Green Economy

Re-posted from Transforming Cultures

If you’re carrying around Potomacs in your wallet or purse, let it be known that you can spend them here. Here at the Worldwatch office, that is. Yep, one copy of State of the World 2010 will cost you twenty Potomacs. Come by the office and we’ll exchange you a book for a one of those golden Harriet Tubman bills. We’ve already had some sales and will be using our Potomacs to purchase coffee at Qualia, just down the street.

No idea what I’m talking about? Unless you live in the D.C. area, you’re not really supposed to know.  Local currencies are designed to strengthen and enrich communities of people who wish to be connected by more than the internet, highways, and credit card transactions. And such currencies are on the rise especially because of society’s newfound desire for economic transparency. More and more, people want to know how much of their money falls into the hands of polluters, criminals, foreigners, and bailed-out bank and auto execs. The use of local currencies eliminates most if not all of these concerns as participating businesses are typically well-rooted in the community and genuinely interested in its health and well being. Local businesses also tend to buy more from local suppliers, reducing the miles that their goods travel, and making the supply chain more traceable.

Potomacs were launched as D.C.’s local currency in May 2009 and are currently accepted at five businesses and one NGO (us!) in the District. So when a Potomac is spent at one of these places, it has nowhere to go beyond the cash register but on to another Potomac-accepting business. That means 100% of the value of a Potomac (1 Potomac = $1) stays in D.C.!  Compare that with the Federal Reserve Notes you’re used to exchanging and which are nearly impossible for any single consumer to trace beyond their pocket: An economic impact analysis performed in Austin, Texas showed that for every $100 spent at a local bookstore, $45 re-circulated in the community. $100 spent at Borders bookstore, a massive national chain, yielded far more appalling results: only $13 re-circulated. These numbers speak to the economic resilience created by local businesses as well as the potential for local currencies to strengthen that resilience.

Since trading twenty bucks for my first wad of Potomacs I’ve asked a couple businesses whether they accept the currency – a bar and a pet store to be exact. The bar man didn’t quite have time for my explanation and the pet store owner was completely resistant to the idea, insisting that Potomacs are too easy to counterfeit. These are legitimate excuses. Not all businesses – even local ones – have the time to account for dollars and Potomacs separately or verify the authenticity of every Potomac bill.  Then again, if we are to become a society that values, rather than ignores, the impact of our actions then our perceptions of time and economic value must change.

Local currencies are often named after rivers. For example, the Columbia Hour in Washington state and Anacostia Hour in Maryland, reflecting their purpose: to flow through communities, bringing neighbors and natural resources closer together. Thus local currencies are a bold economic step toward a vibrantly interdependent future.

Come by Worldwatch to spend Potomacs or find out more about them. Or visit here:

http://Ecolocity.ning.com/group/communityexchange

local currency, localization

Suppose you could design the ideal company–one that not only makes money, but is fair to its employees and for kicks, solves social and environmental problems as well. Utopian? Perhaps, but several models that aim for this ideal, called “social enterprises,” have gained traction in recent years. Distinct from companies that adopt the Corporate Social Responsibility ethic (under which conventional corporations endeavor to be “good citizens”), the new social enterprises represent fundamentally new business structures.

My colleagues Michael Renner and Tom Prugh have already written about the Mondragón worker cooperative model in Spain, one example of the economic democracy concept described recently in World Watch magazine. Although more than half a century old, this cooperative structure is attracting new interest in the United States, having been adopted recently by a set of Cleveland businesses and embraced by the United Steelworkers.

But other, new forms of corporate structures are also blossoming in the U.S. and elsewhere. One is known as B Corporations. Started in 2008, “B-Corps” (the B is for Benefit) have charters and other founding documents that expand their legal responsibilities to include commitments to employees, the community, the environment and other stakeholders–not just to shareholders. For B-Corps, gone is a long-standing rationale–”we are bound by a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns to shareholders”–that has kept many corporations away from social and environmental initiatives. Moreover, B-Corps commit to clear environmental and social standards, and their performance is subject to random audits by an independent nonprofit. Over the two-year term of a B-Corps membership, the chance of being audited is 20 percent. Companies that don’t get a passing grade have 90 days to correct their operations–or have their B-Corps Certification publicly revoked.

