THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  As lawyer and former presidential advisor Gus Speth wrote in his book The Bridge at the End of the World, “Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates... My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today, and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism.”18

  Yet, in the United States, we’re still hesitant to broach this unmentionable subject, fearful of being labeled unpatriotic, unrealistic, or insane. Elsewhere in the world, there’s a widespread recognition that some aspects of capitalism aren’t working well for the majority of the world’s people or for the planet; people talk about it openly. Michael Cohen, Lecturer in American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, says that’s because in other countries capitalism is seen as one option among many, whereas in the United States it’s considered an inevitability.19

  Can we put capitalism on the table and talk about it with the same intellectual rigor that we welcome for other topics? Can we examine the failures of capitalism without falling into generations-old stereotypes and without being accused of being un-American? Refusing to talk about it doesn’t make the problems disappear. I believe the best way to honor our country is to point out when it’s going astray, instead of sit here silently as many economic, environmental, and social indices worsen. Now would be a good time to start looking at what we could do differently, and what we could do better.

  Take the Red Pill

  The belief that infinite economic growth is the best strategy for making a better world has become like a secular religion in which all our politicians, economists, and media participate; it is seldom debated, since everyone is supposed to just accept it as true. People who challenge capitalism or growth are considered wackos, or as a recent article in U.S. News & World Report put it, “The growing anti-economic-growth movement [is] made up of extreme environmentalists, hand-wringing technophobes, and turn-back-the-clock globalization bashers...”20 Even while taking over the reigns of a country steeped in social, environmental, and economic problems, during a troubled time ripe for the adoption of alternative strategies, President Obama and his team promised over and over that economic growth would return. The U.S. Treasury’s $800 billion rescue package to stabilize financial markets in late 2008 was to protect this sacred idea of economic growth, and by 2009, Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic czar Larry Summers, and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke had committed an estimated $13 trillion of public funds to bailing out Wall Street and kick-starting economic growth again.

  What gives? Why are so few people willing to challenge, or even critically discuss, an economic model that so clearly isn’t serving the planet and the majority of its people? I think one reason is that the economic model is nearly invisible to us.

  “Paradigm” may be an off-putting word, but it’s an important concept when considering different ways of organizing our economy and our society. A paradigm is like a framework, or like the operating system of a computer. It’s made up of the dominant set of assumptions, values, and ideas that make up how a society views reality. It’s our worldview. After a while we tend to forget that we’re viewing the world through the paradigm, like it’s a pair of contact lenses. “Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm,” said prominent systems analyst Donella Meadows.21

  You’re more likely to notice aspects of the paradigm when you view a culture from the outside. For example, living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for five months in the mid-1990s provided me with many opportunities to see another culture’s norms and also see my own from a new perspective. While there I lived in a house full of Bangladeshis and worked in an organization composed of Bangladeshis; there were no other westerners around. At first my housemates and co-workers were warm and friendly, but after about a week, they cooled toward me. I kept asking people if I had done something to offend them but got no response until one woman who had lived in the United States explained that I had insulted them by not going to their homes for dinner. “But they haven’t invited me,” I protested. She told me that I had to just go and show up at their homes at dinnertime and invite myself in.

  Growing up in the United States, I never went to someone’s house for dinner unless I was invited by them. In the back of my head was the understanding that it is rude to go to someone’s house at dinnertime and expect to be fed without an invitation. “That’s impolite,” I told the woman. “No it isn’t,” she said. “Where you come from that is impolite. Not here.” It was a simple thing, but it made me think. I started a mental inventory of all the beliefs, values, and concepts that I considered the truth without having ever questioned them: I started unpacking my paradigm.

  Paradigms are so pervasive and invisible that they can be easily mistaken for truth. When this happens, we limit our creativity in finding solutions to the problems we face, since our thinking is cramped and predefined by society’s dominant framework. For example, if your culture believes the earth is flat, you’re unlikely to explore what lies beyond the horizon. If your paradigm views nature as a reservoir of supplies intended for meeting humanity’s needs, you treat nature very differently than if your paradigm holds nature as a sacred, complex system of which humans are just one part. If your framework says that economic growth is the key to ending poverty and bringing about happiness, then you protect growth at all costs even when it makes many people poorer and less happy.

  Unfortunately many organizations and political leaders working to improve environmental and social conditions operate unquestioningly from within the paradigm. However, to paraphrase Einstein, problems cannot be solved from within the same paradigm in which they were created. A prime example is the cap and trade approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In this scenario, private companies are permitted to sell their “right” to pollute to other companies, which can then pollute more, in the belief that the free hand of the market will find the most efficient opportunities for greenhouse gas reductions. But viewing pollution as a “right” and relying on the market to solve environmental problems reinforces the very paradigm that got us into this mess. In a different paradigm, human health and ecological survival would be paramount, and industrial activities that undermine these goals would be prohibited outright. The right to clean air and a healthy climate would trump the right to pollute.

