After nine years with Greenpeace, Leonard left to help form the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) in DC. There she met her future husband, a political refugee from Burma. Shortly after, Leonard gave birth to their daughter, Dewi. But the marriage faltered, and Leonard and Dewi moved to Berkeley, where she got a divorce and continued her work for GAIA. Throughout her career, Leonard had been talking to environmental and school groups about the need to change our relationship to materials. In 2005, she enrolled in a Rockwood Leadership Institute training program to learn how to become a more effective "change maker." The first time she gave her talk, Eli Pariser, who was enrolled in the program too and who'd go on to cofound the political action group MoveOn, interrupted within five minutes. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. Neither did anyone else.
"I was shocked," Leonard recalls. "No one had ever told me that before." But at Rockwood, her peers told her that she was starting the conversation 20 years down the road, that she needed to simplify her vocabulary. She had to start her story at the beginning. Van Jones, a cofounder of the nonprofit Green for All and President Obama's former special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told Leonard, "I never want to hear you say `paradigm shift in relation to materials' in public again."
Humbled, Leonard tried new angles. They all failed. Finally, in frustration, she hung a huge sheet of paper on the wall and crudely drew a mountain, a truck, a factory, a store, and a dump. And then she told the story of stuff. "You ought to make a movie of that," 30 different people said as Leonard, post-Rockwood, traveled the country with her sketch. The rest is Internet history.
"Annie says all the tough and awful stuff you really don't want to hear, but she does it in a way that is engaging, inspiring, funny, and motivating," Jones says. She's broken through, he adds, "because she's America's best storyteller using new media right now."
Viewers respond to The Story of Stuff because it provides a narrative, a way to make sense of the daily drumbeat of planetary ills: carcinogens in cleaning products, scary tap water, oceanic garbage patches, disappearing forests, and disenfranchised workers. We know the ice caps are melting, and we all know we've got too much stuff (while others, in the developing world, don't have nearly enough). But stuff makes us happy, we argue, and don't we have to support the economy?
Not so fast, Leonard tells a group of business leaders in San Diego on a cold and rainy morning in late January. They're an atypical audience for her, but she dearly would like to reach beyond the eco-inclined. "If you look at the Happy Planet Index"—an annual study by the New Economics Foundation that measures happiness per unit of resources consumed—"the U.S. is 114th out of 143 countries. We have less leisure time than Europeans but more stuff; Europeans, who are both healthier and happier, have more leisure and less stuff." Study after study shows—surprise!—it's not the flat-screen TV that makes us happy, it's the quality of our social relationships and rallying around a shared goal.
"Many people would reject what you say because it doesn't sound American," a man in a suit comments dryly.
"I'm pro-America!" Leonard yelps. "I know we can do better!" Incorrigibly, she adds, "We don't need to be number one in body burden and infant mortality."
The gentleman in the suit is hardly alone in challenging Leonard. After The New York Times reported on its front page that thousands of teachers had shown the film in class, Matthew Spalding, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, went on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight to accuse Leonard of telling children that the United States "rapes and pillages the rest of the world." The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Christopher Horner, on Fox News, said Leonard terrorized children. "You can put a ponytail on Marx," he added, "but that doesn't make it any less dangerous."
Ordinarily, a tree-hugger wouldn't merit a lip curl on the conservative talk circuit. But by showing that our insatiable appetite for ever more stuff is a root cause of our environmental and social problems—and by doing it in the most agreeable manner—Leonard and her film inflamed the Fox News TV host Glenn Beck, who called The Story of Stuff "unbelievably anticapitalist, unbelievably wrong on just about every fact." (Beck declined to comment for this story.)
"I'm not anticapitalism," Leonard indignantly asserts. "I'm anti a system that's poisoning us and protecting the wealthy over the poor."
Barely two minutes into the film, she states, apropos the relative power of corporations and governments, "it's the government's job to watch out for us." The assertion drove free marketeers, ever wary of the nanny state, apoplectic. Beck ranted, "It is not the job of the government to watch out for us and to take care of us!... That kind of government leads to a tank and a man on a lonely bridge standing there with his hand up trying to stop the tank."
"I didn't mean it's the government's job to brush our teeth," Leonard tells me later. "I mean when your house is on fire, the government comes to put it out; when your children need an education, the government provides it." Beck, who scrolled annie leonard is a former employee of greenpeace across the screen while showing clips of the Story, doesn't get it, Leonard continues. "The government is constantly intervening on behalf of big business. Look at the bank and automobile bailouts. Is the government supposed to help us or not? It can't help only when corporations want but not when some poor person needs its help."
Asked what the proper reaction to people like Beck might be, Leonard says, "Voice our values and visions more often and more loudly."
At the end of her lectures, she's invariably asked, "What can I buy that will make a difference?" And she answers, "What we need isn't available in stores." It's not that she disparages individual lifestyle actions—the recent focus of many green groups. Changing lightbulbs and choosing reusable cloth bags and bottles, for example, demonstrates the potential for living differently, and it brings one's values and actions into congruence. "Conscious consuming" also sends messages to producers.
But the individualization of responsibility can have a narrowing effect. Complacent after purchasing those bags and bottles, we may never try to imagine ways we can change entire systems and structures. Does it make sense for consumers to spend hours researching sunscreen brands that don't contain carcinogens, Leonard asks, or should we work to ban toxic ingredients? She puts it another way: "If you came home and realized you'd left the tap running and all your carpets were getting wrecked, would you start mopping the floor first or would you turn off the sink?"
She draws a distinction between two parts of the brain: our consumer identity, which is stroked and nurtured from day one, and our citizen identity, which has been largely ignored. "We need to rebuild that citizen part," she says to the business leaders in San Diego. "We need to reengage with civil society and build our communities. That's what will turn the country around."
But do we even remember what it's like to act as citizens in a democracy? In some local elections, the percentage of voters who actually cast ballots is in the single digits. The percentage who communicate with their leaders, run for office, or lobby to change or write laws is probably even lower. "There are so many points of intervention," Leonard says as we barrel down a Southern California highway to her second talk of the day. "Food, public transportation, waste, war. If mountaintop mining is your thing, work on tightening the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. If it's food safety, work on getting toxics out of food packaging." A garbage nut, Leonard continues to fight incinerators, though she wouldn't turn down a day in the woods. "It's way more fun restoring a watershed than going to the mall," she says to her next audience, a gathering of environmental nonprofits. Her point could not be simpler: Engage with like-minded people, and we can heal the planet, improve our health, and be happier. "We're gonna have a better time," she says, "and get to survive!"
For someone who has explored the dark underbelly of hyperconsumption—not just the dumps, but their environmental and health impacts—Leonard is remarkably optimistic. But remember how she lives, the sustainable businesses she tracks, and the environmental activists with whom she communes daily. There's comfort in numbers: The Story's success taught her that millions of people share her concerns. "Everywhere I go," she says, "there are people saying, `Enough.'"
