The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [127]
One of the key innovations of the study is that it assigns the global carbon footprint from imports to the country that imports the goods—not the country that manufactures the goods. This approach is really important because globalized production chains allow companies to outsource the manufacturing of carbon-intensive products, thus hiding the real carbon costs of imported goods. What we need to avoid is a scenario in which countries with tight carbon emission limits can simply outsource the production of Stuff they consume to countries where the emission limits are not so restrictive.
Redistribution and Reverence
Around the world, current consumption patterns are destroying remaining environmental resources and the services that the earth provides and exacerbating inequalities. The crises of poverty, inequality, and the environment are all related—and they are all related to consumption. It is simply not an option for those of us in the wealthy countries to refuse to reevaluate our consumption patterns: the planet is in crisis, we’re not sharing fairly, and it’s not even making us happy.
Here’s an alternative scenario: we realize that things have got to change, because the previous scenario isn’t the world we want. We need to make room at the table for those who don’t yet have a seat. According to Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, “If the human family sets a goal for itself of achieving a moderate standard of living for everyone, computer projections suggest that the world could reach a sustainable level of economic activity that is roughly ‘equivalent in material comforts to the average level in Europe.’”102 Now, that doesn’t sound half bad to me; in fact, it sounds like the way to go.
I like Alan Durning’s poetic vision of what the above level of consumption could look like: “Accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity, and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water’s edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations.”103
All we have to do is rethink and redesign how we’re living in order to produce and consume less Stuff, to better share the resources and Stuff we do have among us, and—the topic of the next chapter—to throw a whole lot less of those precious resources away.
CHAPTER 5
DISPOSAL
A funny thing happens to most of our Stuff almost immediately after we buy it. What we paid for in the store and brought home was a treasure, a prize—a shiny toy, a stylish T-shirt, the latest model cell phone or laptop or camera. But once it belongs to us and takes up space inside our home, the Stuff starts losing value. “Our houses are basically garbage processing centers,” comedian Jerry Seinfeld riffed during a 2008 tour.1 As soon as Stuff enters our homes, it begins the transformation. We get something and it starts out prominently displayed, then gets moved into a cupboard or onto a shelf, then stuffed in a closet, then thrown in a box in the garage and held there until it becomes garbage. The words “garage” and “garbage” must be related, Seinfeld points out, because pretty much everything that enters the first becomes the second.
But in all seriousness, economists have a real term for