The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [161]
The Zero Waste Kovalam activists looked for opportunities to design waste out of the system. They set up stations for people to refill water bottles with boiled and filtered water, rather than buy new bottles. They set up worker cooperatives that trained local unemployed people to make reusable cloth bags from leftovers from the tailor shops, thus eliminating the formerly ubiquitous plastic bags.
The founder of Zero Waste Kovalam, Jayakumar Chelaton, is proud of how the issue of waste connected to bigger issues like governance, environmental health, and economic justice in Kovalam. The Zero Waste philosophy for him “is about relationships. It is about people and communities and how we want to live together.”141
And that’s exactly why I became so passionate about waste some twenty years ago. I understood waste was connected to everything else in our world. Unraveling the story of waste is what led me to the Story of Stuff.
EPILOGUE
WRITING THE NEW STORY
When (if) people stop to think about it, we all worry at some level about the sacrifices that will be necessary to rewrite the Story of Stuff. We worry about big things like jobs lost in Stuff-producing factories, and we worry about little things like the lack of convenience when disposable bottles and cans disappear. Some worry that switching away from the growth-driven model of economic progress and redirecting our priorities away from amassing ever more Stuff will lower the quality of life, perhaps lead us back to living like cavemen.
I want to start by challenging the fear of sacrifice and describing one version of what life can look like when we focus on the quality of our life, rather than the quantity of our Stuff. This is not some pie-in-the-sky scenario of how the eco-perfect person would live if she spent less time on the work-watch-spend treadmill; this is my actual lifestyle, right now.
I’ve mentioned that I live in a tight community in downtown Berkeley, which can be considered a type of co-housing. It isn’t a hippie commune; we don’t swap partners; our children are perfectly clear on who their parents are. It’s really just a bunch of good friends who chose to live near one another—really near, like next door. We chose to relocate from various parts of the country to live in community with each other. We find life easier and more rewarding because we focus more on building community than on buying Stuff. We share a big yard; we often eat meals together; but each family has its own self-contained home into which we can retreat when we want to be alone. Some of us even watch TV, but usually together, so even that is a community activity.
We share Stuff all the time. As the older children in the community outgrow their toys, books, and clothes, the younger children inherit them. Once, after my daughter begged me to let her try skiing, I sent an e-mail out to my community members asking for advice on where I should take her and what I’d need for the trip (not being a skier myself). When I got home from work the next day, there were three bags full of children’s ski equipment and clothes waiting for me on the front step. And that’s not unusual. Before buying some specialty tool that I need, I check to see if anyone else in the community already has one.
We share advice. We coach each other when making difficult decisions in our personal or professional lives. I have