This Year At Bioneers: Annie Leonard
There is no word in Native American languages for the love of an object. Native cultures consider infatuation with an object a form of madness.
We have become possessed by our possessions and it is a form of madness. At the same time we’re destroying Earth’s carrying capacity by the sheer volumes of resources and energy we use to make and sell more stuff, we’re not any happier for it. Quite the opposite. Depression, anxiety, lack of friends and community – the litany is all too familiar.
Yet at the same time, the spandex extremes of rich and poor have stretched to a world of have-nots and have-a-lots. For the 2 billion of the world’s people who live on less than $2 a day, more of the right stuff would a very good thing.
But that is not the way of the world right now. Consider what Clive Crook wrote in “The Height of Inequality” about a telling image from the Dutch economist Jan Pen’s study called Income Distribution in Britain in 1971.
“Suppose that every person in the economy walks by, as if in a parade. Imagine that the parade takes exactly an hour to pass, and that the marchers are arranged in order of income, with the lowest incomes at the front and the highest at the back. Also imagine that the heights of the people in the parade are proportional to what they make: those earning the average income will be of average height, those earning twice the average income will be twice the average height, and so on. We spectators, let us imagine, are also of average height.
“Pen then described what the observers would see. Not a series of people of steadily increasing height—that’s far too bland a picture. The observers would see something much stranger. They would see, mostly, a parade of dwarves, and then some unbelievable giants at the very end.”
Back when Pen wrote his book, incomes were already more skewed in America than in Britain. Over the past thirty-five years, and especially over the past ten, that top-end skewness has greatly increased. The weirdness of the last half minute of today’s American parade—even more so the weirdness of the last few seconds, and above all the weirdness of the last fraction of a second—is vastly greater than that of the vision, bizarre as it was, described by Pen.
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Annie Leonard has the right stuff. She created the activist equivalent of a rock video global mega-hit…and it’s about garbage. Her now legendary 20-minute video, The Story of Stuff, has pinged around the planet as one of the most viral, most viewed and most influential topical videos in history. The Story of Stuff was viewed by more than 3 million viewers within six months of its release in 2007, and hasn’t stopped since. It appeals to grade-school kids and policy wonks alike. It has become a widely used educational tool in schools across the country and internationally.
The Story of Stuff has reframed consumerism and hyper-materialism in ways that make people feel we can jettison our shopping bags without regret and embrace instead the creation of a livable, joyous, equitable world.
One sign of its success is that it made the front page of the New York Times, while Fox News has charged Annie with undermining Western civilization itself.
But Annie Leonard didn’t just wake up one day and make a video. An expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, she spent more than 20 years investigating factories and dumps in over 30 countries. During the 1990s, she traveled throughout Asia to track exported waste from the U.S. and Europe. She testified before the U.S. Congress on international waste trafficking. She saw first-hand the pain and devastation our gluttony inflicts on people most of us will never see.
As Coordinator of the Funders’ Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, she communicates and campaigns worldwide about the impact of consumerism and materialism on global economies and health. She has worked with numerous groups worldwide and serves on many boards.
Annie understands that the video’s popularity is one more step in an epic struggle to free ourselves from the grip of our disposable civilization. Please join us at Bioneers 2009 with our own Garbage Czar, the unstoppable Annie Leonard.
