Stephen's interview sounds better. Environmentalist Annie Leonard has put out a book The Story of Stuff) based on her video. Here's from StoryOfStuff.org's about page:
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute film that takes viewers on a provocative and eye-opening tour of the real costs of our consumer driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration.
Annie Leonard, an activist who has spent the past 10 years traveling the globe fighting environmental threats, narrates the Story of Stuff, delivering a rapid-fire, often humorous and always engaging story about "all our stuff—where it comes from and where it goes when we throw it away."
Leonard examines the real costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, and she isolates the moment in history where she says the trend of consumption mania began....
I found lots of mentions online, but not a whole lot of analysis. I suspect it's there, but I don't have the time to dig. But from what I did find, her blog (current top story: Talk about externalized costs! World’s top corporations cause $2.2 trillion in environmental damage) and her recent HuffPo article (The Story of Stuff: Externalized Costs and the \$4.99 Radio) are worth reading.
C-ville.com summarizes:
Basically, the movie and the book dive into the particulars of the global economy: where all these consumer goods come from, what their true costs are, and what happens when we throw them away. Along the way, it critiques some of the basic tenets of capitalism, including the fact that countries and corporations chase growth "as a goal unto itself, above all else." And a country's GDP is not a true measure of how well it's doing by its people.
Here's the Publisher's Weekly review (via B&N):
Leonard expands on her eponymous Internet movie hit to further examine the costs of Americans’ addiction to purchasing and discarding consumer goods. The book records her evolution from a toxic waste–trafficking expert to a crusader for more durable and adaptable consumer goods and is divided into an exploration into the hidden and enormous costs of extraction of natural resources (it takes 98 tons of materials to produce a ton of paper), production (to grow and process cotton for one T-shirt requires over 256 gallons of water and generates five pounds of CO2), distribution (mammoth container ships transport cheaply produced goods from one end of the world to another, polluting the seas and generating toxic waste), overconsumption (Americans spend two-thirds of the $11 trillion economy on consumer goods), and disposal (most of these items end up at the dump). All this makes for depressing reading, and some humor and less priggishness would have helped. But Leonard conveys her message with clarity, urgency, and sincerity—and her suggestions for making stuff more durable, repairable, recyclable, and adaptable is undeniably important.
Treehugger.com slightly disagrees:
...The Story of Stuff is not a depressing lecture about everything we're doing wrong. Rather, it is an optimistic book that, while indeed outlining everything we're doing wrong, it shows that this is a fixable problem, that manufacturing and consumption as we know it is not a must-follow path but that there are many potential paths for us to take that don't require relinquishing Stuff altogether, but rather adjusting our thinking around it....
And I found two interviews. This came from School Library Journal:
Do you think some of the material may be too scary for young children?
It is scary, it is really scary. And I want people to know there are toxins in their products and in their bodies. My 10-year-old daughter looks at labels to see if there is PVC in things, and she’s been doing that since she was very young. It’s important to allow them to be carefree children, but we also don’t want them to be sucking on PVCs. My daughter’s {then} second grade teacher saw a child putting a pencil in his mouth in class, and she said, "We don’t put pencils in our mouths. What else don’t we put in our mouths?" And someone said shoes, and my daughter said neurotoxins.
And this is from grist.org:
Q. What would you encourage people to do on an individual level?
A. People ask me that a lot, and I like to see where they are so I ask them, "What can you think of to do?" They say, "I can recycle. I can ride my bike more. I can buy organic. I can buy this instead of this." Really individual actions as opposed to, "I can work with my neighbors to shut down this toxic factory." We have a consumer part of ourselves and a citizen part of ourselves. And throughout this country's history, the citizen parts of ourselves have accomplished enormously wonderful things to make this country a better place. But in recent decades, I feel like the consumer part of ourselves is spoken to and validated and nurtured so much that we've over-identified with it and the citizen part of ourself has atrophied. We just need to start reinvigorating that citizen muscle. So the number one thing to do is to hook up with others who share your values and start making some real change.
And Audubon's story includes this:
...We may have moved beyond recycling and composting and other individual actions, but that doesn’t mean people should stop trying. Now we need widespread government- and corporate-level changes, such as a federal bottle bill or making companies reduce their packaging, Leonard says, and the onus is on individuals to push for those changes.
A tactic that alienates anyone who’s not a natural lobbyist seems risky. But that doesn’t deter Leonard. "There’s too much wrong with the system for even the most obsessive-compulsive among us to get every action and every choice just right. And because that scenario is so overwhelming, the individual-responsibility model of change risks causing people to freak out, throw their hands up in despair, and sink back into overconsumptive, wasteful lifestyles," she writes. "We need meaningful opportunities to make big choices that make big differences." Without those, she concludes, there really would be no hope. And believe it or not, despite two decades of sifting through garbage and stuff, Leonard isn’t there yet.
And here's the original (20 minute long) video (here, also at The Story of Stuff Youtube channel]:
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