Book Review: The Story of Stuff (Chapter One)

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

If you've read my blog for a while, you might recognize my love for The Story of Stuff from this post, back in 2007.

I'm not against stuff. In fact, I'm pro-Stuff! I want us to value our Stuff more, to care for it, to give it the respect it deserves. I want us to recognize that each thing we buy involved all sorts of resources and labor. Someone mined the earth for the metals in your cell phone, someone unloaded the bales from the cotton gin for your T-shirt. Someone in a factory assembled that pair of sunglasses and they might have been exposed to carcinogens or forced to work over-time. Someone drove or flew this bouquet around the country or the world to get it to you. We need to understand the true value of our Stuff, far beyond the price tag and far beyond the social status of ownership. Stuff should be long-lasting, made with the pride of an artisan and cared for accordingly. (Introduction, xxx)

Thus ends Annie Leonard's introduction to The Story of Stuff, a book that picks up where her video left off, describing in consummate detail the unsustainable, careening-off-kilter system that is our materials economy. Many people skip or skim introductions to non-fiction, particularly lengthy introductions that include charts, graphs and a variety of definitions for words that are almost-but-not-quite familiar -- myself included. But this is one instance where I'm terribly, terribly glad to have familiarized myself with the intent of the author prior to reading her work.

Annie is not a minimalist. She isn't one of the "give away all of one's possessions and live in a hut on the flats of a mud plain to become closer to nature" environmentalists. (I know some of those folks; they're good-hearted, kind people, but this book isn't about them.) Annie likes her home and her books and her creature-comforts as much as the next person; and she might appreciate them more than the average American, because she's done the work to understand how her stuff is made, and what affects that process has on the people and the environment of our world. With The Story of Stuff, she sets out to share that experience with us, to teach us about the true value -- and thus the true costs -- of the Stuff we bring into our lives.

This is a vitally important point, because much of what Annie says in the first chapter is pretty frightening -- and becomes more so as she continues. Without the knowledge that her intention is to educate and open our eyes to what relatively few Americans have ever seen, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by fear and dismiss the greater point. That would be a terrible loss.

Chapter One: Extraction is about the process of gathering the ingredients necessary to create our Stuff from the world around us. Whether we're gathering wood because we need a table, mining the gold and diamonds for an engagement ring, or collecting the water to make soda, we're pulling raw materials out of the earth -- or creating synthetic varieties in a laboratory. The process of extracting raw materials (or creating new ones) requires many, many, many other resources; on page one Annie presents the example of paper: "making one ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various other resources." In context, a single ream of the stuff we buy from Staples to stock our copy machines for $7.19 demands 98 times that volume of other Stuff that gets destroyed along the way.

And that's the real point about Extraction -- it's not about what we actually wind up with, it's about what we wreck in order to get the Stuff we want. When we need paper, we don't walk through a forest and cut down the dead trees, the ones that are no longer useful for removing carbon dioxide from the air and replacing it with the oxygen we so desperately crave. Instead, we clear cut an entire forest -- chopping trees down and yanking out the stumps and root systems (or leaving them to wither and die).

I knew that this happened, but always thought that the trees I bought from organizations like the Arbor Foundation for replanting went into those forests, to rebuild them slowly, over time. It turns out that this isn't the case at all. Instead, tree plantations are created by planting acres upon acres of a fast-growing substitute for traditional hardwoods, plants engineered to have shallow root systems that are easy to harvest quickly and replant for faster and faster regrowth and continuous harvesting. This doesn't sound so bad until Annie tells what happens next: without deep root systems to anchor soil in place and create homes for woodland wildlife, heavy rains wash all of the loam -- the healthy topsoil that we pay a premium for at the nursery for adding to our gardens and flower beds -- downhill. When an entire forest has been destroyed, and the topsoil that was anchoring all of that life moves, a few heavy rains can turn the remaining soil layers into a volume of mud that can wipe out entire communities, like those that threatened Haiti immediately after last year's devastating Hurricanes.

Another piece of the Extraction equation, though, is the details of *who* is doing the extraction. Who is responsible for the labor, who reaps the reward for collecting the raw materials, who bears the burden of living with what remains, and who benefits from the Stuff that is ultimately created? In general, those who bear the burden don't reap any of the rewards, and those who benefit from the Stuff don't ever see the full costs.  This is what Annie calls Imbalanced Benefits. In places where "there's an abundance of valuable natural resources... the local people get the short end of the deal, environmentally and economically" (35-37).  When governments can rely on the resources to provide income rather than a tax base of citizens, there's a distinct imbalance of power that leaves those who have to live with the consequences of Extraction without any bargaining levers. (Think about the recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in this context!)

The forest/paper example is just one aspect of the Extraction phase of our materials economy. Annie details dozens of specific stories from her own experience, observations made on her travels to Bangledash, India, and Sierra Leone (among other countries) about "trees, rocks, and water" (1), in order to relate stories of impending wars over the rights to clean, potable water and rare ore (blood diamonds are just one strain), and the effects those particular issues are creating around the world.  But she has a point -- we don't have to do it this way.  In essence,

...we need to extract less and ensure that the extraction processes we do use support environmental, community, and worker well-being. We need to utilize what we extract more efficiently, more wisely, and more reverently. And we need a much more equal distribution of both the harms and the benefits generated by resource extraction (40).

This isn't easy, but it's possible -- and it seems infinitely more possible after reading the next chapter, on Production.  We'll do that tomorrow.

First published at expetesso.com