The story of stuff shows a system about material economy. First according the text book said is that stuff moves through a system, from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. All together, it is called the materials economy. And that is not the whole story, and the speaker tracking where our stuff comes from and where it goes.
Every step along the way, this system is interacting with the real world.
In real life it’s not happening on a blank white page.
It’s interacting with societies, cultures, economies, and the environment. People live and work all along this system.
75% of global fisheries now are fished at or beyond capacity.80% of the planet’s original forests are gone. In the Amazon alone, we’re losing 2000 trees a minute. The materials move to “production” and what happens there is we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products. We are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes, and workplaces, and schools, our bodies. And developed country moves the dirty factories overseas pollute someone else’s land! But surprise, a lot of that air pollution is coming right back at us, carried by wind currents.
The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we contribute to this arrow, how much we consume. We shop and shop and shop to keep the materials flowing. Two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is another word for “designed for the dump.”It means they actually make stuff to be useless as quickly as possible. So we will chuck it and buy a new one. And now people see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime. And if you think about it, what is the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we see.3, 000 times a day, we’re told that our hair is wrong, our skin is wrong,
Our clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong. But that it can all is made right if we just go shopping. Media also helps by hiding all of this and all of this, so the only part of the materials economy we see is the shopping.
The extraction, production and disposal all happen outside our field of vision. We burning the garbage release the toxics up into the air. Even worse, it makes new super toxics. Like dioxin.
Because what we really need to chuck is this old-school throw-away mindset. There’s a new school of thinking on this stuff and it’s based on sustainability and equity: Green Chemistry, Zero Waste, Closed Loop Production, There is Renewable Energy, Local living Economies.
It’s already happening. Now some say it’s unrealistic, idealistic, that it can’t happen. But the ones who are unrealistic are those that want to continue on the old path. That’s dreaming.
