THE STORY OF STUFF
Page 1
Praise for
The Story of Stuff
“Annie Leonard occupies a unique, vital place in the pantheon of leading social and political thinkers in American society today. Better than anyone before, she is able to explain, with simplicity, humor, and verve, the intrinsic problems of an economic system that destroys the Earth while delivering social and economic chaos. This is must reading for anyone seeking to grasp the interlocking crises of our time, what to do about them, and how to talk about them with others. An educational and organizing tool of the utmost importance.”
—Jerry Mander, founder, Distinguished Fellow, the International Forum on Globalization, and author of In the Absence of the Sacred: Failure of Technology and The Case Against the Global Economy—And for a Turn Toward the Local
“Annie Leonard has a gift for teaching without preaching. The Story of Stuff is a brilliant and heartwarming book, a much-needed burst of energy directed toward solutions that stands out in a field of dire facts and laborious explanations about the state of our world.”
—Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
“Annie Leonard journeys into the dark heart of consumerism and returns with a masterpiece. Part handbook, part manifesto, fact-packed and eye-opening, The Story of Stuff is essential reading for anyone concerned about the environment.”
—Alan Burdick, author of Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
“Annie Leonard has done it again! The Story of Stuff video was a huge hit with my students and my family, and I plan on sharing this amazing book with everyone I know. Leonard expertly guides us through the hard truths of our materials economy, from extraction to disposal and she offers concrete and positive alternatives every step of the way. The most important thing I learned from this book is that if we build community and focus on what really matters, we can use our collective power and imagination to change the world. Let’s get to work!”
—David Naguib Pellow, professor of sociology, University of Minnesota, and author of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago and Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice
“Many of the problems facing the world today can be traced back to how we make, consume, and toss our mountains of stuff. Annie Leonard takes us on a much-needed journey into the heart of stuff, and brings us back again with the knowledge and optimism to change our lives and our society.”
—Tim Kasser, Ph.D., professor & chair of psychology, Knox College, and author of The High Price of Materialism
“Annie Leonard’s marvelous new book could not have appeared at a better time, as people across the country (and the world), and young people in particular, grapple with the interconnected issues of consumption and our environmental, social, and economic crises. I recommend The Story of Stuff to students everywhere: it’s a must-read for anyone looking to make a profound difference.”
—Michael Maniates, professor of political science and environmental science at Allegheny College, co-editor of Confronting Consumption and The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice
“Annie Leonard’s is the rare voice who can pose fundamental questions about our economic system without alienating or frightening her audience. With The Story of Stuff, she provides not only a comprehensive look at what’s broken, but a bridge to a whole new economic, social, and environmental reality.”
—James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
“The Story of Stuff is a brilliantly argued triumph of common sense and optimism. A work of great courage, it offers the greatest possible public service: speaking truth to power. A compelling and vitally important book for our troubled times.”
—Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, professor and co-director of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism, Boston University
THE STORY OF STUFF
HOW OUR OBSESSION WITH STUFF
IS TRASHING THE PLANET,
OUR COMMUNITIES, AND OUR HEALTH
—AND A VISION FOR CHANGE
Annie Leonard
with Ariane Conrad
Free Press
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2010 by Annie Leonard
Illustrations by Ruben DeLuna and Louis Fox, Free Range Studios
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Free Press hardcover edition March 2010
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Designed by Chris Brunell, Free Range Studios
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leonard, Annie.
The story of stuff: how our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health—and a vision for change/Annie Leonard with Ariane Conrad.
p. cm.
1. Material culture. 2. Personal belongings. 3. Acquisitiveness—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Consumerism (Economics)—Moral and ethical aspects.
I. Conrad, Ariane. II. Title.
GN406.L46 2010
306.4—dc22 2009042207
ISBN 978–1–4391–2566–3
ISBN 978–1–4391–4878–5 (e-book)
To Bobbie and Dewi
CONTENTS
Introduction
A Word About Words
Key to Recurring Graphics
Chapter 1: Extraction
Chapter 2: Production
Chapter 3: Distribution
Chapter 4: Consumption
Chapter 5: Disposal
Epilogue: Writing the New Story
Appendix 1: Examples of Promising Policies, Reforms, and Laws
Appendix 2: Recommended Individual Actions
Appendix 3: Sample Letter to PVC Retailers, Manufacturers, and Lobbyists
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
How We Made This Book
Index
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION
Growing up in the green and luscious city of Seattle during the 1970s was idyllic, but the real joy came in the summertime, when my family and I piled our camping gear into our station wagon and headed for the stunning North Cascades mountains. Since this was in the days before DVD players in the backseats, during the drive I’d look out the window and study the landscape. Each year I noticed that the mini-malls and houses reached a bit farther, while the forests started a bit later and got a bit smaller. Where were my beloved forests going?
