Annie Leonard's road to viral video fame ran through the planet's garbage dumps: While working for Greenpeace and other environmental organizations during the 1990s, she traveled widely gathering intel on the First World's habit of dumping its waste on the developing world. Along the way, she says, she became "a little obsessed with where all our stuff comes from and where it goes." Armed with some nonprofit funds and a finely honed sense of outrage, in 2007 she made a twenty-minute film based on a series of talks she often gave about the life cycle of consumer goods. The movie, The Story of Stuff, used simple black-and-white cartoons and Leonard's own narration to offer a brisk dissection of what she calls "the materials economy," from resource extraction and production to consumption and disposal. The upshot: The massive wastefulness of Western-style consumer society is squandering the planet's resources and hurling the global economy into full-scale catastrophe.

She posted the film online at www.storyofstuff.com in December 2007 and quickly found herself a Web phenom: The film has now been viewed more than 7.6 million times. "We've been inundated with requests for a DVD from churches, from community groups, and from schools ranging from elementary schools all the way to Oxford economics post-graduate classes," says Leonard, who is finishing a book based on the film that will be published by Simon & Schuster in March. Her proselytizing has not been without controversy, with critics objecting both to Leonard's selective deployment of environmental statistics and her perceived anti-capitalist agenda. Climate change skeptic Chris Horner memorably dismissed Stuff as "community-college Marxism in a ponytail" in comments to Fox News, and in February, a Montana school board voted that showing the film violated district policy after it was shown to a 12th grade biology class in Missoula. But Leonard is undeterred. She's now started a nonprofit Story of Stuff Project to assist with producing study guides for schools and faith organizations: "We want to turn the movie into a movement."

In November, Leonard took a break from her globetrotting (she'd recently returned to the San Francisco Bay area, where she lives, from a trip to Egypt) to talk to WEAA's Marc Steiner about waste, want, and what not to buy this Christmas.



Q
A When I made this film, critiquing capitalism was nowhere on my radar screen. What I wanted to do was get people to think about where all their stuff comes from and where it goes. I wanted to talk about systems of production and consumption. In doing so, I talked about a system that prioritizes profit over public health, that values people based on how much money they have and how much money they spend, that allows toxic chemicals to be used in consumer products so pervasively that they're even showing up in amniotic fluid and breast milk. You know, I described what I saw. And when critics came back and said, "That's anti-capitalist," I said, "Hmm, let's look into that." Are they saying that capitalism is a system that allows unborn babies to be contaminated with toxic chemicals? That capitalism is a system that prioritizes corporate profit over public health? If that's what they're saying, then I have to say, yes, they're right. Capitalism's not working, and I'm glad they pointed that out so we can talk about it.


Q In the film, you quote the economist Victor Lebow, who wrote a famous paper about the consumer economy in 1955. It's almost the centerpiece of what's happened to us. He wrote, "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the pursuit of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption … We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."

A I think that's a really powerful quote, because it's so true. This society is based on the ever-increasing flow of goods, and even more importantly, on that smooshing-together of our sense of self-worth with the things that we own—the fact that we're trying to soothe our ego and feed our self-esteem through buying stuff. Those things have become so normalized we forget about them. It's almost like it's invisible to us; it's so much a part of what society's about. And one of the things I love about that quote is he's just calling it out.


Q But you're arguing that planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence is not something that just happened by accident.

A Absolutely. Some of the viewers that have watched The Story of Stuff have criticized it saying I'm too negative about corporations, and I want to be really clear. I don't think that every bad thing a corporation has done has been totally intentional and manipulative. But pursuing planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence absolutely is. Planned obsolescence is another word for "designed for the dumps." It refers to when producers make stuff that is designed to be thrown away, to break, to be not upgradeable, to be useless as quickly as possible. Perceived obsolescence is when the same companies convince us that something needs to be thrown away, even if it's still perfectly good, because it goes out of fashion or it's no longer trendy. Promoting planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence is absolutely intentional, is absolutely manipulative, and I think is just totally evil.

These companies are doing it because the economic system we have relies on continued production and consumption. But we all have enough stuff. We are stuff-saturated in this country. So the only way to keep us buying more and more and more of this crap is to make us keep throwing it away.


Q You say in the film that in America each of us creates 4 and a half pounds of garbage a day. But you also attack recycling as being inadequate.

A I think that recycling is a piece of the solution; it plays an important role in a healthy materials economy. But there's a reason that recycling comes last in that often-repeated mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle. In many ways, it's an admission of defeat. It's not the first thing we should do. Too often people rush to throw this stuff in the blue bin and say, "I'm an environmentalist now." It's encouraging us to keep consuming, because as long as you put it in the blue bin instead of that gray box, we feel like it's perfectly fine to continue this unsustainable level of consumption.


