'The Story of Stuff' by Annie Leonard

April 16, 2010— -- Annie Leonard is a well-known international environmentalist who has spent more than 20 years investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues.

The California woman has traveled around the world and seen hundreds of factories where goods are made and areas where those goods are discarded.

In "The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health -- and a Vision for Change," Leonard connects the dots between the trash we accumulate from the "stuff" we accumulate and its direct impact on the global environment.

Read an excerpt of the book below, and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

Growing up in the green and luscious city of Seattle during the1970s was idyllic, but the real joy came in the summertime, whenmy family and I piled our camping gear into our station wagonand headed for the stunning North Cascades mountains. Sincethis was in the days before DVD players in the backseats, duringthe drive I'd look out the window and study the landscape. Eachyear I noticed that the mini-malls and houses reached a bit farther,while the forests started a bit later and got a bit smaller.Where were my beloved forests going?

I found my answer to that question some years later in New York City, of allplaces. The Barnard College campus where I went for my environmentalstudies classes was on West 116th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side,and my dorm room was on West 110th Street. Every morning I groggilytrudged up those six blocks, staring at the mounds of garbage that line NewYork City's streets at dawn each day. Ten hours later, I walked back to mydorm along the emptied sidewalks. I was intrigued. I started poking aroundto see what was in those never-ending piles of trash. Guess what? It wasmostly paper.

Paper! That's where my trees were ending up. (In fact, about 40 percentof municipal garbage in the United States is paper products.1) From the forestsI knew in the Pacific Northwest to the sidewalks of the Upper West Sideto . . . where?

My curiosity was sparked. I couldn't stop there; I needed to find out whathappened after the paper disappeared from the curb. So I took a trip to theinfamous Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Covering 4.6 square miles,Fresh Kills was one of the largest dumps in the world. When it was officiallyclosed in 2001, some say the stinking mound was the largest man-madestructure on the planet, its volume greater than that of the Great Wall ofChina, and its peaks 80 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.2I had never seen anything like Fresh Kills. I stood at its edge in absoluteawe. As far as I could see in every direction were trashed couches, appliances, cardboard boxes, apple cores, clothes, plastic bags, books, and tons ofother Stuff. You know how a gory car crash scene makes you want to turnaway and stare at the same time? That is what this dump was like. I'd beenraised by a single mother of the post-Depression era who instilled in herkids a sense of respect for quality, not quantity. Partly from her life philosophyand partly out of economic necessity, my youth was shaped along thelines of the World War II saying: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or dowithout." There just wasn't a lot of superfluous consumption and waste goingon in our house. We savored the things we had and took good care of themand kept them until every last drop of usefulness was gone.

Toxic industrial and agricultural chemicals now show up in every bodytested anywhere in the world, including in newborn babies.7

Indoor air pollution kills 1.6 million people per year, with outdoor airpollution taking another 800,000 lives each year.8

About one-fifth of the world's population—more than 1.2 billionpeople—experience water scarcity, and this resource is becomingincreasingly scarce.9

Global income inequality is staggering. Currently, the richest 1 percentof people in the world have as much wealth and Stuff as the bottom 57percent.10

So what happens when there's a subsystem like the economy that keepsgrowing inside of a system of a fixed size? It hits the wall. The expandingeconomic system is running up against the limits of our planet's capacity tosustain life. Economists project that, with current and projected rates ofgrowth, developed countries will grow at 2 to 3 percent per year, and Chinaand India at 5 to10 percent per year.11 Already, in generating today's volumeof goods and services across the world, we're producing more than five times(closer to six, actually) the level of CO2 emissions to which we'll need toreduce by 2050 in order to avoid total climate chaos.12

So that's the conundrum. Then factor in the impact of raising the standardof living for the world's poor (which inevitably means increasing theircarbon dioxide emissions). With carbon dioxide overloading our fragileatmosphere, and our demands on all the other life-sustaining services andresources that the earth provides, we're stressing the planet beyond its limits.Put simply, if we do not redirect our extraction and production systemsand change the way we distribute, consume, and dispose of our Stuff—what I sometimes call the take-make-waste model—the economy as it is will killthe planet. Look at the news coming through as I write these words: thefinancial markets have collapsed and were only partially resuscitated thanksto vast Wall Street/Washington bailouts; food prices are erratic and causingmisery both for farmers and for the world's hungry; carbon dioxide levelsare rising to life-threatening levels, and resources like oil, fish, and freshwater become scarcer every day.

