THE STORY OF STUFF

Every summer when Annie Leonard’s family would drive out to camp, she would look at the landscape. She noted that the stores reached a bit further and the forests started a bit later every subsequent year. She wondered where the forests were going. Years later, while walking to her college, she would see piles of garbage line New York street’s every dawn. In the evening, she would walk back to her dorm, staring at empty sidewalks. She was increasingly intrigued with this microcosm of materials flow. She started looking into the trash to see what was in those never-ending piles. It was mostly paper. That was where the forests were ending up!

Annie took a trip to the infamous Fresh Kills landfill. Its volume was described as greater than that of the Great Wall of China. In every direction, she could see couches, refrigerators, boxes, used clothes, stuff… Annie just couldn’t comprehend the massive mountain of materials, reduced to muck, by some system obviously out of control. She knew this was terribly wrong. She vowed to figure it out. And 20 years later she did!

Annie created THE STORY OF STUFF - a 20-minute web-based documentary about the life-cycle of goods and services. She presented the critical connection between a huge number of environmental and social issues. Her thesis, "you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely" is supported throughout the documentary by statistical data. It can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

Annie explains, “Our current ways of making, using and throwing away stuff is largely based on unsustainable and unjust systems yet, as a society, we’ve got this big collective blind spot about talking about this. Let’s raise the issues, let’s ask the hard questions, let’s get it on the table and examine it and debate it and figure out together how to move forward towards solutions.” As she says in the film, one of the good things about such an all pervasive problem is that there are so many points of intervention. The world will be better if we find that intervention that matches our skill set and our passions. Like Annie did!

First we must understand and then intervene to change the story

Let’s BE BETTER at taking on stuff that makes our world gory!

- Pravin K. Sabnis