The Story of STUFF - An Interview with Annie Leonard by Daphne Carpenter
Today I learned that 2,000 trees are cut down every minute in the majestic Amazon forest. When I read this statement, it felt like my soul was being violently struck. I even held my breath for a moment. Have you ever been in a rainforest?
The forest is its own mystical realm, ready and more-than-willing to teach you about your ancestral self and the magic of nature. The feeling of being in it is like no other; it’s indescribable. Through the heavenly rainforest flows an endless stream of life-force energy. It’s as if we are passing through a supernatural portal that opens up into what seems to be something higher.
The natives who care for Mother Earth in these forests do so with a tenderness that goes beyond words. However, according to the corporate world, these people, the keepers of the forest, do not have inherent rights to it—the ones with the money do.
Meanwhile, we, the ones reading this “holistic” magazine, consider ourselves to be conscious, right? We recycle, we bring our stylish re-useable bags to the grocery store with us; we might ride our bikes, practice yoga, and do what we can to leave less of a footprint. But let’s face it, we’re all part of this system and we’re all to blame. To fuel the market economy that we live in, we need to cut down forests, invade other peoples’ lands, dump toxic wastes into the water, and then eventually throw our unused, and now out-dated crap into landfills, where it’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
Annie Leonard, the creator of The Story of Stuff video, which has received worldwide acclaim and has been translated into more than 40 languages (and has subsequently been banned in some U.S. schools), shared with Vision Magazine details about her crusade to do what she can to help Mother Earth, and to inform the public about where all of our technological (and other) trash eventually ends up.
In the video Leonard provides cold hard facts about what she considers to be a crisis. After spending more than 10 years traveling the planet and visiting industrial waste sites and dumps, she now shares with us what she’s learned in this 21 minute presentation.
The Story of Stuff brings our attention to the exploitation of natural resources (blowing up mountains to get metal, deforestation) and reminds us how these unkind activities fuel our consumer economy. We also learn about ominous landfills, which are, as Leonard says, “difficult to comprehend the scale of.”
This video is a wake-up call and a must-see for those of us who don’t wish to remain in the dark about the destruction of the planet.
Vision Magazine: What was your inspiration for making The Story of Stuff?
Annie Leonard: I grew up in Seattle—at that time a green and luscious city. My family would go camping every summer. Since this was in the days before DVDs were played to numbed little passengers, in the backseats of cars, I’d look out the window, studying the landscape, for the whole drive. Each year, I noticed that the stores and strip malls extended a bit further out and the forests started a bit later than the previous year. I wondered where all those forests were going. I wondered how I could stop them from going away entirely.
It turned out to be fortuitous that I went to college in New York City, even though at the time it seemed an odd place to go for environmental studies. The college campus was on 116th street and my dorm room was on 110th street. Every morning I would groggily walk those six blocks, staring at the piles of garbage that line New York City’s streets every dawn. Ten hours later, I’d walk back to my dorm, staring at the empty sidewalks.
I became increasingly intrigued with this microcosm of materials flow. My curiosity got the best of me and I started looking into the trash each morning to see what was in those never-ending piles. It was mostly paper. Paper! That is where my beloved forests were ending up. In the United States, 42 percent of industrial wood harvest is used to make paper and about 40 percent of the stuff in municipal garbage is paper, all of which is recyclable or compostable if it hasn’t been treated with too many toxic chemicals.
VM: And where do all those “cut trees” end up?
AL: Once I realized that those morning trash piles were nearly half paper—were once forests—I was determined to find out where they were going. So I took a trip to the infamous Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. Covering 4.6 square miles (12 square km), Fresh Kills is one of the largest dumps in the world. When it was officially closed in 2001, some say its volume was greater than that of the Great Wall of China and its peaks 25 meters taller than the Stature of Liberty. I had never seen anything like it. I stood at its edge in absolute awe.
As far as I could see, in every direction, were couches, refrigerators, boxes, apple cores, used clothes—stuff. You know how a gory car crash scene makes us want to turn away and stare at the same time? That is what it was like. I just couldn’t comprehend this massive mountain of materials, reduced to muck, by a system obviously out of control. I knew this was terribly wrong. I didn’t understand both how we could have developed a system based on such rapid destruction of the Earth’s resources and how it could be so well hidden. So I vowed to investigate it further and share what I learned along the way.
VM: You spent 10 years traveling the world, researching how our “stuff” gets made and eventually thrown away. What countries did you visit, and what did you see during your travels?
AL: I had the amazing good fortune to visit over 40 countries in the course of this work. I have visited Central America, Western and Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. For three years, I lived in South Asia. During my travels, I investigated the factories where our stuff is made and the dumps where it is dumped. I met workers and activists and community residents. I attended conferences and strategy meetings. I visited infamous places like Bhopal, India, the site of the largest chemical industrial disaster in history and Gonaives, Haiti, where ash from a U.S. municipal waste incinerator was disguised as fertilizer and dumped on a beach.
