The New York Times finally wrote up "The Story of Stuff," a fantastic video detailing our why we all need to consume less. The video was orchestrated by Annie Leonard, an activist and thought leader in the progressive movement. In twenty minutes, the video takes us through the entire production-consumption process, pointing out the ways in which it is ruining the planet, exploiting low-income countries and communities, and making all of us "consumers" less happy.
"It's a system in crisis," says Leonard in the video. "You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely."
The New York Times reports:
The video certainly makes the facts stark and at times very political: “We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”
I first heard about this video a year ago when a dear friend, who is as passionate and granola-crunching as environmentalists get, sat me down with her dial-up modem and insisted I watch this online video, which had taken her four hours to download. I knew that if this online video had reached my tech-hating friend, who is just barely on e-mail and has sworn off cell phones, it had really gone viral. This put a big smile on my face, because "The Story of Stuff" is a story that very much needs to told. I'm glad that the New York Times finally agrees.
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