Q But if your argument is correct—that this idea of consumerism and planned obsolescence is a thoughtfully created policy in America that's changed the way we look at what what we buy, what we eat, what we consume, and it's been around for sixty years now—then it has become a way of life. Changing that is the question.

A That's true, but we have two really big motivators. One is that we're bumping up against the planet's limits. Right now, globally, we're using 1.4 planets' worth of resources every year. If every country lived like the United States, we'd be using five planets. You can't keep this up indefinitely when you only have one planet. So change is inevitable. The question is, is it going to be design or by default? And if we change by design, it's going to be hard work; it's going to require some changes in the way that we run our society. But at least we can be compassionate and intelligent and intentional about it. If we dig our heels in and absolutely refuse to budge—if, as Dick Cheney and George Bush said, we say the American way of life is non-negotiable—we're still gonna have to change, but it's gonna be a lot uglier and a lot more violent.

The other motivator is that the current system isn't making people happy. We're trashing the planet, and we're not even having fun. More people than ever are going to bed hungry every night. Income inequality is increasing. Even in the rich countries we have rising levels of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stress, anxiety. People are socially isolated. Half of the people in the United States say they don't know their neighbors' names. A quarter of the people in the U.S. say they don't have a friend to talk to when they are having personal troubles. Socially, health-wise, environmentally, in every way it's just not working.

If you look at the evolving science of happiness and what really brings people happiness, it's not the new designer jeans or the flat-screen TV. Study after study shows that what really brings happiness is the quality of one's social relationships. It's coming together with others around a shared goal. It's having a sense of purpose beyond yourself. All of these things are what we're going to get more of as we unplug from this consumer mania, this haste-makes-waste lifestyle.


Q You're saying that we have more stuff, but our happiness has gone down and we have less leisure time now than in medieval times.

A That's right, we have less leisure time now than we did in feudal society. It's interesting to look at leisure time in Europe and the United States. Both in Europe and the United States, there were huge increases of productivity during the industrial revolution. And the United States and Europe took different paths after this. The United States decided to trade their increases and productivity for more stuff. We work harder and longer hours than any other industrial country except perhaps South Korea. We work like dogs in this country. Half the country has one week or less of vacation a year. But we have gigantic houses and gigantic cars and gigantic televisions. Europe took a different path. They took a more socially oriented path where they decided to trade a lot of those gains in productivity for more social goods. They have smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller refrigerators. But they have two months of vacation and paid maternity leave. They don't have to stress out about their health care and how to pay for college. They took what I think is a much more civilized route.


Q Do you take vacations?

A Uh, not enough, but I do. But you know, for me, vacations are going to visit some dump in another country. I'm not a good role model on the not-working-hard part.


Q What do you think is the role of personal responsibility as opposed to social action in addressing all this?

A I really am critical of the lists of the ten simple things you can do to save the planet, because what we need is not simple. I saw a book recently—How to Save the Planet Without Ever Leaving Your Desk. And I thought, That's dumb. The first thing you should do is leave your desk.

So I've resisted making lists of ten simple things you could do, although people ask me for this constantly. I did make the one list that's on the website, but it's sort of tongue-in-cheek, because it says yes, you should change your light bulbs, but then you should change your paradigms; yes, you should recycle your waste, but then you should recycle your elected officials. Of course individual actions are good and of course we should be responsible in our lives. But those kinds of things—recycling, changing a light bulb, carrying your own [shopping] bag and [water] bottle—are not political acts. Those are just things we should just do as a matter of course. It's like flossing your teeth. Do them, but we don't need to keep patting each other on the back. What you really need to do to make change is to come together with others and engage in the political process. Be a citizen, not just a consumer.


Q Do you have an optimistic outlook on where this is all going? 

A More than optimistic. I am absolutely confident that things are going to change. I think that people are basically smart and competent and good, and that as more of us wake up to the reality of what's happening, which is increasingly hard to ignore, we're going to do the right thing; we're going to turn things around and create a sustainable and just and joyful planet. Everywhere I go there are people saying "Enough." And there are more of us than there are of them. Now, getting corporations out of politics would be an enormously useful first step, but I think these things are related.

I've come to see that in all of our identity, we have two different parts of ourselves. We have a consumer self and a citizen self. And that consumer self is spoken to and validated and nurtured from day one, so that muscle is really well developed. We all know how to be consumers; we know how to get online right now and get any product from anywhere in the world delivered to our door. And one of the things about familiarity is it can lull us into staying there. So we stay in this consumer realm.

Meanwhile, the citizen part of our self, our citizen muscle, has atrophied. I really see this when I show The Story of Stuff at public events. Somebody will almost always raise their hand and say, "What can I buy differently to solve this problem?" And I tell them, You know what? You can't. Because the solutions that we need are not for sale. Even at Whole Foods.