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The G Word
Why holiday giving in a time of climate change needs a re-think
Gifts and garbage are supposedly different things. But they both begin with a “G.”
In truth material gifts and garbage are just adjacent stations on the cross of the carbon cycle. Each has more or less the same effect on the warming of our planet. An estimated 30 percent of unwanted holiday gifts go directly in the trash. There they off-gas their CO2 into the atmosphere as the landfill slow-cooks them. The luckier gifts sit on our shelves, descending from visibility to obscurity, eventually heading toward the garage, which the comedian Jerry Seinfeld helpfully notes rhymes with garBAGE. The only way for our garba-gifts to remain climate neutral is for the carbon within them to remain inside the trunks of living trees or oil in the ground. In other words, for the gifts into which they were rendered never to have existed in the first place.
And yet, we are social beings, the most social of all the apes. Gifting is baked into our DNA. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, after studying indigenous societies around the world, concluded that cultures endure through reciprocal responsibilities, the small, everyday acts by which people care for one another. Part survival strategy, part ethics fundament, gifting quite literally brings us together. Taken to its highest level, a…
