– did you shop on Buy Nothing Day?

We managed to avoid shopping for the last two days.  But then we also missed the fact that yesterday was officially Buy Nothing Day.  It’s a much bigger day in the UK, it seems.

The American campaign runs the day before — the so called ‘Black Friday’ after Thanksgiving.  Even if there’s a reason for this classic case of American exceptionalism, we’re not sure it’s such a good idea.  There’s overwhelming pressure in the US media on the day after Thanksgiving to talk positively about retail that day.  Would the Buy Nothing message win more converts, perhaps, if it hit the day after?  In the calm after the shopping frenzy, after all, people might be ready to reflecting on the real value of their day of binge shopping.

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– ‘culdesactivism’ — engaging at micro-neighborhood level

A great story about the accidental birth of a grass roots environmental activist and a great new coinage — culdesactivism — from James Glave today in Salon.

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– the tree thieves; a must-read

It’s a busy life being an EarthQuaker — especially if you aspire to live it slow, to some degree.  So we’re just now reading last month’s New Yorkers and found this fascinating but depressing insiders look at the growing trade in illegally-logged timber.  It’s essential reading.

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– 10 tips for a sustainable Thanksgiving

Something seasonal — from Sarah Newman at takepart, c/o alternet.

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– guerilla gardening is just like buying a new car!

Or so Honda would have you believe.  Their newest Lexus campaign hitchhikes upon positive environmental developments in the world and links them to the latest Lexus hybrids.

An ad for the campaign — built around the slogan ‘Good things are happening today’ — in this month’s Wired features four newspaper clippings.  Two herald advances in environmental science, another trumpets a deal to preserve a part of the Amazon basin and the last is one of the many recent reports documenting the rise in popularity of guerilla gardening.  ‘The same spirit that drives these,’ says the ad of the news reports, ‘drives these,’ meaning the new autos, one of which has a base retail price of $105,000.

Nice try.  And, sure, hybrids are better than non-hybrids.  But it’s a mighty jump from greening blighted urban landscapes at the cost of a pack of seeds to gathering, shipping and processing the enormous volume of materials that go into even the greenest of cars.

It reminds us, as we’ve said before, that the greenest form of consumption is to avoid consuming wherever possible.

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– hurray for frugality’s new-found hipness!

Every US newspaper, magazine or website with anything resembling a ‘home’ section these days has been suddenly won over, it seems, to the cause of frugality.  And of course it meshes nicely with the living-green trend they’ve all been pushing for a while now.

We welcome this, naturally, but wonder if the virtues of reducing, reusing and recycling will still be so widely extolled once advertisers start raising their ad buys again.

Still, for now, the idea of living for something other than pure consumption is getting some airtime, for which we are grateful.  Here are two recent dispatches from the trend-face:

While the New York Times today ponders the confusions we all face when we really start trying to save money (like figuring out how far to drive for the sake of a bargain or whether buying in bulk at Costco really makes sense), there’s a far more radical solution at hand.

Vermonter Jim Merkel manages to live on just $5,000 a year — a level that means he doesn’t even pay federal taxes.  That’s an added plus for the weapons engineer turned pacifist who didn’t want to pay for US weapons programs anymore.  Truly a model for all us EarthQuakers, too.

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– an economics of regeneration

“We must restructure our economy from a foundation built on consumption to regeneration and maintenance,” say Rebekah and Stephen Hren in the Huffington Post this week.

It’s a plea for ‘ecological economics’ — and one we EarthQuakers pretty much share.

Any hope it will come with the Obama administration?  Not a huge amount, but we might move a hair in that direction and that momentum — such as it is — may actually be something to build on.  EarthCare, Sustainabilty, Stewardship, Ecological Economics: we’re at least now putting names to visions that don’t so much want to do away with conventional global corporate capitalism as radically refine it.

If we can just get economists to add environmental impacts when they calculate costs, for example (and it’s insane that governmental economists, at least, don’t do that when they consider policy alternatives), we’d be a long way towards an economics of regeneration.  There would be new corporate winners and losers for sure, but the capitalist system wouldn’t need to end while the planet and its people would sure reap the benefit.

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– will environmentalism lead to less drug abuse?

Here’s a great reason not to do drugs — it’s bad for the environment!  And here’s Gawker’s take on the idea:

Yuppie cokeheads, stop snorting massive rails for the sake of the endangered tree frogs! That’s the new anti-drug message coming out of the UK. And it just might work!

Could that be the one thing that really speaks to Western cocaine buyers?

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– why frogs are disappearing: toxic pesticide mixes

“Ten of the world’s most popular pesticides can decimate amphibian populations when mixed together even if the concentration of the individual chemicals are within limits considered safe, according to new research,”

reports Science Daily today.  It makes complete sense and speaks to the need for far more comprehensive testing of chemical treatments of all kinds before they are approved.  Shockingly, SD tells us:

“endosulfan-a neurotoxin banned in several nations but still used extensively in U.S. agriculture-is inordinately deadly to leopard frog tadpoles. By itself, the chemical caused 84 percent of the leopard frogs to die. This lethality was previously unknown because current regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do not require amphibian testing.”

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