December 2001 | News of the Earth
Simplify the Holidays
by Dave Aftandilian
Picture the best holiday season you ever had. What made it so special? Maybe it was treasured time spent with family and friends, or perhaps solitary moments of quiet introspection that brought home the true meanings of the holidays. Chances are, though, that awesome gifts of stuff and more stuff will not make your list of greatest holiday memories. Sure, that shiny new whatzit may elicit a squeal of glee when you first rip it out of its paper and plastic shroud, but pretty soon you find yourself thinking, what am I going to do with this? And where the heck am I going to put it?
If you find yourself wishing for more holiday spirit and less consumerist frenzy, you’re not alone. According to a poll conducted last year by the Center for a New American Dream, 84 percent of Americans would prefer a less materialistic holiday, with more emphasis on the things that money can’t buy. Yet year after year we find ourselves caught up in the same old runaround of shop and spend, cook and make merry on demand, stress and rack up the credit card debt.
In addition to the many economic and spiritual arguments to shift the focus of the holidays from spending money to spending time with the people you care about, there are a lot of sound environmental reasons for doing so. For one thing, it would help cut down on the five million extra tons of trash that are produced between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in the United States alone (according to the 1997 Use Less Stuff report). Not to mention the resources needed to mine or harvest, manufacture, transport, and eventually dispose of all that stuff we find under the tree. Perhaps even more importantly, there’s the question of what sort of values we’re teaching our children. Are they learning that people, spirit, and the planet matter more than things, or that money buys affection?
If you’re fed up, and decide you want to take back your holidays from the cash registers and freeways, the Center for a New American Dream’s Simplify the Holidays Web site is a great place to start. First off, decide what kind of holiday you want. Is spending more quality time with your family first on your list? Focusing more on spiritual concerns? Or just keeping gift spending down to manageable levels? Next, set a budget of time and money in line with your holiday goals, and stick to it. And if your new plans will affect family and friends, talk to them before setting your plan into motion. Chances are that once you explain you’re trying to add more meaning to the holidays, not take anything away from them, they’ll be more than happy to be on board.
Wrap it Up, Send the Very Best
Let’s start with an easy one — how to reduce your use of wrapping paper. One obvious solution is not to use any at all. But if that’s a little too radical for you, there are still a lot of options besides buying new paper just so it can be recycled (or more likely, thrown away). For instance, you can wrap gifts in old Sunday comics, colorful pages from magazines, topographic maps, fabric from clothes you picked up at a secondhand store, or even paper grocery bags that you can leave as plain brown wrappers or decorate with crayons. Another option is to present gifts in bags, boxes, or other containers that can be reused by the recipient. Finally, it’s a great idea to reuse paper, bows, ribbons, and so on when you can.
What about holiday cards? According to the National Greeting Card Association, Americans send more than three quarters of a billion Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanza cards every year. The Center for a New American Dream has calculated that if we sent just one out of every ten of those cards electronically, we would save the equivalent of more than 30,000 trees. And there are plenty of electronic greeting options out there nowadays, from simple "postcards" with a brief message and a picture to animated cartoons set to musical accompaniment. See the end of this column for some Web sites that offer free nature and holiday-oriented cards. If there’s a desktop publishing whiz or two in your family, they could easily whip up your own personalized holiday card that has a fun photo of the family along with your holiday best wishes, and you could send that out instead of a paper card to all your computer-savvy friends. Another option is to pick up the phone and call some of the folks on your list instead of sending them a card.
But if you want to send a paper card, why not try making one from recycled materials instead of buying a new one? You could even organize a card-making workshop with your church or community group, asking everyone to bring their favorite materials (and maybe a dessert!) to share. Some of the materials you gathered together for alternative gift wrap might work well, such as pictures from old magazines or fabric scraps — but really the sky’s the limit.
Rethink Holiday Gifts
One way to start reducing the gift-giving frenzy is to agree with friends and family to make time for a special get-together over the holidays instead of exchanging gifts. Or you could agree on a maximum spending limit for the gifts you exchange.
