Richard McLachlan: 'Hands up - don't shop' - Black Friday in the US

Opinion

On the day after Thanksgiving's turkey and pumpkin pie (and multiple side dishes), it's Black Friday and Americans go shopping. Early, early in the morning they line up outside stores all over the country, poised to charge inside and fight each other for access to discounted retail items.

Fists fly every year - "Black Friday brawls break out across the country, including several ugly incidents at Walmart". About 50 years ago, an annual increase in traffic accidents and in-store violence on the day after Thanksgiving led Philadelphia police to call this day Black Friday. It was later changed by retailers wanting to avoid negative connotations to express the positive side of the balance sheet - the day you go into the black.

Despite widespread approval for buying things as a core American value, possibly a religious tenet, not everyone is into it. For example, Buy Nothing Day is an attempt to encourage people in more than 60 countries to abstain entirely - to have picnics, or protest in Walmart. Its organisers refer to "a brand of shoppers who will trample and fight each other to get their hands on next year's landfill". The (self-explanatory) Minimalists, who share their experiences of moving away from an intense focus on success and consumption, have a website readership of four million.

For the past ten years performance artist Reverend Billy Talen and his choir of golden toads have conducted an annual anti-consumption event at the front door of Macy's department store at 34th St, Manhattan. Reverend Billy has been banned from every Starbucks in the world for serial attempts to exorcise the "demon of cookie-cutter capitalism from its stores". They even duct-taped Mickey Mouse to a cross outside Disney stores - that got him arrested.

More recently the Reverend and his group have moved away from broad-brush anti-consumerism to focus on specific targets. Last Thanksgiving, they joined the protests in Ferguson, Missouri against the failure to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. This year they're back at Macy's with a new slogan, "Hands up - don't shop".

All this gives rise to a dilemma brought sharply into focus by the coming climate talks in Paris. Challenges to unexamined consumption run counter to an economic framework that demands increased unexamined consumption and production to sustain growth. The growth that creates massive greenhouse gas emissions, drains aquifers, destroys rainforests, and pollutes rivers, is the very growth that elevates employment figures, allows retirement funds to keep up with inflation, and maintains faith in Wall Street.

Buying new things so you can put them in the landfill a year later is only the outward display of something a lot more troubling. Its origins lie to some degree in our emotional removal from the material sources of existence - water is a good current example. In a six-storey New York apartment, you can run the water for the several minutes it takes to arrive from the boiler in the basement - so it will be hot enough to wash your hands, or your coffee cup. Gallons and gallons of surprisingly pure tasting New York City tap water are pouring straight into the sewer. It happens in apartments all the time, all over the city.

It's hard to reconcile this with the image of people elsewhere walking for an hour with a rusty kerosene tin just to get enough water to cook with. Or with Central Valley in California where the water table in one town dropped 5.5m between 2005 and 2014.

The Central Valley is the world's largest area of class one soil, producing 40 per cent of US fruits, nuts, and vegetables in an environment whose viability is now threatened by sequential droughts.

It seems we are caught in a bind in which ideologically motivated policy choices have come to look like the natural order of things. Individual "preference" and "choice" are now allowed higher explanatory power and imagined impact on the world than the influence of the culturally and economically determined environment we inhabit.

Dr Robyn Toomath, clinical director of general medicine at Auckland Hospital, has just quit her 14-year struggle to change New Zealand's "obesity-promoting" environment. She feels her efforts have effectively come to naught and that civil uprising by citizens who want a different environment "is our best hope for change". Toomath describes a familiar vision - of strings of unregulated fast-food outlets selling fat, sugar and starch to people unable to afford healthy food and forced to exercise their "choice" among a range of options that are all essentially life-threatening.

The Black Friday landfill shoppers, the people in Central Valley whose water supply is disappearing, the person struggling with obesity who can't seem to make it stop, all of us have this one thing in common - a consumption-promoting environment. We have permitted, with varying levels of agency, a set of economic arrangements to arise that are not at all conducive to our best interests.

As a species, we're like baby birds still with a film of pink skin over our eyes, helpless to act, pooping in our nest because we don't know what else to do.

The German language, with its flair for compound expressions, has just the right word for us - Nestbeschmutzer. It's time we grew up.

Richard McLachlan is a New Zealander currently living in New York.