The Story of Stuff
The opening video on the website “The Story of Stuff” is amazing. It encapsulates exactly what I’ve been yelling about since my college days, that our current economy is based upon a pipe dream, and is so totally UNSUSTAINABLE that our children will be eating, drinking, and breathing nothing but waste, toxins and pollution, if they’re alive at all.
The video goes through all the linear stages of our current production cycle, from the extraction of the raw resources to the dump where the stuff ends up when it’s no longer considered useful. It also talks about planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence, how they came about, and the result. All along the supposedly linear chain, the video adds in the real costs to our bodies, our environment, and our well being as a world society. One of the best explanations the video goes into is how Wall Street defines Economic Externalities, and how they really don’t exist when compared to the real cost of the goods produced, the real cost to the environment, to the people who are exposed to the toxins during production, even to the Big Box Employee who doesn’t have enough health insurance, right through the cost of disposal and landfilling, along with the cost of the resulting pollution on that end of the cycle.
I urge everyone to watch this video. Even more importantly, show it to your kids.
