For the Taliban, apparently, Naveed Jan had proved himself too dangerous to be allowed to live.

Despite limiting himself to modestly critical social media posts after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, the civil society activist was hauled away by the Taliban in late November.

Mr. Jan was never to be seen alive again by his family, who have posted photos of his body online and mourn him as a “martyr of free speech.”

For the two decades of U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, during which freedom of speech blossomed, the Taliban waged an insurgency whose tactics included bombing media outlets and an assassination campaign that targeted civil society activists and journalists.

Yet in August, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen declared, “We believe in freedom of speech.” Indeed, since taking control, senior Taliban officials have submitted to being grilled on nationwide television channels by some of the journalists they once sought to kill.

But the lethal result for Mr. Jan illustrates the risks of criticizing the new order in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban demonstrate an array of differing standards over what they consider acceptable levels of free speech – from taking tough questions on TV, on the one hand, to stamping out women’s rights protests and beating, jailing, and even killing Afghan activists and media workers, on the other.

Those Afghans wanting to freely express critical views have been subjected to months of intimidation and fear, often being hunted by the Taliban, according to a multitude of testimonials.

Grassroots control

Taliban actions so far reveal both a sparse commitment to freedom of speech and a fierce determination to snuff out local voices of dissent – no matter how marginal – in the service of the Taliban’s self-declared Islamic Emirate. Analysts say that’s in keeping both with the Taliban’s thin skin, and with their approach to imposing control over Afghan society.

“The problem, when it comes to criticism, is the Taliban don’t go for the big fish; they go for the small fish,” says Rahmatullah Amiri, a Kabul-based independent analyst and expert on the Taliban. “They are very systematically targeting those small fish to close the chapter on freedom of speech.

“The Taliban belief is always that you have to work from the low level, that if you don’t control community from the grassroots, you won’t be able to control it at the national level,” Mr. Amiri says.

“If you want to make sure there is no future forest, you don’t cut the big trees; you [instead] don’t allow the little trees to grow,” he adds. That strategy has evoked little international outcry and has been used effectively for years to “achieve broader aims,” he says, compared with the “easily noticeable” targeting of higher-profile people.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/File

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen at a news conference in Moscow, March 19, 2021. In August, after the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan, Mr. Shaheen declared that the Taliban “believe in freedom of speech.”

A grim case study is that of Mr. Jan, who held two bachelor’s degrees, in agriculture and economics, and had opened a stationery shop after the Taliban took over his city of Lashkar Gah, capital of the southern Helmand province. The sarcasm about Taliban rule that he expressed on Facebook in late November drew unexpected attention.

Mr. Jan posted that protesting teachers should not demand salaries from the Taliban, who “themselves don’t have bread” and were asking local residents for food and charity.

A family’s pleas

Within days, several Taliban fighters came to his house, demanding “to meet Naveed,” family members recall. They took his phone, forced him into their car, and took the 24-year-old to a local security headquarters.

The first family members who went to get Mr. Jan released were told that his Facebook posts were “against the Taliban,” but that he would soon be free. The next day, Mr. Jan’s white-bearded father went with other family elders to plead that his son had “made a mistake” that would not be repeated.

The Taliban again promised his release. But a day later, the Taliban commander who had promised Mr. Jan’s freedom told the father, “Your son is not here,” and denied that he ever had been.

On the fourth day, the family marshaled 50 community elders, but it was too late. They now share images online of Mr. Jan, including of his lifeless body, showing signs of torture, which was found floating near the banks of the Helmand River, dressed in the same clothes in which he was taken away.

“I don’t believe Taliban promises, because the Taliban act against all their slogans,” says Sharif Sharafat, a brother of Mr. Jan. “There are many examples of Naveed, but no one can raise their voice.”

Experts on the Taliban had predicted a shriveling of freedoms if the jihadis were to ever again seize control, after they were ousted from power by the U.S. military in 2001. Since then the media – often accused of working for “infidel occupiers” – have been particular prey. A targeted assassination campaign stepped up in mid-2020 killed scores, from female judges to television anchors.

In late September, media regulations issued by the Taliban banned reports “contrary to Islam,” that “insult national figures,” or that “could have a negative impact on the public’s attitude.”