Some 220 corporations covering 54 industries are now listed as B-Corps, according to their collective organization (also known as B-Corps). B-Corps expects this new corporate structure to account for 5-7 percent of US GDP within a generation.

Meanwhile, the UK established in 2005 a new species of firm known as Community Interest Companies, one of several kinds of social enterprise in the UK. These are companies designed to undertake activities “for the benefit of the community” rather than for the benefit of owners. A key feature is the “asset lock,” which limits the distribution of profits to shareholders, in effect requiring that a portion of profits be reinvested in the company–and therefore, the community. Some 3300 firms in the UK are listed as CICs, which are part of a healthy social enterprise movement in the UK. The 2009 State of Social Enterprise Survey shows that the sector is experiencing clear growth, even in this recession.

Another new company structure in the United States is the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a variation of a limited liability company, or LLC. Like a CIC, it is a for-profit company whose primary purpose is to advance a social goal, rather than to maximize shareholder return. It is especially useful for attracting capital to low-profit, but socially beneficial, enterprises, such as a health clinic that charges most patients but provides services at no charge to the poor.

Like an LLC–the structure often used in law firms and other partnerships–the L3C is structured such that partnership rights are tailored to each partner’s needs, including its expectations for investment earnings. In the case of a newspaper structured as an L3C, for example, partners such as foundations and individuals may invest simply to support an important community institution, expecting minimal financial return. Another tranche of investors might include employees and local businesses with a strong stake in the paper’s success, who receive a moderate return. The highest tranche would include large-scale institutional investors such as pension funds who are looking for the highest returns. In effect, the low-return, socially-minded investors make investing in the firm less risky, which attracts more commercially-minded investors who otherwise would not invest.

There may be any number of weaknesses to these new models, but what is encouraging is the emerging willingness to create business structures that broaden a firm’s mission beyond profit-making. That’s a healthy bottom line.

alternative business, B-Corps, CIC, L3C, Mondragón

Like many people, I suppose, when it comes to important and complex issues I tend to be swayed by the latest plausible thing I’ve read. Following the failure of the Copenhagen conference to make any serious headway on climate change, I’ve started to think that James Hansen is right.

Hansen is one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world, mainly because of his activism. That activism stems from his passion about the urgent need for climate action, which has led him to stick his neck farther out than any of his peers. All this is evident in his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. As the title suggests, Hansen does not limit himself to cold reason and analysis, though there is plenty of that. This is a deeply personal book (sometimes a little too personal; the bit about his prostate surgery doesn’t really add to the argument) in which repeated references to his three grandchildren highlight the stakes for the coming generations if we fail to address climate change adequately now.

I won’t recap his overview of the state of climate science, except to say that it’s terrifying. (Pretty much everything we’ve been warned about is happening, only faster.) More interesting, and controversial, are his prescriptions, which will discomfit many environmentalists. Above all, Hansen believes that humanity simply must stop burning coal for energy, as well as leave most of the rest of the planet’s fossil fuels in the ground. Coal is Hansen’s chief villain, not only because of its contribution to climate change, but also because it demonstrably kills tens of thousands of people every year—year after year.

Not much argument there. But Hansen adamantly does not believe that efficiency and renewables have a prayer of replacing coal, at least anytime soon. He points to Germany and Japan, two technically advanced nations that lead the world in efforts to find renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Germany is building more coal plants as it phases out nuclear power, while Japan—which hosted the Kyoto protocol negotiations and pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels—has seen its emissions rise to 9 percent above that benchmark. Forget the technical arguments, Hansen implies: it’s what is technically and politically possible that matters. And these nations have done the best anybody could do.

Hansen also argues that cap and trade programs are a snare and a delusion: too readily gamed and loopholed and offsetted to death by the hordes of lobbyists (repeatedly referred to as the alligator-shoe people) and greenwashers. (Hansen’s contempt for the corruption in climate policy is palpable.) And the only sensible technical solution, he believes, is nuclear power: third- and fourth-generation plants that are modular, supposedly cheaper and faster to build, supposedly much safer, and—in the form of “fast” reactors—actually capable of gradually eliminating the waste problem (they burn spent fuel from first-generation reactors).

I often found myself nodding, a bit uneasily, in agreement. He makes good points. Cap-and-trade programs do indeed look very squishy; the European experience to date sounds a cautionary note. But while Hansen’s preferred alternative, the fee-and-dividend approach (a price on all carbon, with the money rebated to consumers), sounds simpler and more workable, you just know any such proposal in the United States will be labeled a tax and immediately crash in flames.

