THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Now, a lot of environmentalists don’t really want to deal with the economy. Traditional environmentalists focus on that cuddly endangered bear or the majestic groves of redwoods or the nature preserves where they go to forget all about ugly things like the stock market. Endangered species and pristine places have nothing to do with pricing structures or government subsidies for mining or international trade agreements, do they? (Uh, actually, yes, they do.) Meanwhile, classical economists have acknowledged the environment only as an unlimited and cheap or free set of raw resources to fuel the growth of the economy. Oh, and the arena from which pesky activists sometimes pop up to challenge a new factory site based on protecting the habitat of the woodland shrew.

  Yet in fact, the economy is a subsystem of the earth’s ecosystem, its biosphere. You see, any economic system—like barter, slavery, feudalism, socialism, or capitalism—is a human invention. Since humans are just one of the earth’s many species (albeit a powerful species, what with our written words and our weapons), any invention of ours is a subsystem of the earth’s ecosystem. Once we understand that (which is not my opinion, but plain fact), it leads to other insights.

  Nearing Limits

  The most important of these further insights is about limits. For one system to exist inside of another, the subsystem needs to fit inside the constraints of the parent system. You’ve seen those pictures of our pretty blue planet from space, right? The surface area on this hunk of rock that we call home is 197 million square miles (roughly a third of that is land).3 To wrap a (long) piece of string around the middle of the planet at the equator you would need 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) of it.4 The total water supply—in all its states—measures about 326 million cubic miles.5 That’s what we’ve got. The earth’s dimensions and capacity remain stable. That means there is a limit to the amount of land, water, air, minerals, and other resources provided by the earth. That’s just a fact.

  Believe me, I know that can be easy to forget, given the way most of us here in the United States or in other rich nations live. How would we know that the soil is degrading or the oceans are being emptied of fish? Few of us get to see our food growing or the nets pulling our fish out of the water. Let alone where and how our T-shirts, laptops, books, and other Stuff is made, halfway across the planet. From where I sit in my cozy Berkeley bungalow, the world looks pretty good: the weather’s nice, the vast selection in the grocery store is undiminished by the fact that my state of California is in a multiyear drought. If our fruit harvest is low this year, apples still arrive from Chile. Don’t worry, be happy.

  But the reports of every credible scientist in the world tell a different story. Evidence of the environmental crisis is now so abundant that only those committed to serious denial continue to contest the facts. While mainstream economists and politicians seem blind to the very real physical limits, environmentalists, scientists, academics, and others have raised concerns for decades.

  There are literally hundreds of books and reports, from countless reliable and trustworthy sources, that document how things are going on the planet. Here are just a few highlights:

  In July 2009, we reached 387.81 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Leading scientists around the world have identified 350 ppm as the maximum level that the atmosphere can contain for the planet to remain as we know it.6

  Toxic industrial and agricultural chemicals now show up in every body tested anywhere in the world, including in newborn babies.7

  Source: W. Steffen at al, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, 2005.

  Indoor air pollution kills 1.6 million people per year, with outdoor air pollution taking another 800,000 lives each year.8

  About one-fifth of the world’s population—more than 1.2 billion people—experience water scarcity, and this resource is becoming increasingly scarce.9

  Global income inequality is staggering. Currently, the richest 1 percent of people in the world have as much wealth and Stuff as the bottom 57 percent.10

  So what happens when there’s a subsystem like the economy that keeps growing inside of a system of a fixed size? It hits the wall. The expanding economic system is running up against the limits of our planet’s capacity to sustain life. Economists project that, with current and projected rates of growth, developed countries will grow at 2 to 3 percent per year, and China and India at 5 to10 percent per year.11 Already, in generating today’s volume of goods and services across the world, we’re producing more than five times (closer to six, actually) the level of CO2 emissions to which we’ll need to reduce by 2050 in order to avoid total climate chaos.12

  So that’s the conundrum. Then factor in the impact of raising the standard of living for the world’s poor (which inevitably means increasing their carbon dioxide emissions). With carbon dioxide overloading our fragile atmosphere, and our demands on all the other life-sustaining services and resources that the earth provides, we’re stressing the planet beyond its limits.

  Source: J. Hansen et al, “Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?” 2008 350.org.

  Put simply, if we do not redirect our extraction and production systems and change the way we distribute, consume, and dispose of our Stuff—what I sometimes call the take-make-waste model—the economy as it is will kill the planet. Look at the news coming through as I write these words: the financial markets have collapsed and were only partially resuscitated thanks to vast Wall Street/Washington bailouts; food prices are erratic and causing misery both for farmers and for the world’s hungry; carbon dioxide levels are rising to life-threatening levels, and resources like oil, fish, and fresh water become scarcer every day.

