The (continuing) Story of Stuff

Just passing along a video I found recently and thought was interesting. It’s the sort of thing you might have forwarded to you from your mother’s white-haired socialist friend. Or hear about from the kids you babysit after their young and idealistic homeroom teacher made them watch it in class. I came across it while researching for a seminar in Social Justice and Cultural Resistance. The message is pretty simple: capitalist consumption makes a huge mess. “Your neighbour in the suburbs” narrator, Annie Leonard, is accompanied by cute animations that make her straightforward and driven monologue easy to understand and be moved by.

Watch The Story of Stuff

YouTube video responses are often pretty unwatchable, but here’s a video response to The Story of Stuff that I’d recommend. After seeing the video in their Global Issues Class, a group of high school kids at Woodside Priory School filmed a short response in which they express their frustration at Annie’s not offering more concrete solutions to the serious problems outlined in her film. The video is funny, nicely shot, and captures the feeling of being in high school and wanting to ACT on the issues you hear about.

Annie commented:

I love, love, love this video! It’s fantastic. I showed it to all my friends.

I wrote you guys an email answering your specfic questions and sharing some thoughts about what is needed to make change, but YouTube says it is too long to post here or to send you as a private email, so I am posting on the StoryofStuff blog. Please check it out and let’s keep talking.

Then on her blog:

I intentionally didn’t include specific recommendations for action for a couple reasons:
1) the solutions don’t lend themselves to sound bites and
2) I don’t want to prescribe and limit the actions each viewer may choose to do.

In their film, the students parody me saying “it’s complicated.” Well, that’s the truth. Neither the problems nor the solutions are simple or easy. If we want to change the situation we’re in, we’ve got to be willing to spend time figuring all this out.

I didn’t want to lay out this massive critique of the interconnected environmental and social problems of our current global materials economy and then belittle both viewers and the diversity and breadth of the solutions by providing a pre-determined concise list of simple action steps [...]

As I said in the film, one of the good things about such an all pervasive problem is that there are so many points of intervention. We each need to find that intervention that matches our skill set and our passions. The passion piece is key, because it is going to be a long haul and we need to rely on our passions, the fire in our bellies for change, to see us through. So, I advised the students to find something that they feel passionate about and dive in.

Read the whole post here.

If you wanna follow up with some reading, the archive search on Rachel.org is a good place to find tonsssss of articles on sustainability. And for some practical thoughts on environmental artmaking from Fixture, visit this post.

How does art fit into capitalist production? I wonder.