Happy Buy Nothing Day!

There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.

Ask a representative group of people what is the greatest threat facing humankind in the 21st century and a number of suggestions will follow. Terrorism, hunger, poverty and pandemics will probably be among them. Few would probably say that the way we consume should be at the top of the list, but there's good reason to believe that this is in fact the correct answer – especially now, one day before the official UK Buy Nothing day.

The reason is simple. For all its sophistications, our modern culture and the mainstream economics that underpin it do not put a price on nature – and nature is set to be the ultimate limiting factor on human progress and welfare as we head toward the middle decades of this century. In some respects, the natural world is already central to our concerns as renewable and non-renewable resources are depleted, ecosystems are degraded and the climate's stability is threatened.

But the scale of our mishandling of the natural world is much bigger than this. One widely cited study, published in 1998 by US economist Robert Costanza and his colleagues, gives an indication of just how big. They set out to estimate the financial cost of replacing all the services provided to us by nature. The pollination of crops, restoration of soil fertility and recycling of wastes; the coastal protection provided by coral reefs and mangroves; the creation of rain by natural forests and the climatic stability that enables human societies to develop – all of these were estimated to be roughly double the value of GDP in that year.

(Text borrowed from Tony Juniper of the UK Guardian.) Buy Nothing Day: buynothingday.org

Downshifting to a less resource-hungry economy need not mean the end of comfort and security, or the beginning of mass unemployment. Going green could create millions of jobs, generate new markets, stimulate new technologies and provide opportunities for dynamic new businesses – and in the process conserve the natural systems upon which we all depend. New measures of economic performance are needed, ones that consider human wellbeing as coexistent with the health of the natural world, and account for the state of nature's capital.

While such a transformation, until recently, sounded like a utopian dream, it increasingly looks like our only option to avoid a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe. The moment has arrived to build a culture and economy fit for a finite planet – the only question is how. A good place to start is with ourselves, by working to change our habits and curb our excesses as individual consumers. And what better way to do this than buying nothing for a day?