VM: What is the work-watch-spend treadmill?
AL: The average American (“United States-ian”) is working longer days, watching TV for more hours and spending more time and money shopping than he did in previous decades. Many analysts say that we have less leisure time than we did in feudal society. And guess what the top activities are that we spend our scant leisure time on? Watching TV and shopping! At the same time, we’re spending less time with our kids, less time in community and less time engaged in civil society activities than previous generations. So we are on this ridiculous work-watch-spend treadmill, where we have to work like dogs just to keep up and we’re all exhausted and stressed and not having nearly as much fun as we could have.
We’re so busy and tired that vibrant community life erodes and is less able to provide traditional community services like child care, moving assistance, friends to talk to when we’re down, rides to the airport, and entertainment and socializing. All of these things are increasingly being commodified. Ironically, this means that we have to work harder to get the money to pay for these things, which leaves us even more depleted. It is a treadmill that requires us to run faster and faster just to stay in place.
VM: What’s the most important thing we can do to green our homes?
AL: Here in the United States, much of our consumption is based on our relative perception of “enough.” That means we tend to evaluate whether or not we have enough based on what others have. There’s lots of evidence that the more TV we watch; the more of those ad-packed fashion magazines we read and the more we compare ourselves to higher-consumptive neighbors and co-workers, the less adequate we feel with the stuff we have. It is a destructive pattern yet most of us subject ourselves to it at some level, without even being aware of it. So, I think the most important green item that we can bring into our homes is an internal yardstick of satisfaction. If we can learn to evaluate our stuff based on a sense of sufficiency, rather than the latest commercials we watched, we would be easier on ourselves and the planet.
But if you’re asking about actual stuff one can bring home, often the greenest stuff means less stuff. Buying less, buying local and buying secondhand all can help the planet (and our budgets, which helps reduce our stress).
The two “green” items that I most enjoy, and which are within the budgets of everyone, are my clothesline and my worm bin. These are inexpensive, simple things—easily made rather than bought—which help green my daily life.
I love my clothesline, not just because it allowed me to avoid replacing my ancient dryer when it broke last year, but because it reaches across my luscious green garden which I too often don’t take the time to enjoy in my hectic life.
I also love my worm bins. If worms aren’t your thing, a regular compost bin will do.
VM: What do you personally do to reduce, reuse and salvage?
AL: My first preference when I need something is to borrow it. My neighbors and I share everything from cars to gardening tools to sporting equipment. I like sharing since it requires that we talk to each other too, which helps build our social fabric and community strength.
If it is something I want or need to own myself, or if it’s my turn to provide something to share, I try to buy secondhand items, not just because I get what I need without adding to the upstream waste, but also because I can afford higher quality items which last longer.
Over the past 15 years, my close friends and I have bought six houses on the same block. We have taken down the fences and we share big yards. Our backdoors are open so that we can borrow milk or sugar in the middle of a baking project. We share gardening tools, grills, outdoor tables, a swing set and tree house. We dine together outside in the summer and inside in the rain. We watch out for each other, cheer each other on during good times and provide comfort during the rough patches. Paul Hawken has said that “working for the environment is not a way to get rich; it is a way to be rich.” I feel the same about living in community. Our houses are not grand but our community is.
VM: What’s the best way to educate people about environmental issues?
AL: I like Saul Alinsky’s famous advice to “talk to people where they’re at, not where you’re at.” That’s really key—especially for those of us who spend a lot of time studying environmental facts. The statistics are grim, scary, and intimidating. But fear and guilt are not powerful motivators; they don’t leave people feeling resourceful and inspired.
So, I recommend first listening to people, finding out what their concerns are and then starting a conversation which relates environmental issues to their lives and their concerns. This way, each of us can better understand our connections to environmental issues, rather than perceiving them as abstract and distant things that only affect polar bears and residents of low lying islands.
The wonderful, late, environmental justice leader Dana Alston defined the environment as “where we live, work and play.” For some people, hearing about tropical rainforest destruction will move them to action. For others, figuring out how to shut down the smokestack that is giving their kids asthma will be a more immediate concern. One of the good things about such an all-pervasive problem is that there are infinite entry points to the issue; we need to find the entry points which are relevant and rewarding for each of us.
Daphne is sensitive person who is saddened to know that the rainforests are being destroyed. What will happen to all the creatures who live there? What will happen to us? You can find more information at www.thestoryofstuff.com and you can read Daphne’s blog about child homelessness in Brazil at www.sublimeadventures.blogspot.com