In 1972, when I was anundergraduate at Yale and a bit of an activist, I somehow becameconvinced that George McGovern was going to become the next presidentof the United States. After all, everyone I knew was going to vote forMcGovern. On election night, reality intervened, as is its habit, andRichard Nixon won 49 of 50 states. It struck me that maybe everyone I didn't know had voted for Nixon.

I feel something similar about Buy Nothing Day.I'd seen lots of publicity on green websites about Buy Nothing Day andthousands of people on Facebook had signed up to avoid the malls anddepartment stores on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, whichis one of the busiest shopping day of the year. No one I know plannedto get up before dawn to hunt for bargains at J.C. Penney or Kohl's,both of which opened at 4 a.m. Maybe, just maybe, people's consumptionwould be restrained this fall - when global warming and a loomingrecession are in the news nearly every day.

Apparently not. Early reportsindicated that sales rose by about 8 percent on Friday, compared with ayear ago, the biggest increase in three years. Shoppers were morefrugal - spending about $348 each over the holiday weekend, down from$360 last year - but more of them apparently came out in search oflower cost items. Retailers were expected to rack up about $40 billionover the four-day weekend. So much for Buy Nothing Day.

This, to me, is a reminderthat of all the kinds of changes that we are going to have to make totackle our environmental problems, and in particular global warming,the cultural changes are going to be the hardest.

I'm confident that corporateAmerica will change. Big business is already becoming more sustainable,in part because of pressures from activists and from its own employees,but mostly because reducing energy consumption and waste makes businesssense. When influential companies like General Electric, Wal-Mart andIBM take environmental issues seriously, as they do, others are boundto follow.

I'm also increasingly hopefulthat political change is coming soon. This year has brought dramaticprogress towards federal legislation that will put a price on carbon -the single most important policy change needed to curb global warming.Big forces are driving the Congress to act, among them the growingscientific consensus around climate change, the alliance of businessesthat support carbon caps, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that all butorders EPA to regulate carbon, action in the states and more.

But cultural change? That'sgoing to be hard. Really hard. Virtually every American holiday - frompresident's weekend to Thanksgiving - has become a shoppingopportunity. Malls near where I live seem to be mobbed all the time.Shopping has become a means of self-expression, a way to kill time,cheap (or not so cheap) therapy, a sport - a whole lot more, obviously,than a way to satisfy our needs. To pick just one example, Americans spend about $15 billion a year on perfume. That's considerably more than it would take, by most estimates, to provide clean drinking water to the roughly 1.2 billion people in the world who go without it.

Who among us doesn't have morethan we need? I watched a football game on a 50-inch HD TV earliertoday, after going out for a run, with my 16 gigabit video iPod. Ididn't even keep my pledge to buy nothing on Black Friday. I heard afascinating interview on NPR's Science Friday with Alan Weisman, authorof a book called The World Without Us,and when I passed by a Border's bookstore soon after, I bought a copy(at a discount) for about $20. That was all the shopping I did duringthe four-day weekend but still...

What's more, while there isplenty of activism and organizing around business and politics, I seevery few groups or institutions that are addressing consumption. (The Center for A New American Dreamis a prominent and most welcome exception.) My hope is that religiousinstitutions will take on this job. Historically, Christians and Jewsset aside one day each week for worship and rest, for a break fromproducing and consuming. Many still do, and the great thing aboutobserving the sabbath is the insights you can glean about how toapproach the other six days of the week. In a book called SabbathSense, my friend Donna Schaper,the senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, wrote abouthow we can "take back our time and take care of our souls - one momentat a time." Maybe there's still hope for Buy Nothing Day.