CHAPTER 22

Building immunity

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or so the old saying goes. Many of us take that suggestion seriously each fall when we line up dutifully for flu shots. When we feel a virus coming on, we pop some vitamin C tablets into our mouths, hoping Linus Pauling knew what he was talking about (turns out, he didn’t). Of course, there are no real shots or pills that can prevent or soften the impact of affluenza. (There’s one exception: for the small percentage of Americans who are truly addicted—that is, compulsive shoppers—psychiatrists sometimes prescribe anticompulsion drugs and antidepressants, with promising results.) But in a metaphorical sense, some powerful antiviruses are floating around that can help vaccinate us against affluenza, and so are some equally effective vitamins that can help keep us from harm’s way.

Vancouver, British Columbia, might be called the headquarters of anti-affluenza vaccine research. It’s the home of Kalle Lasn, the author of Culture Jam and publisher of a magazine called Adbusters. The magazine became popular with its clever “uncommercials,” anti-ads that often mock real ads. For example, a parody of Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume ads shows men staring into their underwear, while another mocking Absolut Vodka shows a partially melted plastic vodka bottle, with the caption “Absolute Impotence” and a warning in small print that “drink increases the desire but lessens the performance.”

John’s favorite ad mocks no real product but shows a handsome young businessman who says he’s one of many who are turning to mammon, because “I want a religion that doesn’t complicate my life with unreasonable ethical demands.” It’s an obvious play on Christ’s declaration that “you cannot serve both God and mammon.” “We’re not the biggest player in the spiritual arena, but we’re the fastest-growing,” the mammon anti-ad declares. It’s a subtle but powerful reminder of the decline of true spirituality in the Age of Affluenza.

Perhaps the most successful of Adbusters’ parodies were its antismoking ads. In one, two Marlboro Man–type cowboys ride side by side in the sunset. “I miss my lung, Bob,” reads the caption. A series of anti-ads mocks Joe Camel, a cartoon character devised to sell cigarettes to kids, according to antismoking critics. Joe Camel becomes Joe Chemo, a camel dying of cancer, lying in a hospital bed hooked to an array of life-support equipment, or already dead from cancer and lying in his coffin. In Seattle, the city’s public health department paid to put Joe Chemo on outdoor billboards.

TURNING ADVERTISING AGAINST ITSELF

The anti-ads work like vaccines because they use the virus itself to build up resistance. “We discovered early on in the publication of Adbusters that if we come up with an ad that looks like a Chevron ad or a Calvin Klein ad and fool people for a couple of seconds before they realize it’s saying exactly the opposite, then we have created a kind of moment of truth that forces them to think about what they’ve seen,” says Lasn.

Born during World War II in Estonia, Lasn spent the early years of his life in a refugee camp. He remembers those early years as tough in a material sense, “but it was a time when our family was very together, when the community in which we lived was very together, and I recall it with fondness.” Lasn moved around a lot, from Germany to Australia to Japan, where he worked for ten years in marketing until he had a sudden change of heart. He emigrated to Vancouver and became a documentary filmmaker. In 1989 Lasn produced his first television “uncommercial,” a parody of British Columbia Tourist Commission ads that showcased the province’s stunning natural beauty. Lasn’s spoof showed what was happening to that beauty as logging companies clear-cut BC’s ancient forests. Not surprisingly, television stations refused to air the uncommercial even though Lasn was willing to pay for the airtime.

Many of the uncommercials are produced by people who work in the advertising industry. “They have qualms about the ethics of their business,” says Lasn, “so clandestinely they come and help us to come up with our messages, which are trying to use television to change the world for the better.”

BUY NOTHING DAY

Lasn’s group has been promoting an idea called “Buy Nothing Day,” since 1992. Buy Nothing Day is now celebrated in more than sixty-five other countries. In the United States, it is held on the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, traditionally one of the biggest shopping days of the year. According to Wikipedia, Buy Nothing Day now includes a wide range of possible activities aimed at targeting consumerism and affluenza:¹

• Credit card cut-up: Participants stand in a shopping mall, shopping center, or store with a pair of scissors and a poster that advertises help for people who want to put an end to mounting debt and extortionate interest rates with one simple cut.

• Free, noncommercial street parties.

• Zombie walk: Participant “zombies” wander around shopping malls or other consumer havens with a blank stare. When asked what they are doing participants describe Buy Nothing Day.

• Whirl-mart: Participants silently steer their shopping carts around a shopping mall or store in a long, baffling conga line without putting anything in the carts or actually making any purchases.

