The Story of Stuff

While I don't celebrate it, Halloween is right around the corner, and my latest selection was appropriately scary, although perhaps not in a conventional sense.

Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession With Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health - And a Vision For Change pretty much summarizes the book with its title. Annie Leonard takes the reader on a journey through "stuff" ranging from food to electronics to packaging to clothing to whatever else you can think of. She looks at the 5 stages of "stuff:"

• Extraction
• This section looks at the process of gathering the raw resources needed for various items. Leonard particularly focuses in on our destruction of forests and the creation of homogenous forests of one tree species for wood and paper production. Single species forests do not support biodiversity of other living species the way a heterogenous forest does. She also shares her great concern for water usage. Weaved through this section and the next are human rights concerns. Many of our resources are gathered in questionable ways, and then are produced by people who don't make enough money to buy the items they are making - or even put food on their plates.
• Production
• Leonard focus on the process of producing and manufacturing our stuff. Her main concern is the use of natural resources and toxic chemicals in the production of far too many items. She goes on a long anti-PVC tangent, but also stresses the importance of regulating or banning other toxic substances as well.
• Distribution
• The obvious main focus here is the carbon footprint of our stuff. In America, half of our energy use is devoted to transportation, and a large chunk of that is transportation of goods. Buy local!
• Consumption
• This is the part where the average person steps into the chain. This is where we buy stuff, are manipulated to buy more, and are forced into replacing items on a frequent basis. In addition to going after big-box stores, Leonard also rails against planned obsolescence, the act of manufacturing items that will either go out of style within a year or two or will break down and stop working after a few years. Things are made cheaply so they will have to be replaced. Leonard also goes after advertisement and branding.
• Disposal
• Waste not, want not. First, we waste too much. The average American throws away an average of 4.6 pounds of trash per day!!! Almost all of this trash could be avoided in several ways. First, many items shouldn't be bought in the first place - why not lend what you need from a neighbor? Second, many items can be reused or repaired until they completely fall apart. Third, many items can be recycled or composted. Finally, if corporations would limit their waste in manufacturing and packaging, that would greatly reduce waste (they account for 76% of all waste in the U.S.). With all of this in place, the only things that would have to be specially "thrown out" would be toxic substances and infectious medical waste. Plain and simple (sort of).

I learned some interesting facts from this book, but overall there wasn't much new here for me. It's pretty much preaching to the choir. However, this collects some of the scariest real-life facts all in one place: toxic chemicals are everywhere, we're running out of natural resources, pollution is everywhere, humankind is spewing gasses into the atmosphere that are causing climate change, biodiversity is decreasing everywhere, the rainforest is disappearing, plastic never breaks down, waste is everywhere, the rich are getting rich while the poor are getting poorer to the point where millions of people are practically starving to death so that American CEOs can make millions of dollars and you and I can have our stuff for nice and cheap (and have lots of it). And that's only some of the scary "stuff"!!!!

I found this book both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because it was extremely well-written and highly researched. Frustrated because Leonard doesn't provide many solutions. She suggests many laws and regulations that should be passed, but when it comes down to personal action, she gives you very little to work with. Granted, it's not all that hard to glean the things we should be doing as individuals from these pages, but she essentially says that while individual action helps, it really takes larger-scale action to make a difference. That's kind of depressing - especially in America, where somehow super-conservatives have taken over American discourse to the inane level where over 40% of people doubt the fact that the earth is warming (let alone the fact that humans are making it worse, if not actively creating it), where corporations are defined as people, and where environmentalism is somehow seen as some nazi-socialist-communist scheme to destroy America.

Oh well...at the very least this book got me to consider a few things in my life that need to be changed. Every time I read a book like this or watch a documentary I change something about my life. I just wish that Leonard could have at least lied to me and told me that my day-to-day actions can make a big impact. Then, at the very least, I'd feel a little less defeated.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

77/100