The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [12]
My goal with this book (and the film upon which it’s based) is to unpack the Story of Stuff—the flow of materials through the economy—as simply as possible. My aim is never to make you feel guilty (unless you are the head of Chevron, Dow Chemical, Disney, Fox News, Halliburton, McDonald’s, Shell, or the World Bank); it should be clear that the fundamental problem I identify here is not individual behavior and poor lifestyle choices, but the broken system—the deadly take-make-waste machine. I hope reading the Story helps inspire you to share information with people in your life about issues like toxics in cosmetics, the problems with incineration and recycling, and the flaws in the IMF’s economic policies. I do my best to explain or just avoid the technical jargon of fields like chemistry, supply chain theory, and trade policies, which too often excludes people from this critical conversation.
In the face of so many tough challenges, there are many exciting and hopeful developments that I celebrate in these pages and that I see as steps toward a truly sustainable ecological-economic system. Above all, I invite the citizen in you to become louder than the consumer inside you and launch a very rich, very loud dialogue within your community.
A few points of clarification:
1. I’m not against Stuff.
In fact, I’m pro-Stuff! I want us to value our Stuff more, to care for it, to give it the respect it deserves. I want us to recognize that each thing we buy involved all sorts of resources and labor. Someone mined the earth for the metals in your cell phone; someone unloaded the bales from the cotton gin for your T-shirt. Someone in a factory assembled that pair of sunglasses, and they might have been exposed to carcinogens or forced to work overtime. Someone drove or flew this bouquet around the country or the world to get it to you. We need to understand the true value of our Stuff, far beyond the price tag and far beyond the social status of ownership. Stuff should be long-lasting, made with the pride of an artisan and cared for accordingly.
Like most average Americans, I have plenty of Stuff and I battle clutter. However, I do try to avoid buying Stuff, especially new Stuff, that I don’t need. I buy furniture, kitchenware, sporting equipment, and just about everything I can from secondhand sources, which prevents new waste from being made during production. That also allows me to buy higher quality, longer-lasting Stuff than I could afford if buying it new. And then I take good care of it. I get my shoes resoled; I mend my clothes; I bring in my bike from the rain so it will last as absolutely long as possible.
2. I’m not romanticizing poverty.
When I point out the flaws in our overconsumptive U.S. lifestyle and praise the slower-paced and less materialistic countries that I’ve visited, I am not romanticizing poverty. Poverty is a wretched and intolerable reality, an outcome of the broken economic model that maldistributes resources. I don’t wish that kind of existence for anybody, ever. I once visited an Indian boarding school that had just lost half a dozen kids to malaria, where I realized the medicine that could have saved them costs less than I pay for a cup of coffee at home. For those kids, and others without enough food, medicine, shelter, schools, and other basic goods, more money and more Stuff definitely helps. But once our basic needs are met, it’s been proven that a focus on getting more and more Stuff actually undermines happiness. (See chapter 4 on consumption for details.)
In the United States we work more hours than folks in almost any other industrialized country in the world, and two of our main activities in our scant leisure time are TV watching and shopping. So we go to work, come home exhausted, and plop down in front of the TV; the commercials tell us we need new Stuff to feel better about ourselves, so we go shopping; and in order to pay for it all, we have to work even more. I call this the work-watch-spend treadmill.
What I’m appreciating