I found my answer to that question some years later in New York City, of all places. The Barnard College campus where I went for my environmental studies classes was on West 116th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and my dorm room was on West 110th Street. Every morning I groggily trudged up those six blocks, staring at the mounds of garba
ge that line New York City’s streets at dawn each day. Ten hours later, I walked back to my dorm along the emptied sidewalks. I was intrigued. I started poking around to see what was in those never-ending piles of trash. Guess what? It was mostly paper.
Paper! That’s where my trees were ending up. (In fact, about 40 percent of municipal garbage in the United States is paper products.1) From the forests I knew in the Pacific Northwest to the sidewalks of the Upper West Side to... where?
My curiosity was sparked. I couldn’t stop there; I needed to find out what happened after the paper disappeared from the curb. So I took a trip to the infamous Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Covering 4.6 square miles, Fresh Kills was one of the largest dumps in the world. When it was officially closed in 2001, some say the stinking mound was the largest man-made structure on the planet, its volume greater than that of the Great Wall of China, and its peaks 80 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.2
I had never seen anything like Fresh Kills. I stood at its edge in absolute awe. As far as I could see in every direction were trashed couches, appliances, cardboard boxes, apple cores, clothes, plastic bags, books, and tons of other Stuff. You know how a gory car crash scene makes you want to turn away and stare at the same time? That is what this dump was like. I’d been raised by a single mother of the post-Depression era who instilled in her kids a sense of respect for quality, not quantity. Partly from her life philosophy and partly out of economic necessity, my youth was shaped along the lines of the World War II saying: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” There just wasn’t a lot of superfluous consumption and waste going on in our house. We savored the things we had and took good care of them and kept them until every last drop of usefulness was gone.
So the mountains of perfectly good materials that had been reduced to muck at Fresh Kills made no sense to me. It felt terribly wrong. Who set up this system? How could those who knew about it allow it to continue? I didn’t understand it, but I vowed to figure it out. After two decades of sleuthing, when I’d figured it out, I called it the Story of Stuff.
Interconnections
The Story of Stuff journey took me around the world—on research and community organizing missions for Greenpeace, Essential Action, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), and other environmental organizations—not only to more dumps but also to mines, factories, hospitals, embassies, universities, farms, World Bank offices, and the halls of government. I stayed with families in Indian villages so isolated that my arrival would be greeted by desperate parents running up to me asking “Are you a doctor?” hoping I happened to be the international medic—on her annual visit—who would be able to cure their child. I met entire families who lived on garbage dumps in the Philippines, Guatemala, and Bangladesh and who survived on the food and material scraps they pulled from the stinking, smoldering heaps. I visited shopping malls in Tokyo and Bangkok and Las Vegas that were so big and bright and plastic that I felt like I was in The Jetsons or Futurama.
Everywhere I went, I kept asking “why?” and digging deeper and deeper. Why were dumps so hazardous? Because of the toxics in the trash. And why were there toxics in the trashed products to begin with? Answering that question led me to learn about toxics, chemistry, and environmental health. Why were dumps so often situated in lower-income communities where people of color live and work? I started learning about environmental racism.
And why does it make economic sense to move entire factories to other countries: how can they still sell the product for a couple of dollars when it’s traveling so far? Suddenly I had to confront international trade agreements and the influence of corporations on governmental regulations.
And another thing: why are electronics breaking so fast and why are they cheaper to replace than repair? So I learned about planned obsolescence, advertising, and other tools for promoting consumerism. On the surface, each of these topics seemed separate from the next, unconnected, and a long way from those piles of garbage on the streets of New York City or the forests of the Cascades. But it turns out they’re all connected.
The journey led me to become what people call a systems thinker. That means I believe everything exists as part of a larger system and must be understood in relation to the other parts. It’s not an uncommon framework: think about the last time you came down with a fever. You probably wondered if it was caused by a bacteria or a virus. A fever is a response to a strange element being introduced to the system that is your body. If you didn’t believe that your body was a system, you might look for a heat source underneath your hot forehead or some switch that accidentally got flipped and raised your temperature. In biology we easily accept the idea of multiple systems (e.g., circulatory, digestive, nervous) made of parts (like cells or organs), as well as the fact that those systems interact with one another inside a body.