The provisions were “so broad and vague as to prohibit virtually any critical reporting about the Taliban,” Human Rights Watch noted at the time. In late November, amid reports of death threats against journalists, further media rules banned films “against” Islamic values and dramas with female actors, and made wearing head covering mandatory for female journalists on TV.

One female Afghan journalist, writing anonymously in the London Guardian newspaper Wednesday, describes being on the run from her home province since August, when the Taliban “started to hunt those who had spoken out against them.” She receives constant threats, which describe “the awful things they will do to me.”

“They tell me they will kill me if they find me,” writes the journalist. “I block the numbers they call me from, but they just call me from a different number or ... on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. I have blocked more than a hundred numbers so far.”

She writes that a former colleague was recently discovered by the Taliban, and “they claim they tracked him using the GPS on his phone. ... I am terrified they will find me.”

A sensitivity to tone

Such Taliban zeal is not uncommon for a jihadist organization with a sacred view of its mission.

“For the Taliban, it’s not about freedom of speech, or whether what [someone] wrote was right or wrong, but [activists] are waking others,” says Mr. Amiri, the analyst. “If they see that this guy is systematically posting and tweeting about the Taliban state, they take that seriously.”

More important than the criticism itself is the tone, he says. Making fun and using sarcasm is one Taliban trigger.

“The Islamic Emirate is very pure; they believe in this,” says Mr. Amiri. “They believe that bad-mouthing the emirate is like a sin.”

Some of those “enemies” – once found – are given a choice, like one former human rights activist in northwestern Faryab province. He had been an outspoken critic of the Taliban and in the past often received warnings and death threats.

According to colleagues, when this activist was arrested, the Taliban planned to kill him, but community elders intervened to prevent it. The Taliban told him, “You have one chance to work for us, and reflect our activities as positive, or we will kill you.”

His Facebook page today includes comments such as, “Taliban should be praised for good rule enforcement. A government that doesn’t have hard rules is not strong, and is impossible to rule Afghanistan.”

The former activist’s followers have reacted with disdain. One called him a “spokesman” for the emirate who should examine his conscience. Another complained about “how much we were deceived” by this “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Yet one Taliban follower heaped praise, saying that “after years of ignorance, you well realized the truth. ... The gate of repentance is still open; turn to God and be a good Muslim.”

If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mass deployment of troops on his country’s border with Ukraine is meant to deter NATO from allowing the former Soviet republic to join its ranks, the Western alliance says publicly that it won’t be pushed around. 

“Ukraine has the right to choose its own security arrangements,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reassured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday. “And the decision on whether Ukraine can join NATO will be taken by Ukraine and 30 NATO allies alone.”

But that does not mean that the allies are ready to make the former Soviet republic a member. Indeed, behind the scenes “there’s very little enthusiasm” within NATO for bringing in Ukraine, says Ian Lesser, president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a transatlantic think tank.

That leaves NATO with a balancing act to retain its credibility: How to reflect the deep doubts within the alliance about the advisability of Ukraine joining, without appearing to bow to Mr. Putin’s insistence that NATO renounce such a step forever.

Olivier Matthys/AP

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (right) and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy participate in a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Dec. 16, 2021.

Plausible steps

NATO has been divided over Ukrainian membership since 2008, when President George W. Bush failed to persuade an alliance summit to invite Ukraine and Georgia into the club immediately. Instead, NATO promised the two states that they could join one day, but without specifying when or how.

That reticence derives from a rarely voiced acknowledgement by some members that Mr. Putin may actually have a point in seeing Ukraine’s potential NATO membership as provocative. “There are a lot of people in powerful positions who think that NATO has pushed things too far,” notes Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

There is, however, “a consensus on the need to support [Ukraine] politically, economically, and, to the extent they can, in security terms,” says Mr. Lesser.

Today, key to maintaining the alliance’s reputation will be making clear the plausible steps it will take to deter Russia, which means that NATO must “make clear the difference,” between what it will do for its allies, and what it will do for non-member partners, argues Rachel Ellehuus, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Pentagon’s principal director for European and NATO policy in the Obama administration. 

“While there’s quite a bit that NATO can do,” she adds, “Ukraine is not going to get that Article 5 commitment,” the principle of collective defense at the heart of NATO’s founding treaty, by which an attack against one ally is considered an attack against all.