But you can get even more creative than that. How about giving out handmade certificates good for a home-cooked meal, or a massage, or a weekend trip to the nearest forest preserve? What about offering to teach someone something you do well, such as knitting or photography? Visitors to the Center for a New American Dream’s holiday Web site have also submitted dozens of great ideas for handmade gifts. Some of my favorites are a mix tape or CD of music for someone special, together with notes on why you thought they’d like the songs; for kids, a box of dress-up clothes salvaged from the attic or a thrift store; videotaped memories from an elder relative; herbal pillows made from scrap fabric and herbs bought in bulk; a calendar marking special family events; a homemade Web site bragging about someone’s achievements; or random acts of kindness committed in someone’s name and described in a card.
If you really want to go out and spend money on someone, you might consider looking for gifts that go a bit easier on the environment: gifts with less packaging (made locally or by indigenous groups rather than megacorporations) or organic food and drink. Useful gifts don’t get thrown away or stuffed in a closet, especially gifts of experience such as language or music lessons or a library card. You could also buy someone a membership in a local nonprofit group, adopt an animal in their name from a zoo or environmental organization, or donate to a charity that matches their interests. Alternative Gifts International has a number of ideas along these lines.
You could also give gifts in someone’s name — or your own — to support the victims of the attacks of September 11. The Red Cross has a fund to support the families of those who were killed in New York City. But we should also not forget the thousands of refugees from Afghanistan who have fled the American-led bombings and the brutal Taliban regime and are now living in abject poverty in Pakistan and other neighboring countries. With winter coming on, there is a very real danger that thousands of these innocent refugees will starve. Many organizations have funds for the refugees to which you can donate, a few Web sites are listed below. (You might also want to donate through the religious communities to which you belong; many have established funds to aid the Afghan refugees.) And don’t forget the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which is teaching Afghan girls in refugee camps — girls who had been forbidden to go to school by the Taliban — as well as working in many other ways "for peace, freedom, democracy and women’s rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan," according to their Web site.
Give the Gift of Better Fuel Economy
If your holiday plans include the purchase of a new car, there’s a recently updated Web site you can use to compare fuel efficiencies of all cars and light trucks currently available in the United States, from model year 2002 all the way back to 1985 — the Fuel Economy Guide. The site is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman says, "in addition to helping conserve energy, consumers who purchase these fuel-efficient cars and trucks are helping to protect the environment as well. In fact, choosing the most efficient vehicle within a [size] class prevents at least fifteen tons of harmful emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle."
The Fuel Economy Guide lets you compare up to three models at a time side by side, including their gas mileage, greenhouse gas emissions (which cause global warming), air pollution ratings, and safety information. For instance, you could call up data on the 2001 Honda Insight, and find that it is not only one of the most fuel-efficient cars available, but that it also has a four-star rating for both frontal and side impacts — contrary to the often-heard claim from the auto industry that light, fuel-efficient cars are less safe. The site also has information about local gas prices, fuel saving tips, and an annual fuel cost calculator for new and used vehicles going back to 1985. You can search by manufacturer, class (size) of car, or miles per gallon ratings.
According to the Department of Energy’s press release, "for the third year in a row, hybrid-electric vehicles, which use a smaller gasoline engine and a self-charging electric motor/generator, were rated best in fuel efficiency." These vehicles are the two-seat Honda Insight, which achieves 61 MPG in the city and 68 on the highway (manual) or 57 in the city and 56 on the highway (automatic), and the five-seat compact Toyota Prius, which gets 52 MPG in the city and 45 on the highway. (Ross Thompson took both these models for long test drives, and reported his results in "Hybrid Cars Are Ready — Are You?" in the September 2001 issue of Conscious Choice; you can read the article on our Web site.) Other cars with fuel-efficiency ratings of 37 MPG or better included four Volkswagen diesel models, the Honda Civic HX, and the Toyota Echo.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, according to the Associated Press, "less than 6 percent of the 2002 model cars and trucks arriving in showrooms get better than 30 miles per gallon, and new cars on average get slightly less gas mileage than the 2001 models.... Overall, new passenger vehicles [cars and light trucks combined] average about 21 MPG. Last year’s weighted average, based on sales for all new passenger cars and trucks, was 20.4 MPG — a twenty-one-year low."