 Moreover, concerning nuclear power, Hansen does not directly address the points made by Amory Lovins and others that nuclear power is too expensive (billions of dollars per power plant) and slow to come on line (roughly 10 years per plant). Nor does he talk about the risks inherent in fast reactor technology, which uses plutonium that can be diverted into weapons. And finally, his prescriptions beg the question of how will those same political systems, with their built-in friction and sensitivity to special interests, do any better in getting rid of coal plants or siting new nuclear plants, however benign they may turn out to be?

Which brings us to Hansen’s strategy—and I believe he’s absolutely right about this, whichever course makes sense: “The public must demand a strategic approach that leaves most fossil carbon in the ground. …Our planet, with its remarkable array of life, is in imminent danger of crashing. Yet our politicians are not dashing forward. They hesitate; they hang back. Therefore it is up to you. You will need to be a protector of your children and grandchildren on this matter. …It is crucial for all of us, especially young people, to get involved.”

Re-posted from Transforming Cultures Blog, by Erik Assadourian

Excerpt: The Economist is debating whether Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays. State of the World 2010 author John de Graaf makes it clear the answer is No.

Over the holidays, one of the State of the World authors, John de Graaf, is debating on The Economist’s website with Robert Gordon of Northwestern University on the following resolution:

This house believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes.

I find it hard to even see this as a debate as the only way we’re going to create a sustainable economy is by working many fewer hours and better distributing work among people. Having some people work long hours while others are chronically underemployed is a loser many times over. Stress, ill-health, lack of time for family and civic engagement for those working too much, lack of security for those working too little, and as the data in this slide by Chris Jones of University of California, Berkeley shows, the more discretionary income a household or individual has, the larger their carbon footprint. Having some work fewer hours will mean security for those that would then be employed and less stress and more time (instead of more money to consume with) for those working long hours now.

But enough on this topic by me. Here’s a sneak peak at John’s State of the World 2010 article “Reducing Worktime as a Path to Sustainability,” and a link to The Economist debate. It’s going on until December 31st, so weigh in, but of course, not during the holiday break or John would be mad!

If the Copenhagen climate conference were an episode of the popular children’s show “Sesame Street,” one might imagine the following announcement at its conclusion:  “This show was brought to you by letter F”—F for farce, failure, fiasco.

The Financial Times rightly asked: “One wonders how a conference to conclude two years of detailed negotiations, building on more than a decade of previous talks, could have collapsed into such a shambles. It is as though no preparatory work had been done.”

The decision to marginalize civil society and the secretive manner in which a handful of leaders struck the controversial“Copenhagen Accord” marked obvious ineptness and failures of process. But the shortcomings revealed by COP15 are far more fundamental than the particular maneuvering in Copenhagen.

The major actors continue to play a potentially fatal game of diplomatic hide and (not so much) seek. For years, the Europeans, Chinese, and Indians were able to hide behind George Bush’s climate denialism. In Obama’s Washington, that’s no longer so easy. And yet, Obama himself has in effect chosen to hide behind Congress—arguing that he cannot possibly make any commitments beyond what the Senate will endorse (while studiously avoiding the use of his bully pulpit to expand his domestic maneuvering space). The Chinese have been able to hide behind the West’s failure to put truly ambitious climate goals on the table and to acknowledge their climate debt to the rest of the world. The Indians, to some extent, hide behind China. The West, in turn, hides behind China and India’s recent and rapid emissions rise. And on and on and on…

With Copenhagen largely a failure, hide and seek is now turning into a blame game—all designed to shift responsibility to…someone else. This is largely driven by two factors:

• One, a fear by any of the leading economies to be caught too far out on the climate limb, undertaking ambitious and initially costly measures while others choose the low road. In a world economy that has extensive rules governing trade, but precious few that address environmental needs, this is a real risk.
• Two, the often corrupt domestic political processes that are driven by narrow corporate interests and short-term profit-seeking instead of the public good. This is expressed in two ways: one, the influence of corporate money on elected officials, and two, the ever-present threat to move factories elsewhere if environmental rules become too strict.

