| Main Feature Story - Friday, October 16, 2009
Feature: The story of Annie Leonard
All the 'stuff' and more...
by Samantha Campos
Once upon a time, a simple 20-minute documentary hit the Web and promptly went viral.
On Dec. 4, 2007, The Story of Stuff—written and narrated by former Greenpeace activist Annie Leonard—posted online. Its goal was simple: to explain how goods are made, distributed and disposed of, complemented by lively but fairly basic animation.
The video was an instant (and unexpected) hit, garnering around 50,000 views in its first four hours—reaching 7.3 million currently, and still clocking 10,000 views a day. Along the way it's made Leonard something of an eco-Internet star. Simon & Schuster's Free Press is publishing her Story of Stuff book next March. And just last month, Fox News conservative hothead Glenn Beck railed against the use of Leonard's film in classrooms.
So you know she's doing something right.
The Pacific Sun recently spoke with Leonard in preparation for her appearance at this year's Bioneers Conference—a weekend long forum for environmental innovators, Oct. 16 to 18 at Marin Center. We discussed the hit video, her obsession with trash and how Marinites can use less stuff.
• • • •
Was it hard to tell 'The Story of Stuff' in only 20 minutes?
It's actually based on a live presentation I gave that's about an hour—so we already cut more than half out just for the film. And even that is cut a lot because there's so much more to say about everything. For every one sentence in the film, I read three books and visited five countries. A lot of people said The Story of Stuff was a good problem statement but it's short on solutions—we've gotten tens of thousands of e-mails from people who wanted to know more. And I used to stay up until 4 o'clock in the morning trying to answer these and I was like, this is not working! I was so exhausted.
Is that what the book focuses on?
The book has much more detail than the film. [In the film] I say natural resource extraction is trashing the planet. [In the book] I really explain mining and forestry; I really go into great details on extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. The book has stories of [my visits to] garment workers who're sewing Disney pajamas in Haiti, or spending time in Bhopal with victims of the largest chemical industrial disaster in history, traveling all over the world, following shipments of recycling over to Asia, everything. There's also, throughout the book, signs of hope where people are doing things differently and where change is possible. We have a lot of problems but we have even more people working to make it better.
You grew up in Seattle and now live in the Berkeley area—was there any chance you weren't going to become an environmental activist?
I grew up in a family that really appreciated the outdoors and I went to a school that really appreciated the outdoors and between the two, we did a lot of camping and hiking. The way that I feel in forests is just so grounded; it just makes me feel so safe and good and whole. And when we'd go camping—before DVDs in cars—my siblings and I would talk to each other and look out the window and we would see more and more clear-cuts, and when you're driving up those little winding mountain roads and those huge logging trucks come barreling down [with] these gigantic trees, it's scary, for one thing—you know, in our little Toyota station wagon—but also, we just wondered, where are those trucks going? It almost hurt; it was like a wound to see all those [cut trees].
So that’s how you became interested in public lands issues...
I actually thought that I was going to grow up to be Secretary of the Interior and do public lands management. But I ended up going to college in New York City, simply because I was infatuated with New York City—it had nothing to do with career or academic choice. But it turned out to be very fortuitous because my dorm was on 110th Street and the campus was on 116th Street and I would walk up those six blocks every day and the sidewalk of Broadway on the West side was literally lined with shoulder-high piles of garbage. I just was so curious what was in that stuff; and then I'd walk home and it'd be gone. And, you know, month after month I just kept wondering about it. So that's where I started my habit of digging through garbage. Whenever I'd go somewhere I'd dig through garbage because you can learn so much about what's happening. It's fascinating.
What was the most shocking thing you discovered?
I was shocked how much of it was paper. So that's where my beloved trees were going! Single-use, just one side of the paper or pizza boxes or cardboard—just so much paper—I said, where is this stuff going? So I took a field trip to the Fresh Kills Landfill, which is on Staten Island, where New York City's garbage went for years. People often say that it's—along with the Great Wall of China—one of two man-made structures you can see from space. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's the legend. It's huge; it's the highest point in the Eastern Seaboard. And I stood there as a college student and I looked up, and as far as I could see, every direction, was just trash. Stuff. It was furniture and appliances and clothes and shoes and food and books. I just remember being stunned at the scale of it—as far as you could see in every direction—and thinking, our society has a huge problem: that we're converting these beautiful resources the planet provides into trash, so fast and so hidden. So I became really interested in finding out more and in exposing it, sharing what I found.
How did you begin doing that?
After school I was very lucky to get a job with Greenpeace. At that point—this was in the late-'80s—there were hundreds of proposals to build new landfills and incinerators around the U.S. and people were fighting to stop them. The theory was if we stopped landfills and incinerators we would make it increasingly expensive—politically, as well as financially—to get rid of waste and thereby encourage people to stop making so much of it. And that did happen, to some extent. A lot of municipalities invested in recycling programs and things. But what we didn't foresee is that some really sleazy guys would put their hazardous waste on ships and send it to Third World countries. So I spent 10 years traveling around the world, tracking and fighting against the export of waste and in the process, I visited people who lived near mines, visited hundreds of factories where stuff is made and dumped, people who make their living by scavenging off of dumps in the Philippines or Guatemala or India, visited villages whose water's been ruined by factories that are making our consumer gadgets...The more I realized how intense the hidden environmental, health and social impacts of our stuff is, the more I just wanted to come home and tell people.
What was your biggest obstacle when you first began telling people about what you found?
