Book Review: "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard

Full Title: The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and our Health—and a Vision for Change by Annie Leonard

"It’s just not going to work. There isn’t enough for everyone to consume at this high bar. And if we were to make the selfish and immoral choice of going any farther down that path, then we would have to build bigger walls and fences and hunker down, because it would get ugly. As an official of the U.N. World Food Programme said, “A hungry world is a dangerous world. Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate or they die."

- The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

This book took me longer than I would like to admit only because I went through it with my pink highlighter from Paperchase (R.I.P Paperchase) and my post-it notes so that I could keep track of the argument. It was quite expansive and presented how our consumerist attitudes are basically killing the planet, killing us and killing everything in between. It is horrifying but it wakes you up to various arguments about fast-fashion, environmental decisions when consumers are being looked at and how corporations only really act like they are doing some good in the world.

This was yet another book that was mentioned in The Inner Level - a book from which I have been given a lengthy reading list that I am still working through. Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff has proven to be one of those books I feel like I should have read sooner than I did. She draws on her first hand experiences and statistics from the greater landscape. She sneaks into factories, she draws up stats about the way in which the world has turned more consumerist and she analyses the pipeline that goes from mind to factory to consumerism. Most of all, it shows how this pipeline can have horrifying consequences for the people who choose not to question it. We are being bled through a system which seeks to destroy us and the entire planet with it.

She answers the question of what happens to all that perfectly good stuff that we simply do not want anymore? Well, it ends up in a dump - a place without importance and without care. It ends up having nothing done with it. There are no costs on the corporate balance sheets about where these things go but that's the entire point. The corporations want to get rid of these things with as little money as possible. It costs to recycle.

Annie Leonard discusses that there are things being done about this, even in simple steps, by the people who have grown aware of this pipeline and how, even in the early stages of production, there is high wastage and toxicity.

Apart from this, Annie Leonard also discusses our propensity for greed and how corporations run places dry by turning them into food deserts, or even worse, stop them getting access to clean drinking water. The allocation of clean drinking water is something that plagues our planet in the 21st century as well as it did in the 12th century. If you want to know what the cut-off from clean drinking water does, there are many places in the west you can look at, even to our home of England in which there was a scandal about dumping sewage into the drinking water. For those who can afford it, they will drink bottled water from plastic bottles, but for many there is no other option.

To save the planet, we are going to have to get everyone on our side and perform the task together because if only a few people are working towards it, it simply won't work. The amount of wastage I have seen in this book is not something I want to reveal as I want it to be a surprise for you (and it will shock the hell out of you). But honestly, this book really does open your eyes to how much stuff we don't actually use, how much people are being turned away from basic necessities and are forced to consume like consumers do.

The focus on stuff might just seem like a wastage issue but it is poisoning the very air we breathe through toxic fumes, it is selling us stuff we don't even need for the sake of a profit whilst it continues to produce waste almost constantly, toxic fumes every day, ruining the landscape for crops hour by hour and killing livestock by making the area around the factory unliveable for them. There is something great and nefarious about it and yet, there is nothing we can do about it unless we all work together to do something.

All in all, I think I will watch the documentary for this now. It seems like something I would be interested in as I have been reading a lot of political philosophy lately. However, I might read the rest of the books I have first. I have to say, some of the statistics in this book are quite frightening and though it is old now, there is no telling how much those stats have grown since. It is horrifying and uncomfortable to confront but you must read it.