Have a sustainable Black Friday

If you are thinking of shopping the Black Friday deals today, please consider a few things:

Firstly, consider if what you’re planning on buying is actually something you need. The amount of junk our society accumulates is contributing to climate change, the depleting of our finite resources, and pollution in the air and our oceans.

Second, please avoid Amazon, Walmart and the like (and perhaps, forever). Convenience comes at a great cost to not just our environment from all those delivery trucks driving people’s Amazon packages around cities but also to the small businesses that Amazon and Walmart has been driving into the ground, all while diverting tax dollars away from public services that are chronically underfunded (corporations and their executives and shareholders are much better at tax avoidance than small businesses and their owners).

Finally, please support your communities by shopping locally. Many businesses are quickly hopping on the online shopping bandwagon but there’s also plenty of safe ways to shop during this pandemic. Call ahead, send one person from your household with a mask to pick your order up. If we all just put a little effort into our behavior and do the right thing, we can try to reverse the trend of the corporatization of our Main Streets and slow down the damage we are causing to our planet thanks to over-consumption. I believe in you!