What Would Santa Do?

#239, December 4, 2008

I
went to Portland over the Thanksgiving holiday,
visiting family and hoping to experience some of the “walkability”
for which Portland
was famous. We stayed in a hotel a mile west of the downtown, just below Washington Park. Thanks to the famous Portland weather, our
walking was limited to a single trip to see a photo exhibit at the art museum.

We
nonetheless had other fine outings, which included the Japanese
Garden, Powell’s City of Books, and many excellent
restaurants. Thanksgiving dinner was at The Kennedy School, a former Craftstman-era elementary school converted by the McMenamin brothers into the most amazing little
food/lodging/entertainment complex one could imagine. We spent most of our
mornings in a delightful little internet coffee shop and neighborhood living room
called, appropriately, Wired on Burnside. Our hotel lobby had a stack of
booklets profiling 50 local non-profits worth supporting. There were bike racks
*everywhere* downtown, right in front of the stores! If I had to move from
sweet home Petaluma, I could easily get used to Portland.

One
book I *didn’t* buy at Powell’s was a hilarious volume of captioned
photos showing terrified kids on Santa’s lap (who doesn’t have at
least one of these shots in their family album?) Got me thinking… the enviros have lately been playing the polar bear card in
their quest to arrest the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Cute fuzzy white
polar bears… do we want them to drown for our wasteful ways? But there is
an even stronger card in the hand. How will parents explain the image of the
North Pole bobbing on a bouy, surrounded by floating
wooden toys and elf hats?  Mommy and
Daddy, why did you let Dick Cheney kill Santa Claus?

It’s
not a great time to be a grinch and argue for cutting
back on the holiday consumption, with so many people losing their jobs and the
sales tax revenues heading south. What would *Santa* do? St. Nick doesn’t
want to lose his job, but even less does he want to live in Water World. What
are the alternatives?

On
my Portland
holiday, I picked up the current issue of Orion Magazine, which featured an
article by Ginger Strand about The Crying Indian, that famous 70s TV spot for
the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Remember how the Indian paddles his canoe
into a polluted harbor, and sheds a tear when a bag of litter hurled by a
passing motorist explodes at his feet? That ad always bothered me. For one, it
seemed the Indian should be more upset by the crowded freeway than by the
litter. The Orion piece goes on to point out how the Indian was actually an
Italian-American actor; further, that the ad was a co-creation of the Ad
Council and the aluminum beverage container industry, aimed at creating
consumer support for single-use aluminum cans over refillable glass bottles. Strand documents the history of the Ad Council, and the
role of post-WWII advertising in general, in creating and sustaining the
culture of consumptive capitalism.

Is
government the answer? It seems that when both the economy and the culture are
geared toward mass wasting of our planet, putting government in the way is at
best a stopgap measure, and can itself get out of control. Consider the recent
calls from both the Petaluma Chamber of Commerce and the Argus Courier to clear
up the bureaucratic thicket in the City’s Community Development Department.
Even the best of regulatory intentions can suffer excess in implementation,
creating yet another kind of waste, as entrepreneurial initiatives are choked
in kudzu patch of red tape.

The
solution is vigilance in insisting *we do more with less*: in our personal
lives, in products and services, in business and government. Eliminate wasteful
regulation while eliminating wasteful enterprises. Encourage and protect what’s
really important, as Portland and Petaluma are doing, like preservation and
reuse of historic buildings, alternative transit, independent bookstores, a
vigorous volunteer sector, and public gathering places, gardens and wild lands.

This
Christmas, support your local stores and non-profit groups, and give gifts that
green the globe. Santa will get to keep his job *and* his home.