“If NATO’s going to respond militarily, it’s going to be (through) assistance to (countries) who share a border with Ukraine” to prevent instability in a member state, “which is important to maintaining credibility” within the alliance, Ms. Ellehuus adds.

In NATO’s favor, the Ukrainian armed forces “are far better trained, equipped and resourced, and are more motivated than they were in 2014,” when they failed to repel Russian attacks on Crimea and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Luke Coffey, director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, said in a panel discussion in Washington, D.C.  this week. “The Ukrainians can fight for themselves.”

Roman Koksarov/AP/File

Military vehicles and tanks from Poland, Italy, Canada, and the United States roll during the NATO military exercises ''Namejs 2021'' at a training ground in Kadaga, Latvia, on Sept. 13, 2021. NATO responded to Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by bolstering its forces near Russia and conducting drills on the territory of its Baltic members – maneuvers the Kremlin described as a security threat.

Talks on the agenda

Meanwhile, Russia’s military moves do appear to be bringing some new NATO thinking to the surface, observers say.

“I think that NATO leaned too far forward…when it said that Ukraine will become a member someday,” Ms. Ellehuus says. “They keep saying the door to membership is open when in reality it isn’t. A little more honesty and pragmatism is in order.”

Retracting the promise of membership would likely be impossible. “It would look like a reward for Putin’s bad behavior,” says Mr. O’Hanlon. But U.S. President Joe Biden has already indicated that he is prepared to listen to Moscow’s concerns. 

A day after his conversation with Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden said he hoped to convene high level talks between NATO allies and Moscow “to discuss the future of Russia’s concerns relative to NATO writ large.” The talks would explore “whether or not we can work out any accommodation as it relates to bringing down the temperature along the eastern front,” Mr. Biden added.

On Thursday, NATO’s top body pledged that “we are ready for meaningful dialogue with Russia. We are aware of Russia’s recent European security proposals. We are clear that any dialogue with Russia would have to proceed on the basis of reciprocity.”

That suggests that Mr. Putin has achieved the first goal of his military saber-rattling: to make his voice heard. 

Russia may seek “certain commitments over Ukraine, and we’re probably not willing to provide those,” says Mr. Lesser. “But above all, Russia wants to feel as if it has a seat at the table and is taken seriously as a great power, which its nuclear status certainly gives it,” he adds. “There has been a tendency not to take Russia very seriously over the past decades, rightly or wrongly.”

Top-level talks between NATO and Russia – and especially between Washington and Moscow – are “badly needed,” says Mr. Lesser. “There was more strategic dialogue, more understanding of what we meant when we said certain things” at the height of the Cold War than there is today, he laments.

The key to NATO credibility in future will be framing the conversation in terms favorable to the alliance, suggests Mr. O’Hanlon. “We should begin by saying that we are actually in the driver’s seat. We’re not asking Putin for favors, and he’s not winning,” he says.

At the same time, it may be helpful “to remind people that NATO allies have been successful in punishing Russia for its provocations,” he adds. Recent annual GDP growth rates have averaged below 2%, a reflection of long-stagnant oil prices and corruption, but also the result of sanctions and a lack of Western investment.

And, as President Biden has reiterated, things could get far worse financially for Moscow, Mr. O’Hanlon points out. “If he were to do something more dramatic, like the invasion of Ukraine, we would respond more strongly and place Russia on a path to recession,” he predicts. In such a scenario, European allies have warned Moscow of “massive” economic consequences.

Thomas Krych/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Reuters

A homeless person sleeps near Charing Cross Station in London. In 2020, England and Wales saw their first drop in deaths of homeless people on the streets since 2014, which experts credit to efforts during the March 2020 lockdown to get so-called rough sleepers inside in order to fight the pandemic.

Julian had lived a “normal life” as a laborer, living with his grandmother in affordable public housing in North London. When she died last December, Julian was left out on the streets in the middle of a pandemic. Now, a year later, he remains without a home as winter’s freezing temperatures begin to set in.

With an estimated 280,000 people homeless in England – many of them sleeping outdoors, or “rough” as it is called here – he’s not alone.

