Buy Less Crap, Says Annie Leonard of The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard, the narrator of the hit internet video "The Story of Stuff," and the author of a book by the same name that hit the shelves this week (see her on last night's Colbert Report here), has a radical message:

Buy less crap.

It may seem self-evident. But in the rush to talk about technological solutions; buying local, organic and sweatshop-free; capping carbon emissions; and all the other remedies for our environmental ills, how often do we remember that the simplest way to preserve the environment is simply to be keep our money in our wallet?

It's easy to forget that our extraordinarily high level of consumption — not population, not transportation, not heating and cooling — is the number one issue we must wrestle with on the path to creating a livable planet. It's the number one way that we impact our environment, and therefore the simplest way to reduce our footprint.

But, in the consumerist maelstrom we live in, how to start?

"People ask me what they should get to live more sustainably, and the most most important thing is an internal metric of sufficiency," Leonard told me in a recent phone conversation. "This way I can decide for myself whether or not, for example, my current car is sufficient, instead of having advertisers dictate that to me."

Another long-forgotten concept: sharing. "I know my neighbors and we share things," says Leonard, who lives in Berkeley, California. "Because we share things we can have one truck and one ladder and one barbecue. We share bicycles, we cook dinner for each other and we do all these things that people who don't have a community have to turn to the market for."

To unlearn the consumer habits you've had drilled into you, you'll have to do a little is self-education. If you haven't watched it yet, Leonard's video The Story of Stuff is a good way to frame the problem. Leonard makes apparent the things that are invisible: where our stuff comes from, where it goes, and why we wouldn't make or throw away stuff in the way we do if the problems with that system were visible to us. The video isn't anti-stuff — it's an internet video, after all — but it is about how we should be making stuff in a different way, and preserving the stuff that we do have.

Preserving things, repairing them, making do — in America, that's what poor people do. We associate success with consumption, with excess, with waste, and we are strongly motivated to consume as a display of our power, status and wealth. That's a mindset that no technological breakthrough will change.

As Leonard says in the opening of the book version of her own personal story of stuff, "Partly from [my mother's] life philosophy and partly out of economic necessity, my youth was shaped along the lines of the World War II saying: 'Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.'...We savored the things we had and took good care of them and kept them until every last drop of usefulness was gone."

Short of another world war, getting back to that time and place — when preserving something, giving up the things that unnecessarily complicate life and diminish, rather than enhance our enjoyment of it — requires a shift in values and attitudes. We already have the tools we need to divert ourselves from the onrushing climate and environmental catastrophe we're headed for — the real question is, how can we convince ourselves to use them?

Photo credit: Tim Parkinson