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WHY Buy Nothing Day?
FACT: Twenty percent of the world's
population consumes 86 percent of the world's natural
resources. That leaves 14 percent for the 4 or 5 billion
people in the developing world.
• The
idea of Buy Nothing Day is to stop and think about how
our consumption is destroying the planet and others who
live on it.
Buy Nothing Day in Berlin and in Germany
is part of a growing, International network set up to
support and encourage BND projects at all levels and in
all places making use of free leading-edge communications
technologies It is also protest against the holiday shopping
frenzy.
The Buy Nothing Day movement is a 100% self-organizing
system.
The BND.DE web site is for Dialogue and
Activism. This site is set up to host a wide-ranging public
dialogue on past accomplishments and possible future developments
of and for the BND Germany movement. This is a discussion
space where diversity is not only permitted but also actively
encouraged.
What is Buy Nothing Day? Buy Nothing
Day always comes the day after the American holiday called
"Thanksgiving". The day after Thanksgiving is
the biggest shopping day of the year in The USA. In Europe,
Buy Nothing Day is usually the last Saturday in November.
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The first "No Shop
Day" (as it was originally called) was started
in 1992 as a personal idea by Ted Dave, a Canadian
who made his living by working in the advertising
business. He had an idea to organize a collective
protest against the advertising and marketing professions
that are always telling us to over consume. His original
motto was: "Enough is enough!" |
Buy nothing day became very popular when an Anti-consumerism
organization on the Internet called Adbusters Started
promoting it on its web site in 1995. Then Adbusters also
started to create "spoof" ads and "uncommercials"
or a sort of JOKE advertisements that showed people how
really stupid advertisements started to make consumers
look and behave. (Click HERE to see "spoof"
ads and "uncommercials")
The Internet and the 1999 "Battle for
Seattle" World Trade Organization protests have given
the Buy Nothing Day movement a very big boost. Suddenly
different political groups realized they had common goals.
Buy Nothing Day events are being organized
by a wide variety of consumer groups, environmentalists,
and globalization protestors and, for the first time,
faith-based groups.
More than one million people in at least
65 countries are expected to observe the call to; STOP
SHOPPING! Even though there are many anti-consumer activists
in the United States, Buy Nothing Day has become more
popular in Europe. "European shoppers are more sympathetic
to the campaigners' goals," says Kalle Lasn, author
of Culture Jam and co-founder of Adbusters magazine. "People
have never really questioned consumption," says Lasn,
"People like to think when we buy something, we're
helping the economy, but the idea we're also killing the
planet is not something they've thought about."
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