  Before we can change a paradigm, we need to identify it as a paradigm rather than assume it is truth. In the film The Matrix, the dominant paradigm is the simulated reality that was created by machines in order to subdue the human population while their bodies’ heat and electromagnetic activity are used as energy sources for the machines. The first thing that the band of rebels led by Morpheus does is “unplug”: they take the red pill to see the Matrix for what it is. I believe that examining the hidden impacts of all the Stuff in our lives is a way to unplug, which is the first step toward changing things.

  Donella Meadows worked for years to identify the leverage points where a “small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”22 Over time she developed a hierarchy of leverage points, from those that make incremental but immediate change to those that can fundamentally change the entire system. At the top of the hierarchy is challenging and changing a paradigm itself, because a shift in the paradigm immediately changes everything.23 For me, this fact is a huge source of hope and optimism. Although changing a paradigm can take generations, it can also happen in a second, when a person suddenly sees things in a new light, as I did standing aside the Fresh Kills landfill.

  The Story of Stuff

  My journeys led me to realize that the issue of garbage was related to the whole of the materials economy: to the extraction of natur
al resources, like mining and logging; to the chemistry labs and the factories where Stuff was designed and produced; to the international warehouses and stores where Stuff was shipped and trucked and then stuck with impossibly low price tags; to the clever television advertisements created with the help of psychologists to hook a consumer’s attention. I learned about international financial and trade institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; corporations like Chevron, Wal-Mart, and Amazon; indigenous tribes protecting rainforests in Ecuador, seamstresses making Disney nightgowns in Haiti, the Ogoni fighting Shell in Nigeria, communities along Cancer Alley in Louisiana, and cotton-field laborers in Uzbekistan—and all of these processes and institutions and communities turned out to be part of the same story! As environmental economist Dr. Jeffrey Morris explained when I asked about true cost accounting for my laptop, “Take any item and trace back to its true origins, and you find it takes the whole economy to make anything.”24

  As I pieced together the whole trajectory of the dysfunctional system, I discovered a number of different groups approaching these issues from many different angles. There are the super serious “wonks” in the fields of science, economics, or policy, armed with their true yet terrifying statistics and facts which, unfortunately, tend to inspire panic and despair that shuts people down as opposed to motivating them to take action. Then there are shrill voices waggling their fingers at bad consumers, relying on guilt to motivate mass change in resource consumption, rarely with much success. There are the downshifters, those who voluntarily live simply, unplugging from commercial culture, working and buying less. While they can effectively model a way to live besides take-make-waste, they’re largely unable to get cultural traction beyond their communities. Similar to those who believe that technological improvements will save us, there are the conscious-consumption folks, who believe if we just provide enough of a market for greener products and processes, if we buy this instead of that, all will be well. (Those are the ones who inevitably ask at the end of my presentation, “OK, so what should I buy?”) There are also green designers, working to make our products and homes safer while they’re still in the idea stage. And of course there are all the activists and campaigners working on their issue of choice, as I did for many years.

  For my part, I wanted to figure out how to talk about the materials economy and its underlying paradigm of economic growth by drawing on the best from each of the existing approaches and encouraging a broader systems perspective but without getting bogged down in technical jargon, guilt, or despair.

  My goal with this book (and the film upon which it’s based) is to unpack the Story of Stuff—the flow of materials through the economy—as simply as possible. My aim is never to make you feel guilty (unless you are the head of Chevron, Dow Chemical, Disney, Fox News, Halliburton, McDonald’s, Shell, or the World Bank); it should be clear that the fundamental problem I identify here is not individual behavior and poor lifestyle choices, but the broken system—the deadly take-make-waste machine. I hope reading the Story helps inspire you to share information with people in your life about issues like toxics in cosmetics, the problems with incineration and recycling, and the flaws in the IMF’s economic policies. I do my best to explain or just avoid the technical jargon of fields like chemistry, supply chain theory, and trade policies, which too often excludes people from this critical conversation.

  In the face of so many tough challenges, there are many exciting and hopeful developments that I celebrate in these pages and that I see as steps toward a truly sustainable ecological-economic system. Above all, I invite the citizen in you to become louder than the consumer inside you and launch a very rich, very loud dialogue within your community.

