February 2008 | From the Publisher
Consumption: What is All This Stuff?
If you read this column with any regularity, you know it is wildly inconsistent thematically. It is not much different than the way I think, which is pretty much all over the place. However, there has been an underlying theme to all my contemplative moments lately: consumption (not as in tuberculosis). Consumer consumption, conspicuous consumption, consumption economics, corporate consumption. Keynesian economics.
And, since my universe seems to run at perpendicular lines just to intersect others in my sphere, a dear colleague sent me this website for no apparent reason, other than it made an impact on her. The website storyofstuff.com contains a twenty-minute film on the consumer goods process, from raw materials to waste. This is an extraordinary, encapsulated and concise look at a core societal disease. Even a child would get the message.
Let me back up a little bit. I have been having a really difficult time at the grocery store. In perishable consumables, excess packaging seems unavoidable as in everything else. Even in the bulk isle, when ready to dispense the peanut butter from the vat, I realize I must use a new container because my other 342 containers are at home. Then, I think about a book I read where, as a child, the main character carries garden soil in his mouth up a steep mountainside to his secret vegetable plot. What would Whole Foods say if I opened my mouth full of peanut butter at the check out, and mimed “charge me for this, I am conserving resources”? Eww. I should leave home better prepared.
I am not just talking about food. Food is what I shop for most often. Cell phones, iPods, televisions, automoibles, computers, appliances and the cache of planned obsolescence items we keep manufacturing and buying and tossing is phenomenal. Is this necessary?! Recently, there have been a number of news items on the amount of waste our nation ships to third world countries for recycling. Not only are we shipping it (non-renewable resources being expended further), we are shipping it to areas where unsafe and unfair labor practices are commonplace. Clean air and water standards are nonexistent. Imagine billions of tons of electronics going to third world countries to be stripped with bare hands. Parts that can be are often re-processed in non-regulated factories, and what cannot ends up in the slums in heaps. I just read this propaganda on Polymer Energy, LLC’s website: “an award-winning, innovative, proprietary process to convert waste plastics into renewable energy.” Renewable? And this on the heels of another story I read where plastics were being burned for fuel in rural villages in Southeast Asia. I bet the air quality is lovely.
It is not that I have a new thought; not that I have anything truly original to add; not that I have a blanket solution to offer. I simply have to point out the precarious structure of our society and hope we all can contribute to a solution, ultimately. If not a solution in our lifetime, then start the ball of change rolling for the lifetimes of following generations. I also realize I am preaching to the choir, our conscious readers. So, share The Story of Stuff website with everyone you can … especially the kids.
— Richard McGinnis
P.S. I would like to share with you a remarkable book written by a Chicago couple. This book really got me thinking about how our society consumes, and how that has evolved over just a few generations. Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. If this turns you on, there is much more to know. Check out innserendipity.com.
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