I did this Rockwood Leadership Program, [with] 20 very experienced activists. And we were supposed to give a talk to the group about what our purpose is in life and get authentic feedback from the group. So I did this talk about what I had seen in my years of traveling to factories and dumps. I used the biggest words I knew and I was sharing my most advanced thinking and showing how much I had overanalyzed garbage for 20 years. At some level, I was trying too hard to impress them, establish myself as a source for credibility. And when I was done—I'm so grateful to Eli [Pariser], who was the head of MoveOn.org; he's a very smart guy—he raised his hand and said, "I have no idea what you just said." I had talked about how we need a paradigm shift in our relationship to materials and I said we use too much materials—fact, fact, fact—we use too toxic materials—fact, fact, fact, fact.
You were literally confusing them with the facts.
He said, "What's a material? What are you talking about?" The group told me that I was starting the conversation 20 years into it and they were back at the beginning; that they haven't spent 20 years going to factories and dumps and so they said I needed to come back to where they were. I realized, if you're an organizer and you communicate, the goal is not to show off how much you know but the goal is to make a connection with the audience. And so sometimes that means not using your biggest words and not sharing your most recent intellectual thoughts. Some people call it "dumbing it down"—I don't think it's dumbing it down at all because I didn't dumb down The Story of Stuff, I just made it accessible. I tried to weed out the jargon, explain terms that people aren't familiar with, instead of whizzing by them. My goal with the film was that someone could see the film and then go home and tell their roommate about the materials economy. So I'm hoping the book is like that, too.
Will there be a 'Story of Stuff,' part two?
The Story of Stuff was enormously well-received—much more than we expected. So many people are coming to the Web site but it's not an evolving source of information, it's just a static thing, because we didn't know it would evolve into a project. What we've decided to do is partner with different organizations working on similar issues and we're making little mini-films that we're going to stick onto the Web site. So we're making The Story of Bottled Water, The Story of Electronics, The Story of Cosmetics—and these little mini-films are going to be much shorter and they're going to be very much solutions-oriented. People often ask me, "Do you think we're going to change?" Of course, we're going to change. Right now we're using 1.4 planets' worth of bio-production every year—you can't do that indefinitely. Change is inevitable. The question is how are we going to change? Are we going to change by design—or are we going to change by default? By design means that we're going to come together and that we're going to be intelligent and compassionate and it's still going to be hard work, for sure, but we can be more intentional about how we change. If we change by default, if we really dig our heels into the sand and refuse to budge and wait until we are really on the brink of ecological and social disaster—which we're getting awfully close to—we're still going to change. We can't live like this indefinitely. But it's going to be a lot less fair and a lot more violent. But we have to change. So for me the absolute inevitability of change provides enormous hope.
What new frontiers excite you?
Some of the stuff that really excites me has to do with bio-mimicry and green chemistry—I love the "stuff" part of what's going on, you know, people who're figuring out how to make stuff that is safe to make, safe to use, safe to dispose—that is so exciting. There is no inherent reason that the products in our lives have to poison us. So thank goodness some people are fighting the poison; other people are just making a new materials base for society. Pretty much across the board on any issue, there's people fighting back and doing good work.
Marin County has one of the highest recycling rates in the nation—but also, one of the largest carbon footprints. Are we recycling in vain?
Recycling is such a tricky thing. The problem is when people look at recycling as the first, or the only thing to do. There's a reason it's last in "reduce-reuse-recycle." Recycling is what you do when your back is against the wall and you admit failure, that there's no way you could've avoided buying the stuff, that you could've reused it, that you could've designed it out of use. Recycling is the last thing you do, it's not the first. And unfortunately, there are a lot of structures that reward that because too often progress is viewed as simply recycling more. For example, I heard about this recycling contest in the Northeast, where these colleges had a contest and whoever recycled the most, won. And so this one college went out to Costco and bought pallets of bottled water and had all these bottles and won. And there's a new program that's spreading nationally that is so backwards, called "Recycle Bank." You have a chip in your recycling bin and when it gets picked up, it gets automatically weighed. And the more stuff in there, you get these points and then you can cash in the points to go shopping—at Bed Bath & Beyond and Target. So I'm thinking, there's this one neighbor who's a total schmuck and buys a bottle of water every time he needs a drink and then another neighbor who buys a filter for his tap and uses that extra time of not dealing with the bottled water to lobby to get municipal water supplies cleaned up—and the schmuck gets rewarded. It just really shows you've got to be measuring the right stuff.
What should we be doing more—or less—of?
In terms of quantity of waste, avoid single-use packaging. Things like, taking your own coffee cup, taking your own bag—those are important for reducing your household waste. It's important to realize those are not political acts that are going to fundamentally change the problem. But in terms of managing your own household more responsibly, avoiding single-use products, disposable products, is a big help. In terms of the toxicity of the stuff in your home, avoiding PVC plastic is really important. A great new resource is called Good Guide (goodguide.com), and it lists thousands of products you can look up—how toxic is your shampoo, rate it [compared] to others, you can get in the habit of screening your products. Buying local and organic food is really important. Driving less, biking more. In my life, the thing that I do that most reduces my impact is I am friends with my neighbors. If you live in a community, you can share—we have six houses that are all really good friends. We have one fax machine and we have one lawn mower and we have one pickup truck—you know, we share things. So sharing is enormously helpful in reducing your impact. But also, if you share, you have to talk to each other and build community. And the stronger communities are, the less stuff we have to buy.
The Story of Stuff
For more info on Annie Leonard or to watch the film, visit www.storyofstuff.com .
Bioneers Conference 2009
Oct. 16-18, 9am to 6pm (with all-day intensives on Oct. 15 & 19) at Marin Center, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. Keynote speakers include Annie Leonard, Michael Pollan, Andrew Weil and many others. Info: Visit www.bioneers.org .
Share stuff with Samantha at scampos@pacificsun.com |
Send this story
Print this story
