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Overconsumption is Costing Us the Earth and Human Happiness
Story of Stuff creator Annie Leonard's new book examines the high price of the western world's obession with all things material
If you really want to understand a country, a society, or even a
civilization, don't turn to its national museums or 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."
She is sure of one thing though: "Change is inevitable. You can't keep using one and a half planet's worth of resources indefinitely."
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."
13 Comments so far
Show AllThe population of the planet increases at three people per second.
As long as the STUFF you want includes more children and traditional family values, the problem over the finite planet continues.
Shifting stuff from here to there, removing this and adding that is not the problem.
The problem is who decides what is necessity and what is luxury for the three additional children born in the past second.
You?
Why?
As populations stabilise, and a particular society gets wealthier, individual consumption of resources increases.
So, no, simply telling people to reduce population, on it's own, does nothing.
The people who worked for a living used to be called "workers," but that sounded too much like a Marxist class. During Reaganism and its union busting era the media needed to be taught a new, less classist term so "consumer" was introduced as the new label for the common man which, of course, flies in the face of logic since if only consumers exist then who produces the items for consumption? The answer is workers, of course, but the bourgeois class, wanting to disguise its existence, replaced worker and producer with consumer.
I once came to Seattle from Montana with a group of protesters who were demonstrating in a non-violent civil disobedience action against the Trident submarine base at Bangor when it was first inaugurated in the late 70s. We came in an old school bus from the University of Montana. We were housed at the Quaker church in the U-district and one of the other demonstrators was the Rev. Sloan Coffin, of the Rockerfeller Church in New York. He too slept on the floor of the Quaker church with the rest of us. When we were getting up in the morning to go and climb the fences at the submarine base with the full intention of being arrested, the Reverend Sloan Coffin spoke to us and I have never forgotten one of the things he said:
"There are two ways to be wealthy in this world. One is to have a lot of money and the other is to have few needs."
a very good way of putting it, Heavyrunner.
"Capitalism creates a society in which people work very , very hard to deprive each other...
"capitalism promotes the creation of things for the sake of Profit rather than for their usefulness".
Albert Einstein.
Where did he say these things? Not questioning that he did, but I can't just punch that into google and find those phrases except here.
it's in his Essay .
"WHY SOCIALISM?"
i paraphrased them as they come from different paragraphs.
The unspoken problem here, is what to do with those that don't subscribe to the idea that less is more. Educating individuals that its more responsible to be more efficient only goes so far. But if the individual weighs the costs and the benefits and then decides they prefer consumption, what then? And, as "queerplanet" put it, who decides what is luxury and what is necessity? The government? Are we prepared to accept the notion that somehow the better angels of the human race gravitate to government as opposed to business? At some point we must come to grips with the notion that individual freedom cannot co-exist in the type of system that must, by necessity, make these determinations and impose them on the population. For some that is a frightening revelation; for others not so much. I would like the author to address this issue in detail.
RE: "community college Marxism in a ponytail."
I think that this is actually an apt description of the Annie Leonard's work. But rather than see this as a negative, we "negate the negative". The next step is to move beyond "community college Marxism" to 4-year degree and graduate school. Nowhere more than in the US is a sophisticated critique of capitalism needed by so many.
I hear what she is saying, and the answer lies in the first paragraph,the teen part ! We as a people seem to be in our teenage stage...we are all so immature in our complete thinking. We say fancy terms, we dissect every move of every person.(something a teenager does) yet still come up with lousy answers,and reckless ideas. To many Big Wigs make to many simple mistakes. I feel embarrassed often by how world leaders ,super scientists,religious Icons, all get it wrong, so much, and just act so stupid, to be so smart. ! Until we decide to grow up, and stop indulging ourselves... while others are clearly dying, and suffering, we will not get past this stage. We have moved on ,we don't still watch our executions on the town square (at least in 99% of the world)so we have gone through some stages of maturity, but as it is for all ,the teen years are the hardest. and yet for still thousands of years, we prefer our own immediate comfort, over what would be best for all.We are selfish and hardheaded, we need to Grow up. Please make sure you watch the show " GasLand" on H.BO. What bothers me is that C.N.N. and all the other "real news" people aren't airing this as MAJOR NEWS....America is in deep sh*^t and so is everyone else....if we don't grow up NOW !
Please read following article if you haven't.The article is entitled "The Gospel of Consumption", written a few years ago.
The link: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962
"The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society." -Albert Einstein
"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil."- Albert Einstein
Taken from the essay, "Why Socialism?".
Every time that you see someone talking about 'growing the economy ', you are seeing a part of the problem . Our present economic system requires a continual expansion of the economy AND OF THE MONEY SUPPLY, to keep from falling into a recession, or depression. The defect can be traced back to the fact that almost all of our money supply comes into existence as a debt. because of this it requires a continuous expansion of it to allow the borrower to keep from being foreclosed upon. It is an impossibility for this to continue without wholesale repudiation of debt or revolution which will do the same thing. The 'credit crunch' was a result of the banks all knowing that all the other banks were 'over leveraged'.
Those who would seek a solution to this problem should study reform of the monetary system.
The alternative is an ever expanding inflation with the same result.