, emissions from oceangoing vessels caused 60,000 premature deaths in 2002. With increasing trade, the number of such deaths is projected to rise 40 percent by 2012. Ships' crews, dockworkers, truckers, other port personnel and local residents are all vulnerable.

The particulate matter produced by burning diesel has been associated with lung cancer, asthma, chronic bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, decreased lung function in children and infant mortality.

And that's just the human impact, not withstanding the enormous cost of increased pollution and the burning of fossil fuels on global warming and air and water quality.

Clearly we've got to make changes, he writes:

Halting that growth or even making deep cuts in imports would not only help clear the air, it would make it easier to clean up the toxic water pollution that accumulates in sea lanes and ports; it would curb the noise pollution that can do serious damage to human health and interfere with communications among marine mammals; and it would stop the headlong rush to pave more land for logistics parks.

Of course there is an upside to all these grim numbers. A recent article from YES! Magazine summed up, that "The Good Life Doesn't Have to Cost the Planet." Spending less money on stuff and more money with family and friends is bound to be way more rewarding. And that seems like the best part of the holidays, anyway.

See more stories tagged with: environment, energy, water, global warming, climate change, consumption

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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