Earth to IKEA

What that Poäng chair really costs.

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FURNITURE USED to be an investment, meant to last a lifetime. But thanks in no small part to IKEA, that’s changed. Now we buy bookshelves for $19.99—and feel fine about throwing them away two years later. In her forthcoming book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell chronicles how the Swedish furniture giant crafted the message that furniture can be affordable and adorable and sustainable. “With its focus on sharp design and Scandinavian élan, its hip, irreverent television commercials, its conspicuously progressive outlook,” she says, “IKEA appears to be the anti-Wal-Mart, a classy, high-minded company where value and good values coexist.” But do they? IKEA is now the world’s third-largest consumer of lumber after Home Depot and Lowe’s—and though it likes to tout its sustainable harvesting program, the responsibility of policing the logging has fallen on just 11 forestry monitors. As Mother Jones has reported, up to 25 percent of IKEA’s furniture is made with wood culled from the vast forests of northern Russia—an area notorious for illegal logging—and milled in China. There’s just too much to keep track of, as one monitor admits in a company report: “It’s not possible to be everywhere all the time.” The larger point is this: When IKEA says its wood furniture is made from a “renewable material,” it reinforces the idea that disposable is okay.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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