The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [122]
PVC’s entire lifecycle, from production through use and disposal, has severe environmental and public health impacts. Most notably, the production and disposal of PVC is closely linked to the creation of dioxin, the most toxic man-made substance known to science... Since dioxin concentrates in fat, and breast milk contains high amounts of fat, women’s breast milk around the world is now contaminated with this highly toxic chemical which is known to cause cancer and disrupt hormonal systems. Every time I breastfeed my baby, I think of the corporations that knowingly create and release dioxin into our environment... Enfamil is fully aware of the controversy around PVC... The representative with whom I spoke was aware of the concerns and was knowledgeable about the details... The irony is that an infant formula company is a culprit in making our breast milk less safe.
Will you continue to use your Enfamil diaper bag knowing that it may leach chemicals that threaten Toby’s reproductive and hormonal systems, neurological development, and may cause cancer?... Do you really believe that the production and distribution of a diaper bag made from a dangerous and unnecessary plastic—which will obviously be around small children—is consumer driven? Do you believe it is appropriate for a hospital nursery to distribute a PVC diaper bag without even warning of the dangers?...
Again, best wishes for a healthy future for your son.
Sincerely,
Ann Leonard
My point then, as now, is that what is best for the corporation is not always best for the consumer. The choices that are offered to us may be touted as “consumer driven” but often are actually corporation driven, which is to say profit driven.
Being a powerful, free individual actually means being able to demand an economic system that respects, rather than exploits, workers and the environment, not being able to choose between an infinite number of coffee flavors and styles. Barber writes in Consumed, “We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.”81 And the places where we enact our real freedoms to define what’s on the menu and set the agenda—those places are our town halls and community meetings, the offices of elected officials, the op-ed pages of newspapers, and sometimes simply the streets—not the aisles of shopping markets or the counters of coffee shops.
Consumer Self, Citizen Self
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been speaking to a community group or at a college and been asked by audience members, “OK, so what SHOULD I buy?”
I’ve come to believe that each of us has two parts of our identity: a consumer self and a citizen or community self. In American society today, the consumer part of our self is spoken to, validated, nurtured from Day One. From the moment we are born, we are bombarded with messages that reinforce our role as consumers. We’re experts in consuming; we know where and how and when to get the best deals. We know how long we have to wait until the shirt we want goes on the sale rack. We know how to navigate the Internet to get what we want the very next day.
Our consumer self is so overdeveloped that it has drowned out all our other identities. What should be our core identities—as parents, students, neighbors, professionals, voters, etc.—are smothered underneath it. Most of us lack a basic understanding of how to utilize the citizen muscle.
The hyperdevelopment of our consumer self and the atrophying of our citizen self isn’t natural; social scientists, historians, child development experts, academics, and many others see it as a result of nearly a century of consumerist conditioning. Survey after survey has shown an increasing commercialization of our culture and a simultaneous decrease in investment