Just read the cover story of Sunday's NY Times Style section and thought I'd bring it up here.
To summarize, it was about how this year's Christmas-stealing "Grinch" is the loopy environmentalist in your family, who wants to fore-go exchanging new store-bought presents for more eco-friendly options - like chore trading, recycled gifts, no wrapping paper, etc. The tone of the article was that this person is a bummer and that Christmas is not a time for austerity... or perhaps I'm editorializing.
For the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit here that Christmas is not my holiday. So I read this article through the cool, steely eyes of a Jewish girl who always envied the over-the-top-ness of my Christmas celebrating friends (and, well, the rest of the world) at this time of year. And if those tree-hugging hippies ever came after Rosh Hashona, I would be PISSED. (Um, I'm kidding of course... I mean, how could you make the Jewish holidays MORE green??? We don't really "do" anything... besides eat and walk everywhere.)
Anyway... for conservation to work on a large scale, the Green movement has to come up with some convenient, win/win ways for the rest of the country (meaning, west of Santa Monica and east of Vermont) to hop on board. This shift in attitude will have to be all-encompassing - from our government, through the corporations and institutions, on down to the consumer. I don't think that ix-naying my little niece Isabel's Polly Pocket set (as loathsome as I find those things), is the way to go about it.
I saw Al Gore's movie. And I agree that the smaller things add up. But don't you think there might be a backlash if Christmas becomes the new target of the Green movement? Couldn't this be another way to marginalize a very crucial issue as mean-spirited and a little crazy? Or maybe this could be spun as a WWJD, stewards-of -the-earth kind of thing? Maybe it is the time of year to consider all that our planet gives us and try to give back... For some reason, I doubt it.
Thoughts?
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