  In the face of the grim data and the stubbornness of the problem, I know it’s tempting to tune out, give up, and resign oneself to the way things are. One friend told me that reading this kind of information actually makes her want to go shopping because it is such a relief to be in a situation where your biggest concern is if your shoes match your purse. People everywhere, but especially the poor, are experiencing crisis fatigue. Heck, there are flu pandemics, freak storms, unemployment, and foreclosures to worry about. The thing is, we don’t have a choice. In the words of Joseph Guth, a lawyer, biochemist, and the legal director of the Science and Environmental Health Network: “Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the Earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... The Earth’s biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.”13

  Fragmented Solutions

  While the challenges are interconnected and system-wide, the responses are often partial, focused on just one area—like improving technologies, restricting population growth, or curbing the consumption of resources.

  Proponents of techno-fixes, for example, believe that cleaner, greener, and more innovative technologies will make our industrial and economic activity so efficient with energy and other resources that our problems can be solved this way. They point out that there’s less and less environmental destruction per unit of activity (per dollar of gross domestic product or per ton of product made). They’re not wrong. Many technologies are getting more efficient. But that progress is canceled out by the fact that—at least until the economic crash of 2008—there was more absolute growth overall: more people extracting, using, and disposing of more Stuff. (Even the decline in production from 2008 to 2009 was relatively small, and if past trends are any guide, we will revert to growth soon enough.) So the overall adverse environmental impact is still increasing, regardless of more efficient technology.

  The reason that green technologies will not save us is that they are only part of the picture. Our collective impact on the planet—how
fast we reach the limits of the earth’s capacity to sustain us—results from a combination of how many of us there are, what kind of technologies we use, and how much we’re consuming. In technical terms, this is often represented by the I=PAT equation, which was conceived in the 1970s during debates between the camp that believed that technologies and consumption patterns were the main driver of environmental destruction and the opposing camp, which argued that increasing population was at fault. The I=PAT equation—in which I is impact, P is population, A is affluence (aka consumption), and T is the technologies used—recognizes the interplay between all these factors. The equation helps us see how these factors can interact; generally we can decrease our impact by reducing population and/or improving technologies. Generally, but not always: not if other variables cancel out the change. Fewer people consuming much more Stuff, for example, still increases impact. More people consuming less Stuff could decrease impact. There are many ways these variables can relate to one another.

  Of course total population growth is part of the problem: all you need to do is see those hockey-stick-like graphs on page xv to know that one of the big reasons that exponentially more of everything (trees, minerals, fresh water, fisheries, etc.) has been used up in the last fifty years is because there are exponentially more of us. It took us two hundred thousand years (until the early 1800s) to reach 1 billion people; then a little over a century (1960) to reach 3 billion; and we’ve more than doubled since then, with our current 6.7 billion and counting.14

  Yet historically, interventions aimed at stabilizing global population have usually been driven by those in the overconsuming regions of the world and have often ignored the fact of vastly unequal consumption patterns. Often places with the most rapidly expanding populations are using very few (too few) resources. Meanwhile the very small slice of the global population that owns most of the world’s wealth (the top 1 to 5 percent) is producing the lion’s share of greenhouse gases and other environmental destruction. It’s important that whatever strategies we democratically decide to employ in order to stabilize population must be grounded in an unshakable commitment to human rights, especially women’s rights, and equity.

  We don’t know what the actual carrying capacity of the planet is, but we know it isn’t one inflexible number; it depends on our levels and patterns of production and consumption. That raises huge issues about equity in resource distribution and value judgments about how much is enough. Should we be asking how many people the planet can sustain at the U.S. level of consumption or at the Bangladesh level of consumption? And, importantly, who decides the answer?

  The questions are complicated, but we need to have the conversation and decide on our answers together. We need to do this because there is no doubt we will reach the planet’s carrying capacity; we’re heading in that direction now. And once we cross that line, it’s game over: We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life-support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together—justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully—on the only planet we can call home.

  If what’s getting in the way of that is this human invention gone haywire—the take-make-waste economic growth machine—then it’s only logical to consider dismantling and rebuilding that machine, improved upon by all that we’ve learned over the previous decades.

  It’s the Economic Growth, Stupid

  Economic growth generally refers to an increase in economic activity across the board (trade, services, production, consumption, everything), which also implies an increase in the amount of natural resources extracted from the earth, run through the economy, turned into products, and returned back to the earth as waste. Put simply, this means more. More Stuff. More money. Just like it sounds, growth means getting bigger.

  Now, economic growth should be a value-neutral means toward the real goals: meeting everyone’s basic needs and creating healthier communities, greater equality, cleaner energy, sturdier infrastructure, more vibrant culture, etc. For a long time, growth did contribute to those fundamental goals, although it’s important to remember that growth in some places has too often required the exploitation of others. A century ago, when we still had vast stretches of open land, the growth model brought roads and houses and central heating and full bellies. Now, in much of the world, we have those things. In fact, we do have enough Stuff to meet the basic needs of everyone in the world; it’s just not distributed well enough. We have a shortage of sharing rather than a lack of enough.

