justice issues

justice and compassion has a couple of recent excellent resource posts:

1. dark for darfur and buy nothing day

• Dark for Darfur has a calculator for the electricity costs for outdoor christmas light displays. They are encouraging us to consider doing without these displays, and instead donating corresponding dollar savings to address the insanity in Darfur.
• Buy Nothing Day is encouraging us to undertake a 24 hour buying moratorium on November 23 in the United States (the infamous Day after Thanksgiving/busiest shopping day of the year) and on November 24 internationally.

1. how many planets are you consuming?

• A little exercise from public radio called consumer consequences. It’s a sort of a game you play where you enter various data about yourself, like how much you drive your car, how many miles per gallon it gets, how much you fly every year, how much food you eat, of which types, how much garbage you throw out every week, how much you use public transport, how much your electric bill is on average, and so forth. Then it gives you an estimate of how many earths we’d need if everyone were consuming at the same level as you.