In school we all learned about the water cycle, the system that moves water through its various states—as liquid, vapor, and solid ice—around the earth. And about the food chain, the system in which, as a simple example, plankton get eaten by small fish, which get eaten by bigger fish, which get eaten by humans. Between those two systems, the water cycle and the food chain—even though one’s inanimate and the other is made of living creatures—there’s an important interaction, as the rivers and oceans of the first provide the habitat for the creatures of the second. That brings us to an ecosystem, made up of interrelated inanimate physical parts and subsystems like rocks and water, as well as all the living parts like plants and animals. Again there are systems within systems. The earth’s biosphere—another word for the planet’s entire ecosystem—is a system that exists inside of that much larger thing that we call the solar system.
The economy functions as a system, too, which is why there can be a domino effect inside it, as when people lose their jobs and then reduce their spending, which means that factories can’t sell as much Stuff, which means that more people get laid off... which is exactly what happened in 2008 and 2009. Systems thinking as related to the economy also explains a theory like “trickle-down” economics, in which benefits like tax cuts are given to the wealthy so that they’ll invest more in businesses, which would hypothetically in turn create more jobs for the middle and lower classes. If you didn’t believe these parts (money, jobs, people across classes) operated within a system, there’d be no basis for the trickle-down theory, or for beliefs about the interplay between supply and demand. All these examples assume interrelated parts within a larger system.
Another way to say that everything exists as part of a larger system (including systems themselves) is to say everything is connected.
It’s funny: Most people’s professional paths start with a general interest that becomes increasingly specialized with years of education, training, and on-the-job implementation. There’s powerful social and professional validation for increasing specialization like this. I, however, took the opposite path: I started with a fascination—and outrage—about garbage, specifically about the bags of the Stuff piled up on New York City’s Upper West Side. After getting a degree in environmental science, I got a job with Greenpeace International, which paid me to track the destination and the impact of all the waste loaded onto ships in the United States and sent abroad. My whole job was about investigating and stopping the international dumping of waste.
I will forever be grateful to Greenpeace. Founded on the Quaker principle of bearing witness—the idea that seeing wrong-doing with our own eyes creates a moral responsibility to inform others and take action— Greenpeace provided me with a laptop computer and rudimentary training and then set me loose upon the world to bear witness to waste trafficking and tell everyone what I saw. However, like most institutions, Greenpeace divided its work into specific issue areas that left us working in silos, disconnected from one another: toxics, oceans, forests, nukes, marine ecosystems, genetically modified organisms, climate, etc. The organization cultivated a strong culture of specific expertise. F
or example, the toxics people knew a scary amount about toxics—even the interns could rattle off the molecular structures of chlorinated organic compounds and explain their environmental health impacts—and they single-mindedly pursued their issue to the exclusion of everything else. Back then, we didn’t spend much time understanding the connections between the problems we were each working so hard to solve.
In the early 1990s, I started traveling extensively to work with allies in other countries. At first, I prided myself on knowing more about international waste trafficking than anyone outside my team at Greenpeace. But the more I traveled, the more I realized how much I didn’t know and didn’t understand. I was initially shocked by the scope of work that I found others doing, in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Haiti, and South Africa, for example. I met dozens of people who worked on a whole jumble of issues altogether: water and forests and energy and even women’s issues and international trade. At first, I assumed that they had to cover so many issues because they were short staffed; I felt sorry for them having to do the jobs of multiple people while I had the luxury of devoting all my attention to one issue. After a while, I had a revelation: all those issues are interconnected. As I kept unraveling the strings of connections, I realized that garbage—or any single problem, for that matter—can’t be solved in isolation. Focusing so exclusively on a single issue wasn’t helping me; in fact it was retarding my ability to understand the context of the issue of garbage, to see the Big Picture. Learning about other issues wouldn’t distract from my progress, it would enable breakthroughs.
And so it was that I went from poking in bags of garbage to examining the global systems of production and consumption of manufactured goods, or what academics call the materials economy. That means I cross back and forth between two disciplines that the modern world usually sees as not only sharply divided but at total odds with each other: the environment (or ecology) and the economy. But guess what? Not only are these two systems connected, one is actually a subsystem of the other, the same way that earth’s ecosystem is a subsystem of the solar system.