Just a quick post to highlight a documentary that I downloaded over the weekend. The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard is an excellent and quick study on consumerism, which she describes as a system in crisis. Her description of a linear system being unsustainable is very interesting, quote: “you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.”
The documentary is not new news (it came out in 2007 and has had millions of views from all over the world). But Annie has been making the circuit in the last couple of weeks, including the Colbert Report, MSNBC and CNN, promoting her new book of the same name.
Her comments about the levels of toxicity in our environment are particularly alarming and reminded me to reference Alice Shabekoff’s excellent piece last week in The Pump Handle, A Change in Our Children. Alice writes:
Heath factors affecting this generation are different from those impacting previous ones. Childhood cancer, once a medical rarity, has grown 67 percent since 1950. Asthma has increased 140 percent in the last twenty years, while autism rates have expanded by at least 200 percent. Miscarriages and premature births are also on the rise, and girls face endometrioses even as teengers. Another odd statistic demonstrating changes in reproductive patterns is that more girls than boys are being born…
Despite naysayers (who pays them to say nay?—that’s a whole story in itself), it’s clear that there is not only an association but a causative connection between the explosive use of poisons in our everyday lives and our children’s “issues.” Over 80,000 industrial chemicals (tested only by the manufacturer) are in commerce in the United States, produced or imported at 15 trillion pounds a year. Pesticide use has leapt from the troubling 400 million pounds Rachel Carson wrote about in the 1960s to the mind-boggling 4.4 billion pounds in use today. Nuclear power plants, aging and under-maintained, increasingly leak waste, often without notifying local communities of such hazards.
