Implications

Implications
We’ve allowed our citizen
self to be dwarfed by a
relatively new reflex action –
consume,
consume,
consume.
34 35
She is sure of one thing though: “Change is inevitable.
If you really want to understand a country, a society, or
You can’t keep using one and a half planet’s worth of
even a civilization, don’t turn to its national museums or
resources indefinitely.”
government archives. Head to the tip.
According to Annie Leonard – former Greenpeace activist,
unwavering optimist and waste obsessive – the
tip is akin to society’s secret journal. “Stuff” became a
fascination for Leonard in her teens, choosing field trips
to landfills while at university when she began to question
how we came to build an economy based purely on
resources.
That was 20 years ago, and a lot has changed. Waste
and recycling are now burning policy issues. Forty
countries, hundreds of factories and still more landfills
later , Leonard worries we have not grasped the fundamental
problem with our materials economy. “It is a
linear system and we live on a finite planet. You cannot
run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely. Too
often the environment is seen as one small piece of the
economy. But it’s not just one little thing, it’s what every
single thing in our life depends upon.”
In 2007, Leonard tried a novel medium – a YouTube
video – to convey the message. The Story of Stuff was
a frank and cleverly animated short film telling the story
of the American love affair with stuff and how it is quite
literally trashing the planet. Three years on and it’s a
viral online phenomenon; seen by 10 million people in
homes and classrooms all over the world. Now she has
followed up the video with a book of the same name.
Leonard has surprised many, though, by not actually
being against stuff. She isn’t even anti-consumption.
In fact, she feels lots of people should be consuming
more. Just not most of us in the western world who
often over-consume.
Consumption can be good, she says. “I don’t want to be
callous to the people who really do need more stuff”.
But consumerism is always bad, adding little to our
wellbeing as well as being disastrous for the planet.
“[It’s] a particular strand of overconsumption, where we
purchase things, not to fulfil our basic needs, but to fill
some voids about our lives and make social statements
about ourselves,” she explains.
“It turns out our stuff isn’t making us any happier,” she
argues. Our obsessive relationship with material things
is actually jeopardising our relationships, “Which are
proven over and over to be the biggest determining factor
in our happiness [once our basic needs are met].”
Leonard calls upon wider research to argue the sociological
and psychological consequences of our all-consuming
epidemic, including that of Tim Kasser and Robert
Putman. Kasser identified a connection between an
excessively materialistic outlook and increased levels
of anxiety and depression, while Putman argues we’re
paying the ultimate price for our consumeristic tendencies
with the loss of friendships, neighbourly support
and robust communities. Together they suggest we are
witnessing nothing short of the collapse of social fabric
across society.
Part of the problem, according to Leonard, is our confused
sense of self. We’ve allowed our citizen self to
be dwarfed by a relatively new reflex action – consume,
consume, consume. “Our consumer self is so overdeveloped
that we spend most of our time there. You
see it walking around – we usually interact with others
from our consumer self and are most spoken to as our
consumer self. The problem is that we are so comfortable
there that when we’re faced with really big problems
[like climate change], we think about what to do as
individuals and consumers: ‘I should buy this instead of
this.’
“If you’re going to vote with your dollar that’s fine,”
Leonard says. “But you need to remember that Exxon
has a lot more dollars than you. We need to vote with
our votes; re-engage with the political process and
change the balance of power so that those who are looking
out for the wellbeing of the planet dominate, instead
of those who are just looking our for the bottom line.”
Like George Monbiot, Leonard doesn’t think so-called
ethical consumption, or greensumption is going to
get us out of the problem either. “The real solution is
not perfecting your ability to choose the best option,
it’s getting that product off the shelf,” she says. “It’s
increasingly looking like buying green delays people
engaging with the political process.”
Leonard’s film has its critics. Fox News branded it “full
of misleading numbers”. And the free market and climate
sceptic think tank The Competitive Enterprise
Institute, called the project “community college Marxism
in a ponytail.” But many have found it hard to argue
Leonard doesn’t live up to her values. At her home in
California she and another five families have chosen
community over stuff, tearing down the fences between
their homes. “Its not a big deal”, she says. “We don’t
have matching clothes and its not like a commune of
anything. We are all just regular families in these six
houses [who] share things. And we just have so much
fun.”
The Story of Stuff is about America, but how is the UK
faring? Leonard does note some positive differences:
the NHS, our liberal political discourse – allowing us
to utter the words capitalism and unsustainable in the
same large breath, and she likes the fact that washing
lines are not a threatened species. One thing that does
bug Leonard about this country, though, is our pyromania.
Specifically, she’s worried about our leaders’ love
affair with waste incinerators. “It’s just so depressing.
Incinerators are such a regressive way of dealing with
waste materials. We need to promote zero waste as an
alternative.”
Zero waste is a term that gets thrown around a lot, most
recently this week by environment secretary Caroline
Spelman. For Leonard, a complete overhaul in our
approach involves a real cradle-to-cradle revolution;
marrying intelligent design upstream and consumer
incentivised recycling and composting downstream.
This may well be one of the answers, and the book provides
a few more. But Leonard doesn’t pretend to have
them all, and she’s reluctant to commit to a new economic
paradigm, either, because “we haven’t invented it
yet.”
Many have argued against the minor details of the book,
but few have questioned the fundamental premise that
our current use of resources is unsustainable. Even
fewer have doubted her optimism. “Environmentalists
need to figure out a way of talking about this stuff in a
more engaging and inviting way, and that is what I hope
I’m doing with this book.”