Here is something to think about. Where do your material goods come from? Where do they go when you’re done with them? And what goes on in this whole process?
Free range studios has a great video on this issue: the story of stuff. Annie Leonard has spent the last 10 years following the chain from resource extraction to waste management. Luckily for us, she’s managed to consolidate everything she’s learned in a 20-minute presentation, with accompanying graphics. It’s easy to understand, and easy to get indignant about.
Here are some highlights:
1. “Cheap” goods are not cheap. Somebody is paying for the production of that item, and it’s not usually the consumer. Instead, it’s more likely the invisible forest, mountain, miner, factory worker, garbage man, or store clerk bundled up in this opaque process. The inevitable result is an unsustainable drain on the environment, local communities, infrastructure, and your budget.
2. The government is not doing a good job looking out for you. Annie believes in “for the people, by the people”. I think we all do. But that’s not what we get, usually. With MNCs running the planet, governments do all they can to appease those interests.
3. You work as hard today as serfs did in the Middle Ages. Generally speaking, we have less leisure time than ever, except possibly those folks who worked their fingers to the bone for close to zero gain 1000 years ago. Sure, we have more stuff, but aren’t actually any happier than they were. We may even be unhappier, because we have a whole lot more to worry about than they did.
4. You’ve been brainwashed. Commercials exist to tell you that your life is unfulfilled until you go out and get the latest consumer item (in the latest model). If you don’t, you won’t be happy. Never mind that the current version you have is perfectly fine - it’s nothing compared to the newest version, and all your friends know it. In business, they call this “perceived obsolescence”. There is also, of course, “planned obsolescence”, in which the item is deliberately engineered to be useless after a specified (short) amount of time. These are the twin pillars of the American economy (with the anthem being: “buy stuff! spend more! be American!”).
5. Recycling won’t save us. You could recycle everything that comes through your house, it won’t matter, because for every garbage bag-worth of stuff you save, 100-worth we used to make it (and they weren’t being recycled). In other words, the problem lies in two places: the front end of manufacturing, and the back end of demand.
6. We’re slowly killing ourselves (and taking everyone else with us). Annie doesn’t explicitly say this. But if we don’t do something to change our way of life, we’ll soon be in a lot of trouble.
7. But there’s hope! It’s not easy to change habits, but it can be done. There are so many big and little ways to do this, and maybe I can talk about that in a later post, but the main idea is simple - BUY LESS.