But a glimmer of hope emerged after 2020 showed a decline in the number of rough sleepers dying in the streets – the first such drop in almost a decade. The fall is attributed to a rare, albeit brief, pandemic success story, when the British government made a concerted effort to house thousands of rough sleepers inside emergency accommodations at the onset of lockdown in March 2020.

Britain’s brief foray tackling homelessness has raised questions about whether that spark to protect homeless people can return. Protections are now lapsing, with a ban on evictions during the pandemic and the “Everyone In” program now gone.

The minds of charities and policymakers are now focused on whether the short-lived success can be replicated, and whether a change in the philosophy of letting homeless people into housing is needed.

“It boils down to an unconditional versus a traditional tough-love approach,” the latter a characteristic of multiple governments, says Ruth Mason, a frontline homeless shelter worker already “stretched to the limit.”

The success of “Everyone In”

When Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown in March 2020, local authorities had been given just 48 hours to house all rough sleepers as part of the Everyone In program. It was a “landmark moment and the right thing to do,” says Jon Sparkes, chief executive of the homeless charity Crisis. Around 37,000 people were housed in emergency accommodations.

That request was made without a clear plan or much financial backing for local authorities. So many local councils turned to hoteliers to find the rooms needed.

In Shrewsbury in western England, the Prince Rupert Hotel agreed to take in all the town’s homeless people. “The council literally walked them, with their rucksack from their natural habitat of a doorway or a park bench, into the hotel that they’d only walked past for years,” says Mike Matthews, owner of the Tudor-style hotel.

Many hoteliers, like Mr. Matthews, cooked meals for the new arrivals in kitchens that normally fed paying guests. One hotel in London overlooking the capital’s river filled up all the rooms usually given to high-paying tourists.

“So many of the rough sleepers had never been in such a comfortable bed,” says a manager at the popular hotel chain Travelodge. Hotel staff stayed on while the country mostly shut down, collaborating with rough-sleeping charities round the clock. “The Everyone In scheme was a real success. ... For a few months in the first lockdown, the government showed that where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

The government had also moved to suspend all evictions during the pandemic, thereby halting one of the main mechanisms that ends up putting more people on the streets. The ban “brought welcome relief and gave time to decide what protections could be put in place,” says Ruth Ehrlich, policy adviser at the U.K. charity Shelter.

The effort paid off, at least in saving lives. According to the Office for National Statistics’ figures for 2020, released this month, last year saw the first drop in the number of deaths of homeless people in England and Wales since 2014. The number of deaths had been increasing steadily from 2014 to 2019 (going from about 500 to 778), but 2020 saw a drop to 688.

Time for a shift in thought?

But Everyone In did not continue, nor did the eviction ban. While a majority of the 37,000-plus people housed were moved on to more settled accommodations, according to a House of Commons report earlier this year, many remained in emergency housing. And as the evictions ban ended, the number of repossessions spiked – driving people onto the streets once again.

Repeating the Everyone In initiative isn’t easily done. Though it made a commitment in its 2019 manifesto to end rough sleeping by 2024, the Conservative government has yet to provide a clear, long-term plan to that end. Charities warn that more investment in housing and support work is necessary to replicate last year’s results over years, rather than as a monthslong stopgap. National charity Crisis argues the solution is in more specialist support and housing that is more suitable for long-term living, as opposed to hotel rooms, which are once again being used by tourists.

Crisis also calls for housing to be provided unconditionally, a marked change from traditional policy around granting shelter to those in need.

Ms. Mason, the homeless shelter worker, operates under the traditional approach when she assesses the health and well-being of rough sleepers, making sure they’re off drugs and alcohol before declaring them “fit” for temporary accommodation. The logic is that otherwise, “rough sleepers go to hostels, but fall into a trap because they’re surrounded by other rough sleepers with alcohol or drug dependency,” she explains, and they will then flee back onto the streets to avoid such conditions.

But under Everyone In, those requirements for shelter were waived, which enabled the sweeping action needed. She wonders whether that change in direction, to provide housing “free of judgment,” might make more sense now. “How else can people overcome their troubles, without a roof over their heads first?”

Some housing charities are already taking that approach. Housing First is one such model that provides rough sleepers with their own homes unconditionally, and was first pioneered at a national level in Finland before being launched in the United Kingdom, where it is lauded by many.

