I was researching consumerism this week, and came across a great video with Annie Leonard, called “The Story of Stuff”. It was produced in 2007 to track the “materials economy”. Leonard spent from 1988 to 2006 travelling to over 35 countries and investigating where our stuff comes from and where it goes. If you look up how the materials economy works, it goes like this: extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. If only it were that simple! According to Leonard, this equation is very incomplete because the interaction with our actual world is not accounted for, neither are the people who live and work along the entire chain. (Which is everyone in the world.) To start with, governments should be looking out for us, since we elect them, and trust/assume that they are. However, the government parties need the big corporations to back them so they can stay in government, and those corporations end up having more influence on government decisions and policies.
The first part of the chain is extraction. We use and exploit our natural resources to create most of our stuff. However, we are running out of those resources. Leonard refers to a book by Paul Hawken et al. titled “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution” which states “in the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s resources, its ‘natural wealth,’ has been consumed.” We are clearing trees, mining, and generally trashing the world so fast, it is unable to keep up with renewing itself. Our own self-destruction will be inevitable in approximately fifty or sixty more years if we keep proceeding at this rate. Leonard says the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but is consuming 30% of the world’s resources. And since they are using more than their share, they are taking resources away from third world countries with little regard to how this affects the people living in those countries. Large corporations have the money and power to take over extracting the resources because the people in these smaller countries don’t have the means to fight back. The people are exploited because they don’t have the money or power that is needed, and end up having to work for, or move or change to accommodate, those corporations.
On top of exploiting people, the corporations are creating toxic products from the natural resources they are extracting. According to Leonard, “there are over 10,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today.” The natural resources are mixed with toxic chemicals to create plastics and other products. Unfortunately, we also can’t avoid those toxic chemicals from entering our bodies (not to mention the effects they have on the factory workers.) A lot of those products also create pollution as they are being made, releasing more toxins into our atmosphere.
Next in the equation comes distribution. Leonard says “the goal here is to keep the prices down, keep the people buying and keep the inventory moving.” To do this, manufacturers externalize the costs. All along the system, the cost to make cheap merchandise is paid by all of the people who have been effected by the materials economy system. People pay with the loss of their natural resources, loss of clean air, loss of income, and loss of education (they need to work to survive), etc. Those costs are not accounted for when we buy that $2.99 plastic container.
Even more scarier is the fact that consumption is what drives this whole system in the first place. We need to keep consuming, because that is how we have come to be identified as being happy and successful. Our value is created by our ability to contribute to consumption. We shop and replace our stuff for newer and better because manufacturers have us believing it is necessary to be the person with the most value to be happy.
Another number Leonard refers to is that only ONE PERCENT of the stuff created in this system is actually in use six months after we’ve purchased it. That means the other NINETY-NINE PERCENT ends up as trash. After the second world war, the economy was elevated by pushing consumer goods and production. The consumer demand occurs with the use of planned and perceived obsolescence – my biggest pet peeve of abandonment. Planned obsolescence means the manufacturers make stuff that is designed to brake as quickly as possible. I am not joking. (One of the installations I was thinking about was to create something out of all of the headphones my boys have gone through in the past year or so.) Perceived obsolescence is used to convince the consumer to throw away something that is still perfectly useful. For example, they change the look of something so the consumer believes to stay happy, they have to keep up with the newest, latest, greatest. I-phone 7 anyone?
Unfortunately, this all turns into a horrible cycle of work, spend, repeat. During our ever-decreasing leisure time we are in undated with commercials to buy more stuff. Let’s stop the madness!
Hawken, Paul, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism: Creating the next Industrial Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and, 1999.
This book refers to the need for the creation of another Industrial Revolution. Because of current society’s practices, we are wasting the earth’s precious resources, some of which are irreplaceable. The authors describe Natural Capitalism as a new business model to create the opportunities necessary to revamp current manufacturing processes and business practices. Some of the key principles they outline include increasing the productivity of natural resources, shifting to biologically inspired production models, reinvest in natural capital and moving to a “service-and-flow” business model. In the service-and-flow model, value is provided as a continuous flow of services, rather than as a perceived way to gain happiness.
Pitman, Sheryn D., and Christopher B. Daniels. "Quantifying Ecological Literacy in an Adult Western Community: The Development and Application of a New Assessment Tool and Community Standard." Plos ONE 11, no. 3 (March 3, 2016): 1-18. Food Science Source, EBSCOhost (accessed October 27, 2016). doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0150648.
This paper speaks of the essential need for ecological literacy to create and sustain successful current and future societies. The relationship between human communities and the impact they have on natural ecosystems, which is described as key to sustainability in our current world, is surveyed in this paper. Because knowledge in the natural world has diminished, and less people have ecological literacy, we have to bring back the awareness of the need to understand ecological systems so we can live more sustainably on Earth.
