Joe Suchnsuch

Garage Logic gave Patty a call at home yesterday. It went out live on Joe Soucheray's radio show. He took her to task for giving up purchasing goods while still holding investments (the implication being that we're hypocrites because we've sworn off buying new things this year but still hold stock in companies who make money because people buy their things).
I've heard flavors of this argument before. We get it sometimes because we don't have a television, and yet we still watch DVDs on the computer. A number of people have tried to point that out as hypocritical, because we don't swear off movies entirely. And they're right. We definitely should put a television in every room of the house, leave them on constantly, and get a dish to pipe 500 channels of crap to them 24/7. The fact is, by not having cable or a television receiver, we choose what we want to watch when we want to watch it. And we're not subjected to the advertising (although we usually do scarf down most of a bag of popcorn by the time the previews are through... but those aren't really 'ads', are they?).
It's like finding out someone only puts their baby to sleep on their back because it decreases incents of SIDs and saying "oh yeah? well you still put the baby in a car seat, don't you? Some babies die in car accidents every year. That's hypocritical to put it to sleep on its back because you're not doing everything you can to avoid the untimely death of your infant!" It makes no sense.
And this is the crux of the argument, I think. If you can't do everything, then you're a hypocrite to do anything at all. This argument is not only fallacious, it's also a cop-out. It's supposed to serve as some justification for doing nothing, but I don't think it does.
The fact is, we're not trying to save the world. We're trying to reduce the amount of material goods we consume in this year. There are a number of reasons for that, and they're not all because we're do-gooders trying to save the planet. In the process of doing this, however, we will consume less resources than we would if we were not doing this, and that is good.
It's like Bill McKibben says, we could all have a "bubble" that follows us around representing the amount of resources we consume in a year. The average American's bubble would be 10x the size of bubbles from most other nations. We're making our bubbles smaller this year. We're not trying to pop them. It's not possible.