How to move forward from here? We should disabuse ourselves of the false hope that if political will couldn’t be marshaled this time, then somehow, miraculously, it will materialize at the next climate gathering. We’ve been treated to this kind of wishful thinking at Bali in 2007 and in Copenhagen in 2009, and there is no point in projecting such fanciful assumptions forward to COP16 in Mexico City in 2010.

For one thing, unless you subscribe to the “big man” theory of change that rests solely on the vision and leadership abilities of elites, political will does not materialize out of thin air. In large measure it depends on a vibrant public discourse, which in turn depends on bottom-up pressure and public awareness.  It is incumbent on environmental organizations to turn up the heat, especially in countries like the United States that continue to be laggards on the climate policy front.

But another huge part of the problem is the focus on emission-cutting burdens. As long as the options before us are portrayed in negative, undesirable terms, there is every incentive for government and corporate officials to limit their own commitments and undermine serious reduction goals.

While we cannot abandon the quest for a multilateral policy architecture that leads to meaningful, mandatory emission cuts and does so in a reasonably equitable manner, we need to think in terms of positive change in pursuit of an attractive, clean economy that works for everybody.

Let’s have a race for breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, energy and materials efficiency, in more intelligent and more livable settlement structures and transportation systems, and so on. Let’s understand that this is where the jobs of the future lie. Let’s devise ways to jointly develop and share climate-friendly technologies.

More ambitiously, let’s think creatively about the kind of economy that satisfies needs instead of creating endless wants, cultural change that combines material and spiritual wellbeing, and ways to revitalize communities.

In other words, we need a post-Copenhagen era, an episode, brought to you and me by the letter I—for inspiration, imagination, innovation. And that won’t happen without letter P—for public discussion, participation, and (bottom-up) pressure.

climate, Copenhagen, policy

At the Copenhagen climate conference, one of the key sticking points is finance—adaptation support for those countries that are most vulnerable to the repercussions of a destabilized climate, yet are least culpable and least able to undertake measures to reduce the negative consequences of living in a warming world.

Lack of generosity is perhaps a, well, generous way to describe what the wealthy countries have so far put on the table. That’s true even for the December 17 statement by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at Copenhagen’s Bella Center:

“…in the context of a strong accord in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation, the United States is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries. We expect this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.”

While Clinton’s announcement can be read as a bold step forward (and seems way ahead of many U.S. Senators), some environmentalists denounced it as hollow. To me, it is another indication of how hard it is to mobilize adequate funding in timely fashion to counter one of the most existential threats that humanity has ever faced. In our deeply compartmentalized world, few ask why governments are super-cautious and stingy in the face of this danger, but are quite happy to keep feeding their war machines?

In times past, pacifists would half-jokingly say that they looked forward to a time when governments would have to hold a bake sale to finance their next armaments purchase. So, a subversive thought occurred to me: Let’s finance and govern warfare the climate way. Eternal peace can’t be far behind.

Just think: Money for war would depend on meeting tough conditionalities that are subject to an elusive international accord. Governments in military alliances would pledge that they “are prepared to work with other countries toward a goal” of mobilizing an aspirational sum of money for the military. And the bulk of the financing would become available in the distant future—and essentially consist of existing funds presented as a new package.

Governments would announce their expectation that “funding will come from a wide variety of sources”—because if carbon markets are such a great way to finance climate programs, then shouldn’t the same principle be applied to raising funds for war? Let countries exceeding their allocation of AWUs (assigned warfare units) purchase additional war indulgences from those that have stayed within their martial limits.

A farce, you say? Indeed! The point here, of course, is to raise questions about governmental priorities and long-accepted, yet badly outdated conceptions. If melting glaciers, rising oceans, failing harvests and raging storms portend growing upheavals that could shake the foundations of human society, then is it too much to ask that climate challenges be treated with at least the same degree of seriousness as the toys sought by the boys?

In a world where military spending in2008 ran close to $1.5 trillion, the haggling at Copenhagen over the comparatively small climate adaptation budgets has an unreal quality. Refuse to make adequate resources available now, and be prepared to spend far, far more in the not-too-distant future—on humanitarian operations, disaster relief [COP15 webcast], migrant and refugee flows … and on dealing with the conflicts that will likely sharpen because of climate chaos.

climate, Copenhagen, finance, military, priorities, war

An article in the New York Times today reports on emerging water shortages in El Alto, Bolivia, caused by the disappearance of glaciers in the nearby mountains. The article notes that El Alto, a city of one million people, may be “the first large urban casualty of climate change.” People there talk seriously about leaving the city; neighboring La Paz has cut supplies to water-intensive businesses; and nearby farmers ponder not having more children because the future of agriculture is so bleak.

