THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Yours sincerely,

  (it was signed but I’m withholding the name in this book)

  Dear Ms. ———,

  Thank you for your recent letter with congratulations on the birth of my baby. I, too, congratulate you on the recent birth of your son Toby and I wish him a healthy future...

  I do, however, disagree... with the claim that “We, the consumer, control the manufacturers. It is never them controlling us, and it never has been.” Corporations around the world make decisions based on a number of factors. Profit, not consumer demand, is the primary driving force. Every day corporations take actions that are not only not demanded by consumers, but which are against consumers’ best interests... For example, let’s consider the diaper bag produced by the Enfamil infant formula company and given to you by the hospital. Your letter states that you use this bag every day. If it is the same Enfamil bag that I received (a green one decorated with Peter Rabbit), it is made of polyvinyl chloride plastic or PVC.

  PVC’s entire lifecycle, from production through use and disposal, has severe environmental and public health impacts. Most notably, the production and disposal of PVC is closely linked to the creation of dioxin, the most toxic man-made substance known to science... Since dioxin concentrates in fat, and breast milk contains high amounts of fat, women’s breast milk around the world is now contaminated with this highly toxic chemical which is known to cause cancer and disrupt hormonal systems. Every time I breastfeed my baby, I think of the corporations that knowingly create and release dioxin into our environment... Enfamil is fully aware of the controversy around PVC... The representative with whom I spoke was aware of the concerns and was knowledgeable about the details... The irony is that an infant formula company is a culprit in making our breast milk less safe.

  Will you continue to use your Enfamil diaper bag knowing that it may leach chemicals that threaten Toby’s reproductive and hormonal systems, neurological development, and may cause cancer?... Do you really believe that the production and distribution of a diaper bag made from a dangerous and unnecessary plastic—which will obviously be around small children—is consumer driven? Do you believe it is appropriate for a hospital nursery to distribute a PVC diaper bag without even warning of the dangers?...

  Again, best wishes for a healthy future for your son.

  Sincerely,

  Ann Leonard

  My point then, as now, is that what is best for the corporation is not always best for the consumer. The choices that are offered to us may be touted as “consumer driven” but often are actually corporation driven, which is to say profit driven.

  Being a powerful, free individual actually means being able to demand an economic system that respects, rather than exploits, workers and the environment, not being able to choose between an infinite number of coffee flavors and styles. Barber writes in Consumed, “We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.”81 And the places where we enact our real freedoms to define what’s on the menu and set the agenda—those places are our town halls and community meetings, the offices of elected officials, the op-ed pages of newspapers, and sometimes simply the streets—not the aisles of shopping markets or the counters of coffee shops.

  Consumer Self, Citizen Self

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been speaking to a community group or at a college and been asked by audience members, “OK, so what SHOULD I buy?”

  I’ve come to believe that each of us has two parts of our identity: a consumer self and a citizen or community self. In American society today, the consumer part of our self is spoken to, validated, nurtured from Day One. From the moment we are born, we are bombarded with messages that reinforce our role as consumers. We’re experts in consuming; we know where and how and when to get the best deals. We know how long we have to wait until the shirt we want goes on the sale rack. We know how to navigate the Internet to get what we want the very next day.

  Our consumer self is so overdeveloped that it has drowned out all our other identities. What should be our core identities—as parents, students, neighbors, professionals, voters, etc.—are smothered underneath it. Most of us lack a basic understanding of how to utilize the citizen muscle.

  The hyperdevelopment of our consumer self and the atrophying of our citizen self isn’t natural; social scientists, historians, child development experts, academics, and many others see it as a result of nearly a century of consumerist conditioning. Survey after survey has shown an increasing commercialization of our culture and a simultaneous decrease in investment in civic literacy and engagement. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute annually tests the civic knowledge of Americans. Its 2008 report found that not only can fewer than half of us in the United States name all three branches of government, which is a pretty fundamental foundation on which to understand our governance system, but that the more TV—even news!—we watch, the lower our civic literacy.82

  “It is not that Americans do not accept the Constitution, indeed they love it,” write law professor Eric Lane and journalist Michael Oreskes in their 2007 book The Genius of America—How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again, “but... they no longer have any idea of its contents or its context. For them, Government has become a place to seek a product and they grow angry at government when it does not deliver.”83 Some see the government solely as a service provider; others see it as an obstacle to individual success. Either way, the fundamental sense is of government being external to or separate from us. What happened to the idea that government, and governance more generally, is something we can, indeed must participate in? Remember “government of the people, by the people, for the people”? That’s us—the people! But we’re letting all that drift away because we’re busy watching TV or shopping at the mall.

