The G Word
Why holiday giving in a time of climate change needs a re-think
By Safina Center Writer-in-Residence Paul Greenberg
Photo by Olivia Bollen on Unsplash, licensed under the Unsplash License.
Gifts and garbage are supposedly different things.
But they both begin with a “G.”
In truth material gifts and garbage are just adjacent stations on the cross of the carbon cycle. Each has more or less the same effect on the warming of our planet. An estimated 30 percent of unwanted holiday gifts go directly in the trash. There they off-gas their CO2 into the atmosphere as the landfill slow-cooks them. The luckier gifts sit on our shelves, descending from visibility to obscurity, eventually heading toward the garage, which the comedian Jerry Seinfeld helpfully notes rhymes with garBAGE. The only way for our garba-gifts to remain climate neutral is for the carbon within them to remain inside the trunks of living trees or oil in the ground. In other words, for the gifts into which they were rendered never to have existed in the first place.
And yet, we are social beings, the most social of all the apes. Gifting is baked into our DNA. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, after studying indigenous societies around the world, concluded that cultures endure through reciprocal responsibilities, the small, everyday acts by which people care for one another. Part survival strategy, part ethics fundament, gifting quite literally brings us together. Taken to its highest level, a gift economy, “nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being,” according to the author and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. “The economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ as all flourishing is mutual.”
But if we were born onto this Earth to give, do we really need to take so excessively from the very Earth that gave us life? Year after year, as the gift-giving season starts earlier and earlier to prop more and more businesses hoping for an end-of-the-year Hail Mary, the harm only seems to grow. Just as social media was a commercial hack into our inborn desire to connect, so too has the holiday bonanza commercially hacked into our naturally occurring need to give. If we assume the human compulsion to give to be as immutable as the planet’s vulnerability to our generosity, is there any way out? Can we find a way to give that helps rather than harms?
The Black Friday-ifiers would inevitably argue, of course! Why you could give your loved ones who like to hike a solar backpack. The ones who stay home could get a solar charger for all their devices. But I return here to the essential “stuffness” of the problem. The photovoltaic cells in the solar backpack were assembled from stuff in the ground, powered no doubt by the burning of at least some fossil fuel. And if that backpack gets merely a smile before entering the Seinfeldian garagification/garbagification pathway, then what was the point?
OK, if not stuff, then what? If recent surveys of younger people are to be believed, upwards of 65% of Gen Zers would prefer to receive an experience rather than a thing. And with the further evolution of the gift card any number of options present themselves. Amtrak now has one to whisk your Gen Z children carbon-lightly across the country. You can send those same children to their local state park with a State Park Card or you can send them all over town with a bikeshare. A Live Nation card will get them concert tickets. Though OpenTable’s gift card scheme went bust, the reservation platform will gladly send you to individual restaurants, which each have their own gift card schemes. But a dirty secret of the gift card industry is that it can suffer from the same garbagification process as “stuff.” Ten to twenty percent of gift cards never get redeemed, representing something like $20 billion in ultimately ungifted gifts. On top of it, to my mind, a gift card does not do the job for which a gift is meant. If what we really want from gifts is for them to bind our loved ones closer to us, then an experience gift card does the opposite, sending them away toward the exterior moment rather than bringing them closer to moments by the hearth.
And yet, I think the experience card leads us in a direction that might be the key in unlocking the carbon gift problem. For what those thin slices of hydrocarbons we put in our wallets signify more than anything else is time. As we’ve learned the hard way from the rapacious capitalist in the silicon suit, time might be the most valuable gift in the world. The global “attention economy” that supposedly gives us so much for free is currently valued by the United Nations in the trillions of dollars. The tech industry has long known what is today only dawning on the rest of us: time is limited, valuable, and irreplaceable.
What if during the gift-giving season that lies ahead we took back time itself and gave it to our loved ones? Using brute capitalist methodology, this could be done quite simply with raw money. That 18-year-old to whom you’re contemplating giving a $1,000 iPhone? Were you to set up an IRA and put that same thousand in that account, it would be worth over $100,000 by the time your child retires—about a year’s worth of toil-less time, in other words.
But there could be other, more modest time-gifts. In college and graduate school, we all laughed at the hand-scrawled “gift certificates” we gave each other in financially strapped times for a foot massage, a free load of dishes, a housecleaning, or an evening of child care.
But what’s so funny?
As the ecologist Carl Safina points out, “a monetary transaction merely transfers ownership; both parties walk away. A gift exchange is an acknowledgment that we are with each other in the world, a little gesture of understanding that, simply, we may help each other.” Kimmerer further echoes this sentiment. “The currency in a gift economy,” she writes “is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity.”
Say what you will about a hand-scrawled gift certificate for a donation of time. But there is deep wisdom in the reciprocity and compassion such a gift represents. In the end, that kind of sentiment is pretty hard to throw in the garbage.