The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [78]
It Wasn’t Always This Way
The problems with the production of Stuff seem nearly intractable. If you were born anytime in the last sixty-odd years, it’s hard to imagine that things could possibly be any different. But it wasn’t always like this. The most toxic parts of today’s production processes have been with us for less than a hundred years. And that is cause for hope.
For a long time, the production of all our Stuff caused far less environmental harm. There were definitely some negative health impacts in early production, especially around the use of heavy metals like mercury and lead before people realized they were as dangerous as they are. But it was insignificant compared to today’s global environmental destruction and persistent toxics, their reach extending from seemingly pristine wilderness areas to the fat cells of every person on the planet.
When we look back through history, we see two periods of change that fundamentally transformed production processes, with devastating effects. Before the Industrial Revolution, nearly all production was powered by elbow grease—meaning we humans, and the animals we could enlist to help, provided the energy needed to make Stuff. That meant there was a limit to how many resources we could collect and how much Stuff we could make. Then in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries we developed the steam engine, and soon machines could replace a lot of people, toiling harder and longer, without demanding things like safe working conditions or breaks to eat or rest.
Suddenly the limits on how much Stuff we could extract and process disappeared, under the motto “more, faster, better.” It was definitely more and faster, but not always better. The volume of resources moving through the system—both those used to power processes and those used as materials in production—increased dramatically. For example, in 1850, U.S. coal production was just under 8.5 million tons; by 1900 it increased to 270 million tons; and by 1918, it had reached 680 million tons.182 A frontier mentality reigned: there would always be more forests to cut, more valleys in which to dump the waste. It seemed that there was no need even to think about limits back then.
Yet despite using more natural resources and making more Stuff faster, we needed less human labor. This raised a dilemma: if factories kept all the workers and introduced these new output-increasing machines, they would soon be producing more Stuff than people would need. (Economists call this overproduction, when production outpaces consumption.) There were two options: to ramp up consumption (more Stuff) or slow down production (more leisure). As I’ll explain fully in the upcoming chapter on consumption, at that juncture America’s business and political leaders unequivocally chose more Stuff.
The next wave of major change came in the early to middle twentieth century. This time it was on the materials front, as scientists began developing a whole new set of chemical compounds that hadn’t previously existed. Many naturally occurring materials were replaced with synthetic petrochemicals. The volume and toxicity of chemical compounds used in production skyrocketed.
Of course the Industrial Revolution and modern synthetic chemistry have benefited us. I appreciate many things in my life that wouldn’t have been possible without them. Refrigeration. A heated home. Medicine. The Internet. A tiny little device that brings music wherever I go. I don’t want to do without these things and I don’t want others to either. But it’s time for another set of advances—another