If that sounds pathetic to you, you’re not alone. Two reports this past summer, one from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and one from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), both came to the conclusion that fuel efficiencies of U.S. vehicles need to be improved, and that revising the federal corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards is a crucial step in that direction. The CAFE standards set a rating of 27.5 MPG for cars and 20.7 MPG for light trucks (including SUVs) that each automaker must achieve across their fleets — meaning that some vehicles can have lower efficiencies than the standard, if enough other vehicles have higher efficiencies to average them out. The CAFE standards were instituted in 1975 in response to the oil shocks then, and have not been significantly updated since 1985. In fact, in recent years, the budget allocation for the Department of Transportation has specifically prohibited it from even studying whether CAFE standards should be increased, thanks to heavy lobbying of Congress by the auto and oil industries. With the current concerns over energy security and supply, we may finally be able to convince our legislators to raise the CAFE standards — although the House voted against eliminating the loophole that allows SUVs to be considered light trucks this past August.
The UCS report "Drilling in Detroit" gives a wealth of data that ought to force Congress to change its mind on raising the CAFE standards. According to the report, increasing the fuel economy of cars and light trucks to 40 mpg by 2012 would save consumers $3,000 to $5,000 over the life of the vehicle, more than paying for the higher cost of the needed technological improvements. The higher standards would also save 1.5 million barrels of oil a day by 2010 — far more oil than we could get from drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 273 million tons, toxic emissions by 150 million pounds, and smog-forming pollutants by 320 million pounds. Even greater fuel and emissions savings could be achieved if we implemented hybrid-electric technologies to meet fuel efficiency standards of 55 MPG by 2020, doubling current efficiencies, and using fuel cell technologies could triple fuel savings over current levels.
Sound like a pipe dream? Actually, we can achieve most of these reductions with currently existing technologies, according to both the UCS and NASP reports, including more efficient powertrains (transfer of energy from the engine to the wheels) such as five-speed automatic transmissions, and engine advances that reduce friction such as variable valve timing. Both reports recommended that the federal government increase research and development funding in these areas. This is significant, since while the UCS is composed largely of pro-environment scientists, the NAS panel that drafted its report, according to the New York Times, consisted "mainly of engineers and consultants who have worked for the auto and oil industries, along with some economists and retired oil executives. It does not include anyone from the environmental movement." Yet both panels came to the same conclusion: that CAFE standards need to be revised, and government funding for research and development of more efficient technologies increased. Let’s hope our elected representatives listen.
Although government action to increase vehicle fuel efficiency is necessary, it’s also important to keep in mind that we can all do our parts by selecting the most fuel-efficient vehicle we can when we buy a new or used car, by keeping our cars in tune, and by a few other very simple actions. For instance, if you check the gas mileage tips at the Fuel Economy Guide, you’ll see that keeping your tires properly inflated can improve your fuel economy by up to 3 percent, saving you up to five cents per gallon of gas. Most manufacturers recommend that you keep your tires inflated to 32 pounds per square inch (PSI; be sure to check your manual for the recommended PSI for your car). For every 1-PSI drop in all four tires, gas mileage can be reduced by 0.4 percent. A recent report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 27 percent of passenger cars in the United States are driven with one or more tires substantially underinflated (by 8 PSI or more), and 32 percent of light trucks (SUVs, vans, and pickups) had one or more tires underinflated. In addition to saving you money at the gas pumps, keeping your tires properly inflated — checking them at least once a month and before long trips — will help reduce the risk of tread separations and blowouts, quite possibly saving your life.
Resources
Center for a New American Dream
Alternative Gifts International
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
Free nature and holiday-oriented cards:
Refugee fund sites:
Fuel economy links:
"Hybrid Cars Are Ready — Are You?"
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