For 2009, A Plea for a New Abolitionism

This mighty nation is enslaved by the collective imperative to shop or perish and as a result is dragging the whole globe to perdition. That's why the news this past week about the economic troubles of the nation's retailers has been, well, sorry to say so, good news overall.

Story after story about how retailers are slashing prices and taking losses to move inventory after a dismal holiday shopping season. I couldn't help but be glad when I heard a report on National Public Radio on how empty the stores are now. I didn't imagine that everyone was home sulking, but suddenly free to do something more fulfilling.

The NY Times summed it up this way:

Retailers have no choice but to find creative ways to clear their store shelves, because they have to make room for spring merchandise.

After 9/11, President Bush famously told America: go shopping! In anticipation of a coming snowstorm the week before Christmas, Mayor Bloomberg promised efficient snow removal and told New Yorkers: go shopping! Soon after his inauguration, President Obama will likely sign an economic stimulus bill into law that will authorize the government to print close to $1 trillion of new currency. Why? So that America can once again go shopping! as before.

Good grief.

Our $13 trillion economy is based essentially on shopping -- for cars and houses, clothes and televisions, gadgets and gifts -- a treadmill of consumption with no "off" switch. The Chinese economy, a juggernaut of production, and the American economy, its all-consuming counterpart, together account for half the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the global financial crisis and the global climate crisis, they are working in lock step to bring spring merchandise to a store near you. The retailers are making room on their shelves for it, the marketers are preparing the enticing come-ons, and we are all expected to show up and buy things we really don't need so that the economy can recover and grow without limit.

Back in 1864, the great conservationist George Perkins Marsh had this to say in a book called Man and Nature:

Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.

Usufruct is a legal term. It means the right to use or enjoy something without damaging or destroying it. And so in that one sentence written more than 150 years ago, Marsh presciently anticipated our present condition: a society based on consumption and a profligate waste of energy that spares nary a thought for the future. (see Bill McKibben's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.)

Even earlier in American history, the idea of Earth in usufruct found expression in a famous letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789.

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, that the Earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

The Earth, in other words, must be passed on to succeeding generations in the condition in which it was received. Please notice Jefferson calls this idea "self-evident." He accords it the same nobility as the idea that "all men are created equal" -- also a "self-evident" truth, if you recall his words in the Declaration of Independence, later reaffirmed by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.

How far we have fallen! The first principle of patriotism has become "go shopping!," protected by the embarrassing and sociopathic pronouncement of Bush the First: "The American way of life is not negotiable." Thank goodness we are about to be released from the dark grip of his failed progeny, too.

So as Barack Hussein Obama takes the oath of office with his hand upon the Bible that Lincoln used, let us hope for another emancipation -- from the tyranny of shopping. All citizens can do their part.

What if, in 2009, they gave a sale and no one came?

What if we stopped behaving like the lab rats that advertisers and marketers make us be?

What if instead of consumption and profligate waste, extraction and disposal, we reconstructed society based on honoring the sacred trust we hold for future generations?

It's time for a new abolitionism. If President Obama himself represents the crowning fulfillment of Lincoln's work of abolishing slavery, then let him start a new work of healing the world, for the infection of shopping is corrupting every last corner of the globe.

This is no exaggeration. Earlier this year I traveled about as far from our civilization as a person can still go: the Kingdom of Mustang in north-central Nepal. A king does indeed still preside over its walled capital -- Lo Manthang -- situated in a high-altitude desert a mere 10 miles or so from the border with Tibet. Few foreigners ever reach there, but when we do, we tend to do similar things: take photographs and go shopping.

In response, an enterprising local named Kunga opened a little shop to cater to the tourist trade. He named his establishment Kunga Shopping Shop. It's the shop for the people who must shop. What is for sale is irrelevant as long as something can be bought. Despite the relative poverty and isolation of the place, Kunga revealed that he understands us better than we understand ourselves, even as he succumbed to a long tentacle of globalization and became, unfortunately, a bit more like us.

The King of Mustang himself is feeling the pinch, too. He keeps a herd of horses, and he used to have six or seven hundred of them. Now, he's only got three or four hundred because a road from China reaches the northern wall of his capital. A few times a year, a convoy of big trucks pulls up outside Lo Manthang and disgorges cheap merchandise, and stores like Kunga's get stocked for the season. There's not as much need to ride horses across the border to trade in necessaries anymore, since they arrive, along with plenty of un-necessaries, almost of their own accord and all at once. It's much more convenient, profitable and efficient after all.

Plenty of Chinese beer in big bottles arrives in Lo Manthang, too, even though a bottle costs about as much as a week or two's wages. The beer finds a steady market among the tourists, and the empty bottles find a resting place in a big heap just outside the ancient walls of the town. There's also another spot reserved for burning trash, which I found by following my nose. Returning to town from an excursion, I smelled an acrid and synthetic odor. It reminded me of the sad stench that permeated my neighborhood in Brooklyn for months after 9/11, as the wreckage smoldered downtown. When I found the little pit that was the source of the out-of-place odor, I was afforded a grand view of the Himalaya all around. Where on Earth was I?

For the people of Lo Manthang, the American way of life arrives on Chinese trucks, and perhaps Bush the First was right -- it's not negotiable, it's inexorable. For more than a thousand years, the Mustangis have maintained their planetary outpost, exhibiting an ability to live upon the meager resources available in the harsh climate without destroying the possibility of survival for future generations. All it took was a road and the periodic visitation of fossil-fueled vehicles to tip the balance of forces in favor of consumption and waste.

All year long, our columns are filled with policy discussions -- what's needed to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, chart a new energy future, and save the world from certain doom; and while it is tempting at year's end to evaluate last year's wish list of prognostications and prescribe remedies anew, somehow this year the reflex seems inappropriate. We've rehearsed the list all year long already. Those whose policies we favored are soon to take office and well know what needs to be done: cap emissions, stop coal use, create green jobs, repower America with clean energy, re-engage internationally, etc.

What seems most important is to admit that global climate change will not be solved through the appointment of a crack White House team or even the adoption of the right policies if we maintain the illusion that we can shop our way to a low carbon future.

The new administration will succeed only if it emancipates us from the odd notion that the fulfillment of democracy is to be found in unrestricted shopping, and teaches us instead to use our freedom to enjoy the fruits of the earth without destroying it. All the rest is commentary.

Best wishes to all upon this turning of another year.

May the curses of the year gone by be behind us, may the blessings of the coming year be upon us.

Update 

The King of Mustang is no longer a king. The monarchy formally ended when Nepal became a federal democratic republic on May 28, 2008, two weeks after my visit to Lo Manthang. In October, the deputy prime minister formally asked the king to step down. He agreed.

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