It being Saturday, February 14, let me wish you all a happy St. Valentine's Day.
By the way, St. Valentine, an early Roman martyr, was clubbed, stoned, and beheaded - not shot by arrows - for, among other things, marrying Christian couples. The bow and arrow is the symbol of the pagan Roman god of love, Cupido.
The poster is provided by a Brussels-based group of anti-growth activists. Those are bar code strips, in case you can't make it out. Cupid, appropriately enough, suggests that you "make love - don't shop" to paraphrase the Vietnam-era slogan.
This week the French TV program "Envoyé Spécial" carried a report about the "Décroissance" movement, which, if you look it up in Wikipedia, was born in France and is essentially a European phenomenon (although the California "Locavores" got honorable mention on the program).
These people - mostly young, primarily urban, definitely "green" - are not a threat to the capitalist system, and many are thriving in the market economy. But consumerism and especially waste is definitely out - unless it's in your compost bin, where it's put to active use.
Actually, as modern as they are, they have an awful lot in common with people of my parents' generation, people who grew up in the Europe or America of the inter war, Depression years. Whose married lives were inaugurated by husbands going off to war. Who had to deal with rationing, bartering, black marketing, and all manner of survival mechanisms.
The good people at Décroissance.org are not to be confused with "décroissance.info," which appears to be a nasty far right ripoff using Google to prey on hapless surfers looking for ways to live sustainably. On "Envoyé Spécial," a bunch of people who might take pride in being called "cheapskates" jury-rig their plumbing to flush toilets with rain water, make decorations out of plastic trash (sells well), and are not above retrieving discarded, "bruised" vegetables and chopping off the bad parts.
If hard times are coming, we can all take a note from this book. "Waste not, want not" and lots of other old aphorisms might be ready for a revival. I definitely don't want de-flation or de-pression, but "de-growth" (as Wikipedia rather awkwardly translates "décroissance") might do us all - and the planet, with its finite resources - a lot of good.
Now it's okay to indulge in that Valentine's chocolate.