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.