What Would Santa Do?

#239, December 4, 2008

I went to Portland over the Thanksgiving hol= iday, visiting family and hoping to experience some of the “walkabilityR= 21; 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 muse= um.

We nonetheless had other fine outings, which included the Japanese Garden, Powell’s City of <= st1:City w:st=3D"on">Books, and many e= xcellent 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 livin= g room called, appropriately, Wired on Burnside. Our hotel lobby had a stack of booklets profiling 50 local non-profits worth supporting. There were bike r= acks *everywhere* downtown, right in front of the stores! If I had to move from sweet home Petaluma, I could easily get us= ed to Portland.

One book I *didn’t* buy at Powell’s was a hilarious volume of capti= oned 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 wh= ite polar bears… do we want them to drown for our wasteful ways? But ther= e is an even stronger card in the hand. How will parents explain the image of the North Pole bobbing on a bouy, surrounded by flo= ating wooden toys and elf hats? Mom= my and Daddy, why did you let Dick Cheney kill Santa Claus?

It’s not a great time to be a grinch and argue for c= utting 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 doesnR= 17;t want to lose his job, but even less does he want to live in Water World. Wh= at 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 f= or the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Remember how the Indian paddles his ca= noe 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 rec= ent calls from both the Petaluma Chamber of Commerce and the Argus Courier to c= lear up the bureaucratic thicket in the City’s Community Development Depar= tment. Even the best of regulatory intentions can suffer excess in implementation, creating yet another kind of waste, as entrepreneurial initiatives are chok= ed 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 wast= eful regulation while eliminating wasteful enterprises. Encourage and protect wh= at’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 la= nds.

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.<= /span>