Video Reflections 5: Annie Leonard - The Story of Stuff

I am actually glad that i saw this video. The amount of useful and insightful information in this is bountiful. The way Annie Leonard has laid out all this information in an easy to digest way made it that much more fun to watch. Although what was being said is something that should really be handled, it inspires me to want to thrive in this subject just so i can change the way production is. The flaws that were mentioned in this so called efficient materials economy was very surprising besides the fact that most of these flaws lead back to the United States.

Annie Leonard made it clear right in the beginning that we really need to sort out our priorities in this system when she mentions what the factories were doing to the world and what they were doing to the people of the world. Having 1/3 of the worlds natural resources depleted is not a happy sight. While she has explained the chain reaction of this process, the main thing that got to me was how it may affect people who are not even of this generation. One of the natural things in this world, breast feeding, is caused by these chemicals that do not pass standards. This in turn affects the babies who are ingesting toxins without even knowing it so just like that they will have a lesser quality of life if they aren't lucky enough.

She also brought up another interesting point when she mentioned about a seemingly cheap radio before figuring out what an impact this radio did. I had the mindset that buying something cheap was always helping the world because the materials would be easy to get and there must be an abundance of that type of material for it to be so cheap but Annie then mentions why it was so cheap. The cost is only paying the company while the world and everyone else is suffering from it such as pollution from the factory that made it, or the people who lost their homes because of the mining of the materials. All these costs that weren't noted in any account book was what they called Externalized Costs and i learned a lot just from that.

The thing that made me really annoyed to a certain extent that, yes were are aware of all the waste we are producing which is shown very clearly in the figures that only 1% of the materials that we buy are still in use after 6 months but it was the fact that people had planned for consumers to be wasteful. It was all a grand scheme of money greedy people like Bush to put this false hope in our head that all things will be better if we just go out and buy new stuff. The evilness is just over the top when there are designers that design products that have a limited life span but just long enough so that the user would feel like it was a very good product and go out to buy another one thus feeding this industry of extremely narrow minded people.

In the end, she has just told us that we are pretty much drones being controlled subconsciously to do what ever makes the cycle better for the corporations. We don't buy because we need new stuff, we buy because we are being made fun of, because we won't fit into society.
There were a lot of depressing things in this video that makes me wonder why it ever made us happy in the first place but i liked how she ended on a good note with a load of organizations and process that are helping to clean up this mess that we've created. This actually gives me some energy to go out looking for more sustainable materials even if i have to pay a little more to keep the earth cleaner and the people healthier.