But the debate is still far from resolved, and after years of the traditional approach, change may come slowly. In Manchester, plans are underway to build the U.K.’s largest village for homeless people. Derelict railway arches idly sitting by the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester will be converted to house small, modular apartments for 40 men. Embassy Village, as it will be called, will follow the traditional approach, though, and require residents to have no alcohol or drug addictions before they are housed.

On the streets of London, Julian huddles next to another rough sleeper and takes coffee from passersby. His future remains uncertain, but he knows that a roof over his head is what he needs to kick-start his life.

He knows more than most that rough sleeping can happen to anyone. “You’re no more than two steps away from sleeping on the streets.”

Friday lunchtime at Mini-Mal, a Bogotá restaurant of modern Colombian cuisine housed in a pretty, two-story Victorian edifice, was buzzing with a crowd in suits and heels.

In the back, Antonuela Ariza, the chef, readied the day’s special: the Color of the Andes. It is composed of purple, pink, and yellow tubers, native crops of the South American highlands, and the plate’s highlight was a crispy pastry, wrapping bright, smoky trout in a casing crafted out of coca powder.

On any given day, hundreds of coca plants, the raw source of cocaine, are yanked from the soil by anti-narcotics police patrolling far-flung corners of rural Colombia. But here in this upscale kitchen, coca is being redefined by Ms. Ariza as she plunges a pistachio-green mass, molded into the shape of a crescent, into a deep fryer. She joins chefs from high-end restaurants across Colombia who are experimenting – within the legal bounds of Colombian law – with how to utilize the controversial ingredient for an exquisite array of special dishes. In doing so they are paying homage to the Indigenous traditions in the country, and, ultimately, helping to decolonize the Colombian diet.

“We want people to better understand the coca leaf,” says Dora Troyano of the Alliance Coca for Peace, an association of farmers, researchers, and activists who financed a coca cookbook published this year. “We’re trying to fight fear with knowledge.”

Christina Noriega

Antonuela Ariza, chef at the restaurant Mini-Mal, prepares tubers for the dish Color of the Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia, Nov. 12, 2021.

Coca noodles?

This reimagining is only happening with a handful of businesses that have been granted permits to cultivate or commercialize the leaf. The cultivation of coca, a leafy bush native to the South American highlands, has been largely prohibited since the 1960s to clamp down on cocaine trafficking worldwide. Prohibition has been especially stringent in Colombia, the top producer of cocaine in the world.

Yet coca has remained wildly popular in the countryside, especially among Indigenous populations. Across South America, it’s been considered a sacred plant for centuries – often served as a tea.

In the last decade, finding new and more savory culinary uses for the coca leaf has been the mission of a new generation of chefs to help deconstruct myths and stigmas around the plant. Nineteen of them published an online cookbook in April presenting their coca concoctions – from ice creams to ramen noodles to empanadas to the appetizer served at Mini-Mal on a recent afternoon.

Christina Noriega

After coca flour is mixed with cornmeal and water, the dough is molded around pieces of bright, smoky trout to make an empanada. It is then fried to a golden hue and served at Bogotá restaurant Mini-Mal, Nov. 12, 2021.

Decades of the U.S. war on drugs have led many to mistake coca with its most well-known derivative, cocaine. Many, especially urbanites who have never encountered the plant, are unaware that coca does not induce the same effects as the drug and that to extract cocaine from the leaf requires an arduous process, involving a toxic mixture of gasoline, cement, ammonia, caustic soda, and other chemicals.

Ms. Ariza says she started to conjure recipes with coca about a decade ago, using it as flour or mambe, a toasted coca powder, which became more widely available through small Indigenous businesses. There were no cookbooks or online recipes available at the time, so she began to experiment herself. She found it useful to think of the coca flour as a gluten-free alternative; she looked at mambe as a South American equivalent to matcha, a green tea leaf powder used in Japanese cuisine. 

But she also looked historically at the plant, before the invention of cocaine, especially in presenting it to new audiences. “We told them where these leaves come from, how Indigenous people chew leaves to converse, to resolve problems, to instruct the youth, and they were moved because they finally understood that this vision of coca they had, had been created by foreigners, people outside of Colombia, but also people outside of the [Indigenous] community, white people,” says Ms. Ariza.