I read about climate issues daily, and with intense interest now that the Copenhagen conference is lurching toward a climax. But this story brought the issue home: El Alto is where my adopted children, Sam and Clara, were born. My wife and I know people there (at the orphanage, in the court system) and of course Sam and Clara have blood relatives there. Although these personal ties are not close, suddenly climate change is not just a global tragedy for us, but a family one.

We have long known that many cities in western South America are endangered by glacier melt. A World Bank analysis last year reported that Quito, Ecuador, gets 50 percent of its water from glacier melt, and La Paz, 30 percent. In addition, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru get half or more of their electricity from hydropower, much of which is dependent on glacier runoff. And Bolivia is just one of many, many countries where glacier melt, sea level rise, storms, drought, and floods are causing suffering–typically for people whose responsibility for the climate crisis hardly registers on a global scale.

But sobering as the statistics are, they don’t touch me as deeply as the realization that people I know, people with faces and names, people I have laughed with and shared a meal with, are being hit by the changing climate. Here at Worldwatch, we talk often about how to rally people around distant and future threats. We regularly turn to data, but the truth is that data works only some of the time, for some of the public. Data isn’t personal, and it can’t always break through some of our psychological defenses, as this blog recommended by my colleague Tom Prugh suggests.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has his own view of what’s needed to get us to act in the face of the overwhelming threat that is climate change. In a sermon in Copenhagen today he said:

…what is most likely to get us to take the right decisions for our global future is love. The temptation is to underline fear so as to persuade one another of the urgency of the situation: things are so bad, so threatening, that we have to do something…But this is to drive out one sickness by another…fear can simply paralyse us, as we all know…

Yes, love would definitely help. But reading the Times article today reminded me that it’s hard to love in the abstract, that movement of the heart is easier when relationships, however tenuous, are directly involved. If we all had a direct connection to suffering climate victims, the Copenhagen talks, I dare say, would be proceeding more smoothly to a happy resolution.

The irony is that I already had a direct connection to climate outcomes long before reading today’ s article. Sam and Clara escaped the Bolivian water crisis when we adopted them, only to face an emerging, climate-driven water crisis here in the Sierra Nevada mountains where we now live. In Bolivia the crisis is further along, but water scarcity is our looming future here as well.

You, too, have an unfolding climate crisis in your backyard, because climate will affect every region of the planet in one way or another. So if you don’t know any climate victims, get engaged by learning about your own climate future. Try this website if you’re in the U.S. Make it real. Bring it home. Then contact the White House and your member of Congress and demand action. Plenty of people, many in your own community, need a healthy dose of climate justice–an expression of deep love.

I can’t help but notice the deep discrepancy in the manner with which President Obama is handling two headline issues: Afghanistan and climate stability. In one case, the President has made deliberate use of executive power and perquisite. In the other, he has struck a strangely passive stance. It is a disparity reinforced by the relative budgetary priorities accorded to these two issues.

On climate, the Obama administration has effectively handed the initiative to a gridlocked Congress whose deliberations are marred by the corrupting influence of money. We know how that’s playing out. Corporate lobbyists succeeded in emasculating the House bill to the point where projected cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, relative to the internationally recognized base year of 1990, amount to a measly 4 percent. The Senate version looks to be equally uninspiring.

In the process, the administration has allowed its Copenhagen strategy to be shackled by an unenthusiastic Congress. Instead of climate leadership, the dominant spectacle is one of downplaying expectations, as serious action is delayed until some time next year (the approaching U.S. mid-term elections then may force yet another postponement of critical decisions).

Now contrast that with the President’s approach to Afghanistan. During the election campaign, Obama made it clear that he intended to pour substantial additional resources into the war. Even before his decision to dispatch 30,000 more soldiers, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan had already been increased from about 30,000 at the beginning of the year to 68,000 now.

(There are reasons to believe that military escalation is the wrong policy, and that investments in education, jobs, and sustainable agriculture would be more likely to help stabilize Afghanistan than more soldiers and guns are. But the main point here is not to debate the merits of Obama’s choice, but the striking difference in assertion of leadership between these policy areas.)