  The result: two-year-olds can articulate brand preferences and teenagers spend more time in shopping malls than reading or exercising, while about half of adults don’t bother to vote regularly in public elections84 and fewer than 15 percent have ever been to a public meeting.85

  Of all the worrisome trends and data on the state of the planet—and there are many—the one that I am most worried and sad about is the withering away of this community/citizen self because that is what we most need right now. Given how constantly we’re bombarded with messages that reinforce us as consumers, it’s understandable that we get stuck there. It’s familiar, and that’s comforting. We know what is expected of us, we know the rules, and we know the system.

  A Buddhist teacher I know named Dr. Rita Lustgarten cautioned me about the lure of familiarity. She explained that repeated experiences bring with them a reassuring sensation, which we can easily mistake as being a good thing, when it is just the familiarity that feels attractive. Familiarity can feel like an old friend. That is why we repeat all kinds of patterns in our lives that aren’t always good for us. In other words, as my friend Peter Fox says, “Sometimes we’re in a rut so deep, we think it’s a groove.” A familiar dead end is often more appealing than an unknown open road.

  Conscious Consuming

  Trying to consume our way out of the mess we’re in is a familiar dead end. Many people believe or hope that if we just buy greener, if we buy this instead of that, everything will be OK. Sorry to be a buzzkill here, but we need way more than that. This is why I am uninspired by all the hype about the latest “green” product line or the “green shopping guides” that seem to be springing up all over the place.

  Skeptics call this concept “greensumption,” while advocates call it “conscious consuming.” It’s about bringing a new level of awareness to your consumption. In practice, it means giving preference to products that are the least toxic, least exploitative, and least polluting—and steering clear of products l
inked to environmental, health, or social injustices.

  Don’t get me wrong: of course when we do shop, we should buy the least toxic, least exploitative, least harmful product available—and thanks to the GoodGuide we can better and more quickly assess which products those are. But conscious consumption is not the same thing as citizen engagement. Being an informed and engaged consumer is not a substitute for being an informed and engaged citizen. The “what should I buy differently” response to the critically serious environmental and social mess we’re facing now worries me because it shows how much our citizen or community self has become dormant. What we really need is a revitalization of that citizen self.

  Three Reasons to Reactivate Your Inner Citizen

  1. Participating in strong, vibrant communities makes us happier and healthier.

  There’s lots of evidence that the single biggest contribution to our happiness is the quality of our social relationships.86 People with strong social ties tend to live longer and be healthier. Strong communities also have less crime and survive disasters better because neighbors watch out for one another and are more likely to raise a voice when they see a potential problem.

  As just one example: the environmentalist filmmaker Judith Helfand is making a film about a massive heat wave in Chicago in 1995 that killed about six hundred people.87 She explains that the greatest common denominator among the victims was that they were socially isolated. They didn’t have friends or family or trusted neighbors to notice they hadn’t been out of their house lately, or to check that their air conditioners were working well.88 In fact, three-quarters of all Americans don’t know their neighbors.89 Judith argues that the best way to prevent deaths from future heat waves is not the policy of handing out discount air conditioner coupons, but pro viding community-building activities that strengthen social ties throughout the year.

  2. A vibrant community lifestyle, as opposed to a strong individualist lifestyle, lessens our toll on the planet.

  Having stronger local communities means we buy less Stuff, use less energy, consume fewer resources because we can share things and help one another. The more resources we can get locally—from vegetables to borrowed hand tools—the less energy is spent transporting this Stuff all over the planet. Some great examples of this idea being put into practice are the success of farmers markets across the country, or the Tool Lending Library in the Berkeley Public Library system: anyone with a library card can borrow hammers, drills, ladders—for free!

  3. Reinvigorating that citizen muscle will rebuild public participation in politics and generate real collective solutions to the considerable problems we’re facing on this planet.

  This point is really important. When we allow the consumer part of ourselves to dominate, our thinking about anything—from which product to buy to attitudes about recycling or global warming—skews toward favoring ourselves as individuals (or families), rather than as part of the larger community. Then the option that seems best is always the fastest, cheapest, easiest, and safest for me and my family. But when we act from our community or citizen selves, we can think more broadly. We consider the impacts of our actions (i.e., how will this purchase or this action influence the broader environment, workers, the climate, communities?) and, importantly, we can broaden our thinking about strategies to make change. We can go beyond that limiting arena of consumer action, which is what we really need to do, since the solutions we need simply aren’t for sale in the store! So, instead of “What can I, as an individual consumer, do?” we can ask, “What can we, as a community, as citizens, do to fix this problem once and for all?”

  And you know what is good about that? Joining up with others around a shared goal is fun! It makes us happy. Richard Layard, economist and pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says that “the greatest happiness comes from absorbing yourself in some goal outside yourself.”90 How fortunate that the very thing that will solve challenges like universal health care, poverty, climate chaos, and water scarcity turns out to be the thing that makes us most happy! Imagine the positive feedback loop: if we spend less time watching TV and shopping, and more time building community and engaging in civil society, then our community and our world become better, more fulfilling, more fun, so we want to engage with them more. Who wants to watch five hours of TV a day when we could instead be gathered around a big dinner table with neighbors and friends?

