[sustran] The one day a year we turn off the economy and talk about it

[Eric Britton]

In: 4 days, 9 hours, 14 minutes, 31 second. Check it out at
http://ecoplan.org/ibnd/ 

 

Dear New and Mobile Friends,

 

The coming Friday the 25th is Buy Nothing Day in North America, and the next
day it's BND in the rest of the world. Buy Nothing Day:" The one day a year
we turn off the economy and talk about it"  Now this may strike you as a
trivial, excessively puerile and possibly even dangerous and at best quite
unnecessary way to spend 24 hours of your short life.  And if you are a
certain kind of economist you are going to argue that to the contrary,
consumption is the motor of the national and international economies - so
that anything that looks it squarely in the eye is, what?  Immoral?
Dangerous?  Un- (to coin a phrase popular in some Washington circles these
days) -Christian? But we respectfully beg to differ.

 

And it's for that that each year we spend a bit of time and effort to
provide a conduit of information and, we hope, perspective and insight into
this slowly growing world wide movement. This conduit is called
International Buy Nothing Day and you can visit the full function web site
that we have constructed to support it at http://ecoplan.org/ibnd/.  We have
to conclude that it is a pretty interesting source since today, for
instance, we have already by noon had 140 visitors with new ones coming in
about every five minutes. 

 

While the early wave of BN interest was, predictably, in Canada and the
States, the tempo is quickly picking up. Thus as an example here is a list
identifying countries from which people and groups have walked through our
virtual door here in the last week alone.

 

*         Australia

*         Belgium

*         Canada

*         China

*         Colombia

*         Cyprus

*         Czech Republic

*         Finland

*         France

*         Germany

*         Greece

*         Hong Kong

*         Hungary

*         Lithuania

*         Korea, Republic Of

*         Mexico

*         Netherlands

*         New Zealand

*         Poland

*         Portugal

*         Romania

*         Russian Federation

*         Spain

*         Taiwan

*         Turkey

*         United Kingdom

*         United States

 

If you notice any kinship with the thinking behind our Car Free Days
program, that is probably not altogether accidental. This habit of stepping
back and thinking is one that we believe in firmly.

 

So dip in, have a look, and if you like get back to us with your ideas ad
suggestions.

 

And on BND, try to keep that hand from goin into your pocket quite as often
as usual.

 

;-)

 

Eric Britton (who will most indubitably do little if any better than you
will.)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/private/sustran-discuss/attachments/20051121/d9ac4e9a/attachment-0001.html