You notice that Obama didn’t allow himself to become hostage to Congressional deliberations before making further troop commitments. Unlike on climate, he used a prime-time speech to put down the goalposts in the expectation that Congress will follow suit and provide the necessary additional funds.

This is all reflective of the conventional assumption that matters of war and peace are Presidential perquisite, but that climate policy is not—even though the latter represents arguably a far greater threat to global stability, and thus to U.S. security. It is high time, however, to use the Presidential bully pulpit—the authority and stature that comes with the office—to set the agenda and to marshal public opinion around decisive climate action.

Neither the administration nor Congress seems overly troubled about run-away military spending, but are in comparatively penny-pinching mode when it comes to climate-related budgets.

Imagine, however, if the rapidly rising sums spent on the Afghan war had been allocated to get a green transition of the U.S. economy under way. Even before the West Point speech, the Administration’s fiscal year 2010 request included $73 billion for war in Afghanistan, up from $43 billion in FY2008. A September Congressional Research Service report notes that from fiscal years 2001 through 2010, a total of $300 billion will have been spent on Afghanistan operations.

This is part of a skyrocketing war bill in Afghanistan and Iraq, amounting to a cumulative $1 trillion since 2001. Had even a decent portion of that amount been made available for green purposes, the United States could now rightfully claim global leadership in the struggle against climate change and other environmental ills, instead of busily telling the world what it can’t do.

Afghanistan, budget, climate, Copenhagen, military, US

This is cross-posted from the Transforming Cultures blog.

This Friday is Black Friday in the United States, the frenzied shopping day that marks the start of the commercial Christmas season. Typically a day of sales and deep discounts, an observant Christian might argue that Black Friday would better be observed in 2009 by closing retail stores in honor of Jdimytai Damour. Damour is the Wal-Mart employee who was trampled to death at a Long Island store on Black Friday last year, as shoppers who had lined up overnight stampeded when doors opened at 6 am.
But store closings are not what Wal-Mart has in mind. Instead, the world’s largest retailer has cleverly ramped up its consumerist wattage with a new Black Friday policy: Wal-Marts will now stay open all night Thursday and into Friday, eliminating early morning lines, stampedes, and the memory of last year’s tragedy. Did I mention that the policy increases the firm’s revenue-raking hours?

As a committed Christian, I believe it’s time to move beyond the old Christmas season script that has been operational for decades of Decembers: 1) lament the loss of the “the true meaning of Christmas,” 2) shake our heads, 3) continue with Christmas business as usual. It’s time instead to take seriously the many ideas for minimizing the material side of the holiday and making room for the spiritual. Environmentalist and Methodist Bill McKibben has suggested limiting Christmas spending to $100 per family. The faith group Alternatives for Simple Living offers congregations materials to promote a simpler approach to the holidays; just last weekend it conducted a workshop called Unplug the Christmas Machine, for example. Others may consider observing Buy Nothing Day, which, strategically, is also set for (Black) Friday.

Personally, I think Christians should consider abandoning December 25 as our gift-giving day, as a way to escape the commercial season entirely. Were all Christians–some 80 percent of the U.S. population–to do so, the season would be deflated, commercially. And Advent, the season of restraint, reflection, and spiritual renewal, could recover its rightful place. (How about moving gift-giving to Epiphany in early January, which commemorates the visit of the gift-bearing Magi to the newborn Jesus. It’s already a gift-giving day to honor Jesus’ birth in parts of Latin America. And like the Magi, we might focus on a single, meaningful, gift–in honor of the Christchild.)

In a world in which global consumption of metals, wood, minerals, and other materials–a rough indicator of environmental impact–is projected to double by 2030 over 2005 levels, the Wal-Mart response to hyper-consumerism is too clever by half. Expanding store hours may reduce the danger to Wal-Mart employees, but stoking consumerism leads to greater environmental degradation–and threatens the livelihoods of people who depend on a healthy environment.

It’s time to practice living more simply. Those of us who call ourselves Christians have the perfect holiday to do so. We call it Christmas.

My colleagues Tom Prugh and Michael Renner have written recently about the Mondragón cooperative system in Spain–a set of worker-run, profit-sharing businesses. Here’s a video about efforts to establish similar cooperatives in Cleveland.