• Buy Nothing Day hike: Rather than celebrate consumerism by shopping, participants celebrate the earth and nature.

• Buy Nothing Day paddle along the San Francisco waterfront: In this event, promoted by the Bay Area Sea Kayakers, you can kayak along the notoriously consumptive San Francisco waterfront.

• Winter coat exchange (an idea that started in Rhode Island and has spread to Rhode Island, Kentucky, Utah, and Oregon): Coats are collected from anyone who wants to donate, and anyone who needs a winter coat is welcome to take one.

“Buy Nothing Day has exploded,” says Lasn. “It’s becoming a truly international celebration of frugality and living lightly on the planet, and of voluntary simplicity.”

If only they’d at least buy something

Lasn believes the spirit of Buy Nothing Day must catch on as an effective vaccine against affluenza, because the North American lifestyle is simply unsustainable. “Overconsumption is the mother of all of our environmental problems,” he says. Lasn and his associates were also the creative spark for the Occupy Movement, which has challenged the right of Wall Street, and the 1 percent to appropriate the wealth of our society. One project of Occupy was Occupy Christmas, which calls for supporting the local economy in gift giving, while also encouraging gifts of time and personal energy instead of stuff.

THE (EN)RICH LIST

In the spirit of the Adbusters anti-ads, the Post-Growth Institute, based in Sydney, Australia, has found another to poke fun at an institutional bulwark of affluenza, Forbes magazine’s vaunted Rich List of the hundred wealthiest Americans. The institute, which promotes a less consumptive, “steady state” economy, publishes its own (En)Rich List (enrichlist.org/the-complete-list), honoring people around the world, living and dead who, in the institute’s opinion, have been the leading lights of sustainability. The hundred people featured on the list include such luminaries as E. F. Schumacher, Donella Meadows, David Suzuki, Bill McKibben, and our foreword writer, Annie Leonard, as well as such obscure personages as this book’s cowriter, John, for whom the honor came as a magnitude 10 shock. To add to the parody, the (En)Rich List includes the “net worth” of its members, measured in Internet references rather than dollars, as with Forbes. The idea is that the Internet references are a proxy for how effectively members have been spreading the word for sustainability: Annie is worth 1.97 million, and John 1.07 million.

VACCINATING KIDS

To be truly effective, vaccination programs for affluenza will have to start with children, especially now, when marketers have them squarely in their crosshairs. Websites providing valuable advice in this area include Consumer Jungle (www.consumerjungle.org), a Wenatchee, Washington–based site that offers activities for teachers, parents, and high school kids, helping them become savvy consumers; and Share Save Spend (www.sharesavespend.com), created by Nathan Dungan, the Minneapolis author of the excellent book Prodigal Sons and Material Girls: How Not to Be Your Child’s ATM. Dungan’s site promotes what we think is a very healthy philosophy. It starts with teaching children the value of giving, then shows them how to save money, and finally, how to spend it wisely when they need to.

In many schools around the country, teachers help their students protect themselves from affluenza-carrying commercials by teaching them to analyze how media messages manipulate them. The concept is called “media literacy” and in the Age of Affluenza it may be as important as learning to read. Students dissect television ads to discover the psychological techniques the ads use to persuade them to buy. They analyze what needs each advertisement suggests the product might fill, then ask if there are better, less costly ways to meet the same needs. Increasingly, enlightened school districts require media literacy courses. Around the United States, students who have been exposed to media literacy are also learning about the deplorable wages and working conditions in factories that make some of the products and brands teenagers have been taught to desire. They demonstrate against child labor and sweatshops in other countries where their products are made and refuse to be walking billboards for global corporations.

THE STORY OF STUFF

In our view, one of the most effective vaccinations for building immunity against affluenza has been a funny and provocative twenty-minute video called The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.org), which the New York Times reports “has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.” The video is a compelling, simply animated monologue by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace activist who spent more than a dozen years studying the disposal of waste around the world and the impact of overconsumption on planetary ecosystems. Hundreds of teachers have shown the video, inoculating thousands of students by showing them the real impact of an affluenza-driven, stuff-centered economy. Millions of viewers have seen the video online, and it has so far been translated into more than two dozen languages. In commercial parlance, it’s been a megahit, even though you can watch it for free—do it, by the way!

The success of The Story of Stuff has spawned an entire project directed by Leonard, and since she made the video in 2007, she’s produced many others that can also be found on the project’s website, including penetrating looks at the real costs of bottled water, cosmetics, and electronic gadgets. One of the videos on the site, The Story of Broke, examines the causes and consequences of our debt crisis.