  Equalizing Consumption

  So. A big part of the solution is for people like you and me to step off the work-watch-spend treadmill and consume less Stuff. But an important thing to keep in mind is that many people, all over the world, need to consume quite a bit more. That’s because there are massive differences in the levels of consumption around the world. While it’s true that most Americans are experiencing material wealth unimaginable just a couple of generations ago, that’s not true of all people even in this country, let alone in other parts of world, where many, many people are unable to meet their basic human needs.

  According to the State of the World 2004 report, calculations of overall global growth in consumption mask massive disparities. The 12 percent of the world living in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of global personal consumption expenditures,91 while the one-third of the world’s population that lives in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent.92 Globally, the 20 percent of the world that lives in the highest-income countries accounts for 86 percent of total private consumption expenditures—the poorest 20 percent a minuscule 1.3 percent.93 More specifically:

  Source: World Bank Development Indicators, 2008.

  The richest fifth of the global population consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish; the poorest fifth 5 percent

  The richest fifth consumes 58 percent of energy generated globally; the poorest fifth less than 4 percent

  The richest fifth has 74 percent of all telephone lines; the poorest fifth 1.5 percent

  The richest fifth consumes 84 percent of all paper; the poorest fifth 1.1 percent

  The richest fifth owns 87 percent of the world’s vehicle fleet; the poorest fifth less than 1 percent94

  For the first time in history more than 1 billion people on our planet—one-sixth of the total population—are living in serious hunger, eating fewer than 1,800 calories a day. This milestone was reached in June 2009 and means that 100 million more people are going hungry in 2009 than in the previous year.95 While we in the United States are reaching never-before-attained levels of wealth-related diseases like obesity and a return of gout (caused by high-fat foods and traditionally associated with aristocracy),96 half the world’s population lives on less than three dollars a day.97 Clearly, many people across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even right here in the United States need to consume more just to meet their needs.

  Sometimes I think that for those of us who count among the world’s haves (as opposed to the have-nots), our comfort dulls our imagination. It is hard to imagine what it means to really be without. At an all-day meeting last year, I turned to the woman next to me, who had spent many years in Haiti, and unthinkingly said to her, “I hope this ends soon. I am starving.” She turned to me and gently reminded me, “My dear, you are not starving.” When we’re not starving, when we’re not anywhere near the edge of survival, it is hard to imagine what it is like for those who are. During my international travels, I’ve had moments where the absolutely miserable truth of poverty shook me, but then I went back home where, in the chaos of parenting and modern life, most memories fade. Most, but not all.

  One that I will never forget happened in Cité Soleil, a shantytown with more than a quarter million residents living in extreme poverty on the edge of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Their single-room homes are made of scraps of metal or plastic and often contain not even one piece of furniture on the dirt floor. There are open ditches of rotting trash and sewage forming a network throughout the slum. There are no stores, no place to get clean water, almost no electricity.
Few residents live past the age of fifty.

  On the material side, it’s as bad as it gets. For someone like me, who can mistake a mild stomach grumbling for being starving, visiting Cité Soleil is a profound event, one that is not easily forgotten. I remember one woman in particular whose situation brought home for me just what desperate poverty means. She held a young child, probably about seven or eight months old, in her arms. His forehead had been badly burned—from falling into a cooking fire, she explained. As I walked through the area—gathering the expected level of attention—she held him out to me, pleading for help. There was something bluish black smeared all over his forehead, which had combined with the infection to create a clearly serious problem. I asked what the blue color was, hoping it was some kind of iodine that would help fight the infection. No such luck. The mother had been desperate to put something sterile on the wound but had no access to antibiotics, gauze, or even clean water. So she broke open a ballpoint pen she found and, thinking that the ink inside was the only thing she could access that had not been contaminated by the filth around her, she smeared it over her baby’s forehead. I emptied my wallet for her, probably doubling her annual income on the spot, and left feeling entirely inadequate in my response.

  You don’t have to travel that far, however, to meet people who need more Stuff. Even here in the United States there is inequity—just look at any major city. Until the embarrassing economic crisis in 2008–09, our economic planners loved to tell their success story, evidenced by the increased total wealth generated in this country each year. But that number wasn’t telling the whole story at all: while the rich have been getting richer, the poor have been getting poorer. In his 1999 book Luxury Fever, Robert Frank calculated that the top 1 percent of earners had captured 70 percent of the earnings growth from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s.98 The cycle just perpetuates itself as the superrich, constantly depicted in the news, the movies, and TV shows, keep setting a new bar of consumption for the rest of us to aspire to.