I would like to share this video from Story of Stuff. If it has already made its way through your email and you already saw it, then I hope you were able to appreciate it and that you also help in spreading the word. If not, then please take a few minutes of your time to watch it.
This 20 minute video raised my awareness on the most pressing issue of our time - the environmental crisis that is climate change. Although it does not explicitly talk about climate change it gives people a background of how we became engrossed in a "work-watch-spend treadmill" to the point that we eat, live and breathe it.
In this video, Annie Leonard talks about the "materials economy," she defines as "a linear system unsustainably at work in our finite planet." She describes the following stages of this system:
1. Extraction - aka "thrashing the planet"
2. Production - the production of toxic products by private corporations indifferent to their products' "synergistic health impact"
3. Distribution - private corporations "externalize costs" to sell things at a cheap price with third world countries bearing the brunt
4. Consumption - products are intentionally designed for the dump ("planned obsolescence") and people are made to believe that they should throw away stuff even if it still perfectly useful ("perceived obsolescence"), the latter is made effective by the advertisement in the mass media
5. Disposal - incineration is a man-made cause of global warming, recycling is not enough
At the end of the video, she promotes new ways and thinking: "sustainability and equity." They say Leonard is "Marx with a ponytail." If she is making tangible actions to help the only planet we live, then I say, so what?
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