The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [11]
Donella Meadows worked for years to identify the leverage points where a “small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”22 Over time she developed a hierarchy of leverage points, from those that make incremental but immediate change to those that can fundamentally change the entire system. At the top of the hierarchy is challenging and changing a paradigm itself, because a shift in the paradigm immediately changes everything.23 For me, this fact is a huge source of hope and optimism. Although changing a paradigm can take generations, it can also happen in a second, when a person suddenly sees things in a new light, as I did standing aside the Fresh Kills landfill.
The Story of Stuff
My journeys led me to realize that the issue of garbage was related to the whole of the materials economy: to the extraction of natural resources, like mining and logging; to the chemistry labs and the factories where Stuff was designed and produced; to the international warehouses and stores where Stuff was shipped and trucked and then stuck with impossibly low price tags; to the clever television advertisements created with the help of psychologists to hook a consumer’s attention. I learned about international financial and trade institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; corporations like Chevron, Wal-Mart, and Amazon; indigenous tribes protecting rainforests in Ecuador, seamstresses making Disney nightgowns in Haiti, the Ogoni fighting Shell in Nigeria, communities along Cancer Alley in Louisiana, and cotton-field laborers in Uzbekistan—and all of these processes and institutions and communities turned out to be part of the same story! As environmental economist Dr. Jeffrey Morris explained when I asked about true cost accounting for my laptop, “Take any item and trace back to its true origins, and you find it takes the whole economy to make anything.”24
As I pieced together the whole trajectory of the dysfunctional system, I discovered a number of different groups approaching these issues from many different angles. There are the super serious “wonks” in the fields of science, economics, or policy, armed with their true yet terrifying statistics and facts which, unfortunately, tend to inspire panic and despair that shuts people down as opposed to motivating them to take action. Then there are shrill voices waggling their fingers at bad consumers, relying on guilt to motivate mass change in resource consumption, rarely with much success. There are the downshifters, those who voluntarily live simply, unplugging from commercial culture, working and buying less. While they can effectively model a way to live besides take-make-waste, they’re largely unable to get cultural traction beyond their communities. Similar to those who believe that technological improvements will save us, there are the conscious-consumption folks, who believe if we just provide enough of a market for greener products and processes, if we buy this instead of that, all will be well. (Those are the ones who inevitably ask at the end of my presentation, “OK, so what should I buy?”) There are also green designers, working to make our products and homes safer while they’re still in the idea stage. And of course there are all the activists and campaigners working on their issue of choice, as I did for many years.
For my part, I wanted to figure out how to talk about the materials economy and its underlying paradigm of economic growth by drawing on the best from each of the existing approaches and encouraging a broader systems perspective but without