  A big part of the problem we face today is that our dominant economic system values growth as a goal unto itself, above all else. That’s why we use the gross domestic product, or GDP, as the standard measure of success. It counts the value of goods and services made in a country each year. But it leaves out some really important facets of reality. For starters, GDP doesn’t account for the unequal and unfair distribution of wealth or look at how healthy, satisfied, or fulfilled people are. That’s why the GDP of a country can keep rising at a good 2 to 3 percent clip while the incomes of its workers don’t rise at all in the same time period—the wealth gets stuck in one spot in the system. Earth Economics director Dave Batker, a disciple of the great ecological economist Herman Daly, says the GDP is akin to a business owner adding up all her expenses and all her income and then adding them together into “a big dumb useless number.” The fact that the number is big doesn’t tell us a thing about how the business is really doing.15

  Another huge problem with how the GDP is calculated is that the true ecological and social costs of the growth are not accounted for. Industries are usually permitted (both in the sense of being given permits by government as well as generally not being held accountable) to “externalize costs,” which is a fancy phrase economists use to describe the fact that, while companies are busy producing and selling widgets, they’re not paying for, or even tracking, the side-effects they cause, like contaminating groundwater, exposing communities to carcinogens, or polluting the air.

  This is totally messed up: while on the plus side, GDP counts activities that cause pollution and cancer (such as factories making pesticides or polyvinyl chloride) as well as activities to clean up that pollution and treat the cancer (such as environmental remediation and medical care), there is no deduction in the GDP for the pollution released into the air or water or the loss of a forest. In his book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben gave this real world example of the failure of GDP to measure success: for years in Africa, the non-native water hyacinth was clogging waterways, and herbicides had done nothing to solve the problem. Then someone discovered that dried water hyacinth made great material for growing highly nutritious mushrooms, and that when the mushrooms broke down the cellulose in the hyacinths, it made a great medium for earthworms. The worms chomped that down and created high-quality fertilizer, then were themselves feed for chickens. The chickens, of course, provided people with eggs, while their droppings could be used to fuel biogas digesters that produced power, and this reduced the need to cut down more trees for firewood from the already deforested regions in that part of Africa. Because monetary transactions—like the purchase of fertilizer—were reduced, a solution like this actually shows up on a measure like GDP as diminished “growth.”16 Yet it’s clear to anyone with eyes, a brain, and a heart that the hyacinth-mushroom-worm-chicken solution is true progress: healthy and sensible.

  For the powers that be—the heads of government and industry—the undisputed goal of our economy is a steady improvement in the GDP, aka growth. Growth as a goal has supplanted the real goals, the things growth was supposed to help us achieve. What I and many others have come to see—and as I hope this book makes abundantly clear—is that too often, as a strategy, focusing on growth for growth’s sake undermines the real goals. Too much of what gets counted toward “growth” today—tons of toxic consumer goods, for example—undermines our net safety, health, and happiness. Despite increasing gr
owth and with all of our advances in technology, science, and medicine, more people than ever are hungry, half the world’s people live on less than $2.50 a day,17 and income inequity is growing within and between countries.

  Our society’s deep, unwavering faith in economic growth rests on the assumption that focusing on infinite growth is both possible and good. But neither is true. We can’t run the expanding economic subsystem (take-make-waste) on a planet of fixed size indefinitely: on many fronts, we’re perilously close to the limits of our finite planet already. Infinite economic growth, therefore, is impossible. Nor has it turned out to be, after the point at which basic human needs are met, a strategy for increasing human well-being. After a certain point, economic growth (more money and more Stuff) ceases to make us happier. I mean, if everyone were having fun and enjoying leisure, laughter, and well-being, we might decide that the pursuit of growth was worth the trashing of the planet. But the majority of us are not having fun; instead we are reporting high levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.

  Alright. Are you ready? I’m going to say it: this critique of economic growth is a critique of many aspects of capitalism as it functions in the world today. There. I said the word: “capitalism.” It’s the Economic-System-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

  When writing the film script of The Story of Stuff, my intent was to describe what I saw in my years on the trail of trash, visiting factories and dumps and learning about how things are made, used, and thrown away around the world. I certainly didn’t sit down to figure out how to explain the flaws in capitalism. It was trash, not economics, that was originally on my mind. So, at first it took me by surprise that some commentators called the film “an ecological critique of capitalism” or “anti-capitalist.” Was it? Really? That inspired me to go back and dust off my old books on economics to revisit the core characteristics of capitalism. And I realized those commentators were on to something. It turns out that a hard look at how we make and use and throw away Stuff reveals some pretty deep problems caused by core functions of a specific economic system called capitalism. There’s no way around it: capitalism, as it currently functions, is just not sustainable.