The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [16]
Sustainability:
This word gets thrown around all the time now, and it’s not always clear what’s intended. Perhaps the most common definition of sustainability evolved from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development’s description of sustainable development: meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.7
My definition of sustainability includes a couple of other key concepts. For one thing, sustainability must include equity and justice. As astrophysicist and writer Robert Gilman defines it, “sustainability is equity over time.”8 Also, sustainability requires looking at the big picture, not just the sustainability of a specific forest or the climate in isolation, not just our household or city or country, but the whole enchilada. The Center for Sustainable Communities says that sustainability “consider[s] the whole instead of the specific. Sustainability emphasizes relationships rather than pieces in isolation.”9
KEY TO RECURRING GRAPHICS
A Sign of Hope:
This drawing indicates that progress is being made on this issue, for example that there is growing awareness of the problem, inspiring citizen action or legislation in progress that will improve the situation.
Another Way:
This symbol means I’m presenting a viable alternative to the problematic status quo, for example green chemists developing safe compounds to replace the toxins used in production processes.
CHAPTER 1
EXTRACTION
In order to make all the Stuff in our lives, we first need to get the ingredients. Now, some of these don’t occur naturally—the man-made synthetic compounds—and we’ll cover them too. However, many ingredients for our Stuff exist inside the earth or on its surface. They only need to be harvested or extracted... Only!
Once we start examining them, we soon find that each key ingredient requires a lot of other ingredients just to get it out of the earth, processed, and ready for use. In the case of paper, for example, we don’t just need trees. We need metals to make the chainsaws and logging machines; trucks, trains, and even ships to cart the logs to processing plants; and oil to run all those machines and the plants themselves. We need water (a lot of it) for making the paper pulp. We usually need a chemical like bleach (no!) or hydrogen peroxide (better) to get a desirably light shade of paper. All in all, making one ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various other resources.1 And believe me when I say that’s a pretty simple example. That’s why we have to look at the whole materials economy, and often a map of the world, to get a clear picture of the ingredients that go into any one product on store shelves these days.
There are lots of ways to think about the various resources that come from the earth. For simplicity’s sake I’ll use just three categories: trees, rocks, and water.
Trees
As I said in the introduction, having grown up in Seattle, a green city in an even greener state, I love trees. Half of the land area in Washington State is covered in forests,2 and I visited them every chance I had. Over the course of my childhood I watched in dismay as more and more forests gave way to roads and malls and houses.
As I grew older, I learned that there are more than sentimental reasons to worry about the fate of our trees. Trees create oxygen, which—may I remind us—we need to breathe. That alone would seem sufficient motivation for us to keep them intact. As the lungs of the planet, forests work around the clock to remove carbon dioxide from the air (a process called carbon sequestration) and give us oxygen in return. These days scientists concerned about climate change research all sorts of elaborate, expensive, man-made schemes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere in hopes of moderating climate change. Seems like a waste if you ask me. We already have a natural system that not only sequesters carbon but also provides the exact kind of