Of course, not everyone has agreed with Leonard’s anticonsumerist message and its proven ability to reach kids. Glenn Beck labeled the video an “anticapitalist tale that unfortunately has virtually no facts correct.” Leonard’s facts are actually well documented. Still, in a 4–3 vote, one Montana school board banned the screening of the film in a biology classroom. Parents in the district rose up against this decision, got the policy changed, and gave an award to the teacher who screened the film. Sometimes justice prevails.²

Those who help vaccinate our kids to build affluenza immunity are going to be targeted by purveyors of the disease, and for them, Annie Leonard is a courageous role model. With humility and grace, she fights back, a superstar for simplicity. In her quiet way, Carol Holst is taking the same message to adults.

Though far too humble to agree with our characterization of her, Holst might be simplicity’s saint, a woman who has sacrificed much to challenge the consumer culture. In the late nineties she started an organization called Seeds of Simplicity to promote voluntary simplicity study circles in the Los Angeles area, where she lives. The organization quickly achieved national stature, attracting support from popular television stars Ed Begley Jr., best known for his starring role in the drama St. Elsewhere, and former Baywatch star Alexandra Paul as well as the prominent neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania.

Holst has since begun another organization, Postconsumers (www.postconsumers.com), to promote “the satisfaction of enough,” a message that simpler living can be happier living. To keep the organization going, Holst works two regular jobs, scrimps on her own provisions, and hires a team of consultants to update the Postconsumers website. In this work, she is supported by donations of clever cartoons by Mike Swofford, who has been a Hollywood film animator and whose work, with that of David Horsey, adorns this book—courtesy of Swofford and Holst. Their site includes interactive games and dozens of helpful tips and articles that help build affluenza immunity. The big message is that people have been looking in the wrong places for happiness.

EXPERIENCES INSTEAD OF STUFF

Research psychologists like Leaf Van Boven of the University of Colorado and Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University have come to similar conclusions. In their view, stuff simply doesn’t offer as much bang for the buck as experiences do in promoting lasting well-being. Their research suggests that taking a vacation—and it need not be expensive—leads to more lasting pleasure than buying a product. Other resource-minimal experiences—theater or live music, for example, can also be far more satisfying than resource-intensive consumer purchases. Howell has developed a website called Beyond the Purchase (www.beyondthepurchase.org), which was recently featured in Time magazine,³ to “explore happiness and the quality of life, and the outcomes of different purchasing and money-management choices, as well as the motivations behind them.”

“With these insights, we can better understand the ways in which our financial decisions affect well-being,” says Howell, a new father who has concerns about the sustainability and quality of the world his daughter will inherit. “Also, our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly consumers who are interested in how their purchasing styles impact their well-being.” One great thing about the Beyond the Purchase site is the number of fascinating questionnaires that can be found there, helping people explore their own purchasing behavior and think more clearly about making effective and sustainable choices.

One doesn’t build immunity by beating oneself over the head, and the likelihood is that few of us will ever get our affluenza down to the low-impact levels of a Colin Beavan. On the other hand, we can move in that direction and at the same time do positive things that can neutralize the negative impact of some of our lifestyle. By helping make larger changes happen, you can even have a “net positive” impact on the planet. The idea is to create an ecological “handprint” (putting the stamp of your hand on positive change) that exceeds your ecological footprint. Handprinting (www.handprinter.org) is the brainchild of Greg Norris, a soft-spoken life-cycle-assessment researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The big question we all have to ask,” says Norris, “is, Would the planet be better off without me? Handprinting is about trying to be sure the earth would be better off with us than without us.”⁴

According to the website:

Handprinter lets you calculate your environmental footprint based on your country, income, and air travel habits. Second, it offers suggestions for simple actions you can take to lower your impact on the planet, and gives you the ability to suggest new actions for our collection. Finally, Handprinter lets you spread your ideas and actions around the world, and measure their progress. When you refer your friends to Handprinter, and when their friends sign on, their handprints will become part of yours. Inspire enough people, and your handprint eventually outweighs your footprint.

You can calculate your changing handprint using a test on Norris’s website. When you see progress as your handprint grows relative to your footprint, you are encouraged to keep doing more of the right thing, just as getting more in shape encouraged you to exercise even more and eat even better.

The kind of immunity building this chapter promotes comes from learning to make better personal choices. That’s necessary to overcome affluenza, but not, by itself, sufficient. We also need to change the rules. You can help prevent malaria by using bed nets and taking pills, but sometimes you also need to drain the swamp.