How to Be Green Without Sucking the Joy Out of the Holidays

If you want to be green and celebrate the holidays, the Washington State Department of Ecology, King County Solid Waste and environmentalists have some advice for you: give the gift of self-sacrifice this season.

The Department of Ecology, for example, offers this view of Christmas gift-giving, saying it is little more than "scrambling to perpetuate increasingly consumptive accumulation of 'stuff' to store and throw away."

DOE directs you to King County's web site for "green" gift advice. There, King County employee Tom Watson offers this bit of advice: take a "revolutionary" view of Christmas. He uses the county's blog to promote Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping – a "performance artist, Reverend Billy and his cohorts like to raise havoc during the holiday season." Sounds like fun for the whole family.

This continues the theme from Halloween, where the green blog Grist encouraged people to give "stickers, seashells, Smencils, or coloring books." Perhaps they can also offer environmentally friendly tips to clean the eggs off your house.

For those who truly care about the environment, however, much of this is counterproductive and unnecessary. Indeed, such advice is motivated less by concern about the environment than it is by a particular ideology.

The best evidence that the free market, not green moralizing, is the best force to promote sustainability and do more with less, comes from Great Britain. A recent study on "Peak Stuff" finds that despite economic and population growth, the UK has been reducing resource use for nearly a decade.

The reason is that people and businesses are finding way to do more with less and substituting knowledge and technology for material. They do this not because they listen to the preaching of green government bureaucrats but because the free market offers constant rewards for reducing resource use and wasting less.

The study examines the input and output of the economy, including materials imported from overseas, and finds "Both the weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003." The result is that fewer resources, including water and energy, are being used despite increasing prosperity. This was true even before the current economic downturn.

The conclusion is that "A sustainable economy does not necessarily have to be a no-growth economy." The study does not address the United States, but does argue that this trend is likely in other "advanced countries."

Put simply, the assumption of the Department of Ecology, Tom Watson and others, that we are "increasingly consumptive" is simply false.

So, go ahead and give a heartfelt gift this season and focus more on the act of giving and sharing than on misplaced moralizing that assumes each gift is a sin against nature. It isn't. The power of market incentives 364 days a year more than outweighs the greens' Christmastime lectures.