Story of Stuff -- about trashing Planet Earth
ELLE women's magazine, Elizabeth Royte, April 2010
http://www.elle.com/culture/books/interviews/a11113/book-release-the-story-of-stuff-443281/
Was RELEASE: THE STORY OF STUFF
Environmental activist Annie Leonard on how we're trashing the planet
LEONARD: DOROTHY HONG; THE STORY OF STUFF ILLUSTRATIONS: COURTESY OF FREE RANGE STUDIOS
Before she deployed a cutely animated Internet film to indict the American way of consumption, the environmental activist Annie Leonard had another weapon: her long, brown ponytail. She fastened it high and bouncy, like a cartoon coed. That, plus a crumpled list in her hand and a Valley Girl lilt, was apparently all she needed to get into the dumps, ports, and factories she was investigating on behalf of her then-employer, Greenpeace. Where were Los Angeles' recyclable plastics ending up? Who was dismantling our toxics-laced computers? "I'm pledging into a sorority?" Leonard would say, "and I need to find these things for a scavenger hunt?" In a pre-9/11 world, the tactic nearly always worked. "They never thought this dumb girl could do them any harm," she says.
Fifteen years on, Leonard walked into Free Range Studios in Berkeley and talked like ack-ack fire for 20 minutes, straight into the camera. In the bluntest of terms, she explained how the manufacture, distribution, consumption, and disposal of consumer goods are trashing the planet and our health. All around her in the film, wavery line drawings represented mountains and forests, factories, big-box stores, and landfills. Stick figures (genus: Nebbish) stood for laborers, clerks, and civilians. Fat cats with dollar signs on their big bellies represented The Man: the owners of the means of production.
Leonard called her little film The Story of Stuff. Free Range put the Story online in December 2007, and Leonard notified a handful of activist groups. "I expected maybe 50,000 people to see the film," she says, "and then I'd go back to doing my job-job"—marrying sustainability funders with environmental nonprofits. But what happened next constitutes a landmark in the annals of virology: The Story of Stuff got 50,000 hits in four hours, and within days, a million more. Leonard has just published a critically acclaimed, analysis-packed book version of the movie, which roughly 9 million people around the world have viewed; more than 8,000 schools, churches, and other institutions have ordered a DVD of the film (more on that later); and her peculiar delivery—a hybrid of schoolmarm-cheerleader, perky and scolding, subversive yet sweet—is on its way to becoming a meme, copycatted and invoked by ads for Working Assets and Apple computer.
During the Copenhagen climate summit last December, Leonard released a 10-minute spin-off film, The Story of Cap & Trade, and in March came another, The Story of Bottled Water. Up next is The Story of Electronics. Needless to say, the author's job-job is a memory. Like An Inconvenient Truth and The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Story of Stuff has managed to break through the mainstream malaise where scores of other messages, equally qualified, have failed. The movie is now a movement.
At the beginning of The Story of Stuff, wearing little makeup and a shirt that signifies neither hippie, yuppie, nor preppie, Leonard ambles on-screen holding an MP3 player. She's obsessed with the device, she tells us, but she didn't know where it came from or where it would go when she threw it out. "So I looked it up," she says. And what did Leonard find? That the way we make and consume stuff is "a system in crisis."
In perhaps the film's most emblematic sequence, Nebbish—our unenlightened Everyman protagonist—comes home from work exhausted and plops down in front of the television. "And the commercials tell us, `You suck!'?" Leonard says. "So you gotta go to the mall to buy something to feel better, then you gotta work more to pay for the stuff you just bought, so you come home and you're more tired, so you sit down and watch more TV, and it tells you to go to the mall again, and you're on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill." By now we're hooked; what will this curiously emphatic woman say next?
For decades, environmentalists have been making Leonard's argument: Our consumer habits, molded by powerful forces, are trashing the planet, our health, and our communities. If everybody consumed at the rate we do in the United States, we'd need three to five planets to meet our needs. "And you know what?" Leonard says. "We've only got one."
The message is depressing and easy to tune out. But Leonard is not. She captures our attention precisely because of her blunt words and quirky line drawings. "They're non-Al Gore-ish," says Leslie Savan, an advertising critic and author of The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture. Environmentalists "have been pussyfooting around," Savan continues. "Suck is a word that works. The right wing has been using that kind of gut language for years."
