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Happy Earth Day, y’all! While I love celebrating the earth and raising environmental consciousness, it’s important not to relegate Earth Day to just one day of the year. Earth Day is every day. And environmental activism doesn’t always - or even usually - mean buying more stuff.

Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid waxed green about the un-sustainability of our current culture over at her blog The Boiling Point yesterday:

With every Earth Day there comes a flood of special newspaper and magazine “Green Issues,” all generally pushing the same deluded feel-good idea that if only we replaced non-green products with slightly more green products, we’d really Make a Big Difference and Save the Planet. We don’t really need to change our consumer culture or hold corporate polluters accountable or enact sweeping and drastic environmental legislation–we just need to change our lightbulbs and wear organic cotton T-shirts. [...]

Anyway, here’s the thing: buying more fancy stuff you don’t need (no matter how organic or recycled it is) is fundamentally an anti-green act. If you replace your perfectly good couch with some fancy organic or more sustainably produced designer creation, that does not mean you are saving the planet. It means you are buying a nice couch that is slightly less destructive than another couch. You’re still consuming, and you’re still creating waste. You are not a hero, and you are not an activist, you’re just a less destructive shopper.

And shopping is not a substitute for action.

Anyway, go read the whole thing; she makes many a good point. Buying green is good, but only when necessary. ‘Tis better to not buy (and consume) at all. And mere shopping is not to be mistaken for activism. Replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs is a most certainly a good thing, but it does nothing to curb our increasingly demanding lifestyles, discourage corporate polluters, or encourage a nationwide shift to renewable forms of energy. To truly make a difference, we need structural change.

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Tagged: kcfreecycle earth day consumerism green environment the boiling point Mikhaela Reid