In the face of the grim data and the stubbornness of the problem, I knowit's tempting to tune out, give up, and resign oneself to the way things are.One friend told me that reading this kind of information actually makes herwant to go shopping because it is such a relief to be in a situation where yourbiggest concern is if your shoes match your purse. People everywhere, butespecially the poor, are experiencing crisis fatigue. Heck, there are flu pandemics,freak storms, unemployment, and foreclosures to worry about. Thething is, we don't have a choice. In the words of Joseph Guth, a lawyer, biochemist,and the legal director of the Science and Environmental HealthNetwork: "Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologicallyfunctioning, life sustaining biosphere on the Earth. It is the only habitableplace we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live andwe are compelled to share it; it is our only home . . . The Earth's biosphereseems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for weevolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live longor well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything wehave."13

While the challenges are interconnected and system-wide, the responses areoften partial, focused on just one area—like improving technologies, restrictingpopulation growth, or curbing the consumption of resources.

Proponents of techno-fixes, for example, believe that cleaner, greener,and more innovative technologies will make our industrial and economicactivity so efficient with energy and other resources that our problems canbe solved this way. They point out that there's less and less environmentaldestruction per unit of activity (per dollar of gross domestic product or perton of product made). They're not wrong. Many technologies are gettingmore efficient. But that progress is canceled out by the fact that—at least adverse environmental impact is still increasing, regardless of more efficienttechnology.

The reason that green technologies will not save us is that they are onlypart of the picture. Our collective impact on the planet—how fast we reachthe limits of the earth's capacity to sustain us—results from a combinationof how many of us there are, what kind of technologies we use, and howmuch we're consuming. In technical terms, this is often represented by theI=PAT equation, which was conceived in the 1970s during debates betweenthe camp that believed that technologies and consumption patterns werethe main driver of environmental destruction and the opposing camp,which argued that increasing population was at fault. The I=PAT equation—in which I is impact, P is population, A is affluence (aka consumption), andT is the technologies used—recognizes the interplay between all these factors.

The equation helps us see how these factors can interact; generally wecan decrease our impact by reducing population and/or improving technologies.Generally, but not always: not if other variables cancel out thechange. Fewer people consuming much more Stuff, for example, stillincreases impact. More people consuming less Stuff could decrease impact.There are many ways these variables can relate to one another.

Of course total population growth is part of the problem: all you needto do is see those hockey-stick-like graphs on page xv to know that one ofthe big reasons that exponentially more of everything (trees, minerals, freshwater, fisheries, etc.) has been used up in the last fifty years is because thereare exponentially more of us. It took us two hundred thousand years (untilthe early 1800s) to reach 1 billion people; then a little over a century (1960)to reach 3 billion; and we've more than doubled since then, with our current6.7 billion and counting.14

Yet historically, interventions aimed at stabilizing global population haveusually been driven by those in the overconsuming regions of the world andhave often ignored the fact of vastly unequal consumption patterns. Oftenplaces with the most rapidly expanding populations are using very few (toofew) resources. Meanwhile the very small slice of the global population thatowns most of the world's wealth (the top 1 to 5 percent) is producing thelion's share of greenhouse gases and other environmental destruction. It'simportant that whatever strategies we democratically decide to employ inorder to stabilize population must be grounded in an unshakable commitmentto human rights, especially women's rights, and equity.

We don't know what the actual carrying capacity of the planet is, butwe know it isn't one inflexible number; it depends on our levels and patternsof production and consumption. That raises huge issues about equity inuntil the economic crash of 2008—there was more absolute growth overall:more people extracting, using, and disposing of more Stuff. (Even thedecline in production from 2008 to 2009 was relatively small, and if pasttrends are any guide, we will revert to growth soon enough.) So the overall resource distribution and value judgments about how much is enough.

Should we be asking how many people the planet can sustain at the U.S.level of consumption or at the Bangladesh level of consumption? And,importantly, who decides the answer?

The questions are complicated, but we need to have the conversation anddecide on our answers together. We need to do this because there is nodoubt we will reach the planet's carrying capacity; we're heading in thatdirection now. And once we cross that line, it's game over: We depend onthis planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our lifesupportsystem running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is moreimportant than finding a way to live together—justly, respectfully, sustainably,joyfully—on the only planet we can call home.

If what's getting in the way of that is this human invention gonehaywire—the take-make-waste economic growth machine—then it's onlylogical to consider dismantling and rebuilding that machine, improvedupon by all that we've learned over the previous decades.

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