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At the crack of 10:30, Leonard arrives at a café, ponytail low and mussed, to meet me for breakfast. A single mom, she lives nearby with her 10-year-old daughter in an arts and crafts bungalow on a leafy Berkeley block, part of a six-home compound. "Actually, it's a kampung," Leonard, 45, says, gulping coffee and thumbing her BlackBerry, making sure I understand the Bahasa Indonesian word and its emphasis on helping one another as a community.Kampung members live in their own homes but often share meals, child-care duties, lawn mowers, grills, and garden chores—an arrangement that brings them joy and also makes possible group ownership of a large vacation house on the Russian River.
In between appointments, Leonard tours me through her home at blur speed. It's modest in size, uncluttered, dimly lit, and free of any trace of patchouli. The decor hints, through textiles, at Asian travel. Absent, she tells me, are PVC plastic ("pernicious violating crap," she calls it in the book); the plasticizer BPA (used in can linings); and BFRs, otherwise known as brominated flame retardants. "I borrowed a BFR-detecting gun from a friend—they cost $33,000—and pointed it at all the fabrics and rugs," she says. "Everything was clear." In the small backyard, which connects with her neighbors' more expansive yards, Leonard finally pauses for breath. "Isn't this incredible?" she says of the open space, the floral aroma, the neighborly bonhomie. I register her genuine contentment and her compost bin, clothesline, gray-water system, tree house, and solar panels, which charge her electric car, a ZENN: Zero Emissions No Noise, made in Canada.
"I hate it when people say to me, `So, you don't have any stuff?'?" she says. "I tell them I have stuff, and I like a lot of it." Her BlackBerry and MP3 player, for example, or the reusable bamboo utensils she travels with. "I like things that are well made and last a long time. I think we can move beyond mindless consumption and wasting, and cultivate a sense of stewardship. That's why I get my shoes resoled and bring my bike in from the rain. I want my stuff to last."
From here it's a short walk to the Story of Stuff office, a sparsely furnished suite in the attic of a historic brick building on Walnut Street. Leonard spends her days working on new films, writing speeches (she gives four or five talks a month, with her speaker fees funding those films), strategizing with advocacy groups, and occasionally giving them a piece of her mind. Today, she calls the president of the Environmental Defense Fund and politely asks him to change the name of his just-released Internet film. It's called The Story of Cap & Trade, just like Leonard's recent film, but the EDF's favors legislation that would allow trading of carbon credits, and Leonard's is against this. The EDF complies.
In the early afternoon, the rain—pouring since dawn—stops, and a field trip to the Altamont landfill, about an hour away, is on. Leonard tries to take her three employees into the field fairly often. So far, they've visited a recycling center, a reuse store, and a facility that processes electronic waste. "Garbage is the door to the entire world," she tells them.
Up switchbacks, past the leachate ponds, erosion-control barriers, and a tower flaring landfill gas, we drive (in her other car, a "gas guzzler" Nissan, as the ZENN has neither the range nor the speed to travel on the highway) to the highest point in sight. Tromping across a field of muddy plastic bags, water bottles, a platform sandal, a pink hanger, a red bowl, a busted black umbrella, and a New Year's party hat, Leonard is in her element. "Everyone should be required to visit their landfill once a year," she says, taking a deep breath of nitrogenous compounds, her face dimpling. "Or before they get their first credit card."
Her passion for waste and all that it signifies was ignited in New York City while she studied environmental and political science at Barnard College, where she peered inside her neighborhood's monadnocks of trash bags and toured Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill, then the world's largest dump. Noting the acres of unrecycled cardboard and paper, she said, "So that's where all our trees are going."
Leonard grew up in Seattle. Her mother was a school nurse and her father was an aeronautical engineer for Boeing. "My mother had three children in less than three years, then got divorced when I was in second grade," she says. "That's a big reason I grew up with an appreciation for material worth and not wasting—it was both an economic necessity and my mother's worldview." She spent vacations camping in the forest—in tents with Mom, in a motor home with Dad.
After a year of graduate work in city planning at Cornell University, Leonard accepted an internship at the National Wildlife Federation. It was 1988, a heyday for conservation advocacy. "I wanted to get into activism," she says. Leonard documented illegal hazardous-waste dumping on public lands until, later that year, Greenpeace hired her to follow incinerator ash to Haiti. "There were hundreds of incinerators being proposed [in the United States at the time], and Greenpeace had campaigners all over the country" helping to derail those projects, Leonard says. But blocking incinerators here just pushed our waste, often illegally, into developing nations. To track this illicit trade, Greenpeace sent her to Haiti, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and beyond. Sometimes she wore costumes (college sweatshirts, miniskirts). She carried a fake ID (reporter, waste trader).
Leonard found the job exhilarating. "I was young and childless. I'd go to churches and bars and hang out and say, `Did you know my country is sending you this toxic waste?' I was so welcome!"
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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.'"
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