  A few points of clarification:

  1. I’m not against Stuff.

  In fact, I’m pro-Stuff! I want us to value our Stuff more, to care for it, to give it the respect it deserves. I want us to recognize that each thing we buy involved all sorts of resources and labor. Someone mined the earth for the metals in your cell phone; someone unloaded the bales from the cotton gin for your T-shirt. Someone in a factory assembled that pair of sunglasses, and they might have been exposed to carcinogens or forced to work overtime. Someone drove or flew this bouquet around the country or the world to get it to you. We need to understand the true value of our Stuff, far beyond the price tag and far beyond the social status of ownership. Stuff should be long-lasting, made with the pride of an artisan and cared for accordingly.

  Like most average Americans, I have plenty of Stuff and I battle clutter. However, I do try to avoid buying Stuff, especially new Stuff, that I don’t need. I buy furniture, kitchenware, sporting equipment, and just about everything I can from secondhand sources, which prevents new waste from being made during production. That also allows me to buy higher quality, longer-lasting Stuff than I could afford if buying it new. And then I take good care of it. I get my shoes resoled; I mend my clothes; I bring in my bike from the rain so it will last as absolutely long as possible.

  2. I’m not romanticizing poverty.

  When I point out the flaws in our overconsumptive U.S. lifestyle and praise the slower-paced and less materialistic countries that I’ve visited, I am not romanticizing poverty. Poverty is a wretched and intolerable reality, an outcome of the broken economic model that maldistributes resources. I don’t wish that kind of existence for anybody, ever. I once visited an Indian boarding school that had just lost half a dozen kids to malaria, where I realized the medicine that could have saved them costs less than I pay for a cup of coffee at home. For those kids, and others without enough food, medicine, shelter, schools, and other basic goods, more money and more Stuff definitely helps. But once our basic needs are met, it’s been proven that a focus on getting more and more Stuff actually undermines happiness. (See chapter 4 on consumption for details.)

  In the United States we work more hours than folks in almost any other industrialized country in the world, and two of our main activities in our scant leisure time are TV watching and shopping. So we go to work, come home exhausted, and plop down in front of the TV; the commercials tell us we need new Stuff to feel better about ourselves, so we go shopping; and in order to pay for it all, we have to work even more. I call this the work-watch-spend treadmill.

  What I’m appreciating about countries that aren’t as stuck on this treadmill as the United States has nothing to do with poverty. Instead, I admire societies where people work fewer hours, are guaranteed longer vacations, watch less TV, spend more time with their friends and neighbors... and waste less of their energy on Stuff. You could even say I romanticize that lifestyle: I’m OK with that.

  3. I’m not bashing the United States.

  There are some sweet things about life in the United States. Many of the technological advances and consumer options we have here have added to our quality of life. But after having traveled to forty countries, I also know that there are places from which we could learn a thing or two. I’m envious of my friends in Europe who aren’t stressed about how to pay for their health care or their university education. I wish we had subway systems as clean, quiet, and prompt as the ones in Seoul and Montreal. I wish it was as pleasurable and safe to bike in U.S. cities as it is in the Netherlands. I wish our rates of obesity, diabetes, and other health problems weren’t topping the charts. I don’t believe it is U.S. bashing to point out that we’re losing ground on some serious quality of life issues. On the contrary, I think it’s patriotic to express a desire to aim higher and fix what’s not working. I think of it as a tribute to my country’s incredible potential.

  A WORD ABOUT WORDS

  Americans:

  The Americas are, of course, far larger than the United States, including Canada, the Caribbean, and all of Latin America to our south. I’m therefore aware that it’s inaccurate to refer to the citizens and residents of the United States as “Americans.” But using “citizens and residents of the United States
” repeatedly is a mouthful. Another term, états-unisians (French for “United Statesian”) is catching on in international circles but hasn’t made it to our own shores yet. So, with apologies to folks in the rest of the Americas, I use the word in this book to mean that mouthful: people living here in the United States. Similarly, all amounts given in dollars ($) refer to U.S. dollars.

  Consumer/Consumption:

  The word “consume” originally meant to destroy, as by fire or disease, to squander, to use up. That’s where the old-fashioned term for the disease tuberculosis, “consumption,” came from. That means that a consumer society is a society of destroyers and squanderers. No thank you.

  Michael Maniates, a professor of political science and environmental science at Allegheny College, says perhaps we should rename most of what goes on in various life stages of Stuff—extraction, production, even distribution—and call it all consumption.1 When we cut down a virgin forest to make disposable wooden chopsticks, wrapping them in paper and then burning fossil fuel to ship them halfway around the world, aren’t all those processes, not really production but simply consumption, aka destruction? Yes. In fact, when we talk about national rates of resource consumption, all those things such as how much wood or oil the United States consumes, are included.

  However, in the chapter in this book on consumption, I am using the common definition, focusing on the slice of consumption that involves consumers purchasing and using Stuff.