Seasonal Excess

Apologies for the blasphemy and, worse, the grammatical error. I found it in an archive of material from the EcoDesign Foundation (EDF) where I worked throughout the second half of the 1990s – a draft of a season greetings card we sent to members and clients.

It is evidence of the ‘strong sustainability’ position that that organisation championed at a time when ecodesign was mostly only about harm minimisation (‘cleaner production,’ win-win-win eco-efficiency, etc). Not quite ‘Earth First!’ tactics like shopping mall ‘puke-ins,’ but certainly not what most people expected or respected in Australian ‘environmentally sustainable development’ circles at the time.

The secular side of Christmas, where widely celebrated, is plainly wasteful. Not just the packaging (the plastic that wraps the roll of wrapping paper that is used to wrap the gizmo in the plastic clamshell) and food waste (one year my mother-in-law finally put the remains of the ham in a pot of water to stock but woke the next morning to find it bubbling without being on the heat). [Ian Hodder explains the way we are entangled in increasing materials intensity via the example of wasted Christmas tree electric lights – though apparently ex-living Christmas trees offer some eco-impact positives to balance their being wasted.]

Even the Christmas gifts themselves are mostly waste: Scroogenomics quantifies the scale of unwanted holiday presents, with the author, Joel Waldfogel, concluding with economic glibness that because gift giving involves people guessing what someone else might want, this ritual is a very inefficient form of resource allocation. Especially perverse are versions that are organised around the shame of getting an awful gift or competitively trying to get the least worst gift (Kris Kringle, Nasty Santa, Secret Santa, etc – for which retailers now have explicit categories of cheap crap) – though at least these ‘games’ tend to restrict the overall volume of holiday gifting.

But to trash Christmas like this makes me sound like a typical ‘greenie’ killjoy or snob.

There is of course something valuable about moments in which people engage in versions of generosity or sharing. As anthropologies and sociologies of gift giving in diverse cultures have made clear, the point is less what is gifted than the process. The ideal gift is practically impossible; which means that there is always something risky and awkward about giving and receiving gifts; and that is precisely what establishes the social relation that is the essence of giving.

This means that even though every gift is supposed to be precious, the actual things gifted are also supposed to be nothing compared to the bond they establish. They are supposed to be surplus to the really important thing – the wasteful packaging for a relationship. This is why there is a continuum with cheap gifts at one end and sacred sacrifices at the other, acts of deliberate wastage.

We will need (in the Max-Neef sense) these kinds of wasteful practices in any sustainable future worth living together in. This point was made beautifully by Allan Stoekl, a scholar of philosophy of wasteful excess, George Bataille. Stoekl calls for ways of living that aim at sustainable pleasures and socialities, as opposed to eco-thrift and austerity-based sustainability.

One way to understand his argument is that communities take care to not over-consume precisely to have enough for moments of transgressive excess. [I thought an interesting example was the party celebrating the reversal of CO2 levels in the atmosphere envisioned in the film 2040.] There is still Christmas in these careful societies. Or, to put it more pointedly, we buy fewer garments, taking more care of those we wear in everyday life, precisely so that there are opportunities to wear occasionally outrageous versions of editorial fashion.

This version of Stoekl’s argument is however still too much of a calculation – hopefully the moments of transgression do not completely counter-balance all the in-between-times economising. Stoekl is instead suggesting that being more sustainable as a society means attending to the pleasures of restraint, the effort of doing things manually, the patience needed to let things happen ‘naturally.’ [In fact his argument is more complicated than that: see his three orders of sustainability.] A cyclist, to use an example close to Stoekl’s own life (see below), does not cycle to be more eco-efficient, ‘earning’ them the right to do once a year excessive flying. They cycle because it is pleasurable, whether moving leisurely on a city commute with many others, or whether feeling their legs burn as they weave past consumers in their obese EVs.

So for a happy wastemas, do not abstain completely, but do avoid consuming too much crap so that you can enjoy the social awkwardness of causing people to think about what they do, could and should value.

 FURTHER READING

My review of Allan Stoekl's Bataille's Peak: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/144871309X13968682694876

Recent writing also about the ambiguity of waste and consequent error of zero waste: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2023.2242871

On social awkwardness in the sharing economy: https://medium.com/@camerontw/sharing-you-can-believe-in-9b68718c4b33