“Gunpowder can be used for fireworks that are beautiful,” she adds. “But if it’s in a bullet, it can kill you. With coca, it’s the same thing.”

Coca as a delicacy is growing, alongside conversations about Indigenous rights, but it’s moving slowly, Ms. Ariza says, because of the regulations surrounding its use.

Christina Noriega

Diners at Mini-Mal restaurant in the Colombian capital talk while eating gourmet dishes made with ingredients from remote corners of the Andean country.

U.S.-led clampdown

Most coca in Colombia is targeted for eradication as part of a U.S.-supported strategy to stop the production and flow of cocaine northward. In 2020, more than 130,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in Colombia, about 35% of the total hectares planted that year.

Under Colombian law, some Indigenous communities are permitted to plant, harvest, and commercialize coca. But even small Indigenous companies have faced pushback from the government for selling products like soda drinks, liquors, cookies, flour, and teas. Today only about two dozen have had success selling coca-based products.

One that’s had success sits in the town of Lerma, where the Alliance Coca for Peace obtained a special permit from the government to conduct research on the plant and help local farmers sell to restaurants like Mini-Mal.

As part of the writing process for the cookbook, Alliance Coca for Peace brought the chefs to Lerma. Previously, the town had been ravaged by violence between Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels and the military, but now farmers make a living without the threat of violence by harvesting legally cultivated coca. 

Herney Ruiz is a Lerma native of Indigenous descent. Today the coca he and his family grow is used for food, he says, not financing war.

“It makes us happy to see that so many Colombians, Andean people, are going back to coca, which is our teacher, our medicine, and nourishment,” says Mr. Ruiz. “Every time we eat coca, whether in a dish at a restaurant or chewing the leaves at home, we are making peace with [the plant].”

AP

People in face masks shop amid holiday decorations in the Hudson Yards shopping mall in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021.

Although holiday shopping is near pre-pandemic highs – despite
inflation, shipping delays, and shortages – another type of giving has begun to take off this season.

It’s the Buy Nothing Project. Founded in 2013, the movement has grown
to 4.3 million members in 44 countries. It welcomes participants to
abide by very simple rules: no buying, selling, trading, or bartering
of gifts. Instead, it encourages people to give away items to others,
most often strangers, in a local area.

Two friends near Seattle, Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, hatched
the idea to “build community by connecting people through hyperlocal
gifting and reducing our impact on the environment.” They were struck
by how disconnected their own community had become and the plastic
strewn in the waters near their Pacific Northwest homes in Puget
Sound.

People join Buy Nothing for various reasons. Those in need seek
respectful, nonjudgmental assistance. Others give to spare the planet
from new, resource-depleting consumption. Many have been up to their
eyeballs in pandemic decluttering. Most see how they can save money
and live better.

But whatever an individual’s motive, participants end up weaving new
relationships into an expanding and giving community. “People are
buying nothing in hordes,” Ms. Clark recently told NPR’s Marketplace.

Despite its simple and direct moniker, Buy Nothing remains moderate
and flexible about people’s ethical choices. Participants still both
patronize local stores and shop online. Many also host garage sales or
donate to Goodwill or other charities.

“You could say this is consumption with a conscience, with
sustainability in mind, but it is absolutely consumption. We’re just
sharing resources,” Ms. Clark explains in Fortune magazine. “It’s not
a movement of austerity.”

This approach to “sharing resources” is perhaps what attracts people
who are uneasy with overconsumption and waste. The movement has also
grown as the isolation and tight budgets of the pandemic have forced
many to rethink their habits of consumption.

“There’s a growing dis-ease with consumer culture and the way it
operates,” Boston College economist Juliet Schor tells Fortune. “The
wastefulness, the cycle of acquisition and discard, is increasingly
unappealing to people.”

Co-founder Ms. Rockefeller suggests many people buy new items out of a
belief in scarcity and a Darwinian contest for survival.

“That is not the reality of the world,” she says in an interview with
Yes Magazine. “We believe our innate human nature is one of compassion
and generosity that understands that we survive only together. That’s
the only way we’re ever going to be able to make it and live
sustainably on this planet.”

Talk with a Buy Nothing participant and you’re likely to hear one of
the movement’s mantras: Giving out of abundance. And this holiday
season, that may be the most novel of gifts.