June 5th, 2008
The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard
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The Story of Stuff is a fascinating twenty minute documentary, written by environmentalist Anni Leonard and produced by Free Range Studios.
Annie starts off by throwing away her iPod in a trash can (really!) and asking if we have ever wondered where all the stuff we buy comes from and where it goes when we throw it out. Then, using a funny stand up script backed up by simple animation, she explains why the text book version that our stuff simply moves from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal doesn’t work: it is a linear system and we live on a finite planet and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.
The 20 minute documentary is divided into seven sections or chapters, and you can watch it on the website or on YouTube (Introduction, Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, Disposal and Another Way). You can also download the movie, download an annotated script, and learn how to host a screening of the movie at your house party.
The chapter I was most interested in was, of course, the one on consumption –
Annie talks about how our economy is designed to force us to consume more. Governments do it by allowing corporations to externalize costs and exhorting citizens to be good consumers. Corporations do it by the stratagems of planned obsolescence (through product design) and perceived obsolescence (through advertising). The result is that all of us end up running around in circles on a work-watch-spend treadmill, which sucks out our time and energy and leaves us less happy than ever before.
Over the next few days, I’ll be reading through Annie’s comprehensive list of resources and returning to some of these themes. In the meanwhile, I strongly recommend that you spend twenty minutes today watching The Story of Stuff.
