Adbusters Co-Founder Kalle Lasn On Why You Should Buy Into Buy Nothing Day0

by Nicole Powers

This year is the 20th anniversary of Buy Nothing Day, which began in Mexico in 1992. The day of protest was started by Vancouver artist Ted Dave, and was subsequently championed by the Canadian-based anti-consumerist media organization Adbusters. It is now marked annually around the globe, on the day after US Thanksgiving in North America (a Black Friday in more ways than one!) and on the following Saturday internationally.

There are many economic, spiritual, and social reasons why you should participate, but when we spoke to Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn recently he focused in on the environmental imperative for taking a stand against the great American tradition of conspicuous consumption.

“If everybody on the planet lived like we do in North America, then we would need five planets. There’s seven billion people on the planet, and at the moment there’s just one billion that are living high on the hog. We’re the five planet lifestyle people,” explains Lasn, who challenges the wisdom of our society’s desire – and economic need – for infinite growth in a world with finite resources in a new book, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics. (A longform SG interview will be forthcoming.)

“In a way I think there’s some kind of shaming that has to go on,” Lasn continues. “Buy Nothing Day is the perfect time to ask – How much is enough? How much is enough for me, for my family? How much is enough for my city? How much is enough for this country that I live in? Isn’t there something unethical about me having a five-planet lifestyle, and saying what President Bush said many years ago, that the American way of life is not negotiable. Well, Buy Nothing Day is a day when you wake up to the fact that it is negotiable – and it has to be renegotiated.”

For more on Buy Nothing Day visit: adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd