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First blog post about Stuff

Posted on 7:32 PM by 4 8 15 16 23 42 and filed under ,



Since this Blog is about stuff as the title shows( btw I really should consider major changes in this blog. Come on what’s a blog about stuff, how cheesy is thatJ ) , it’s time to dedicate this post to “stuff” itself.  Or, maybe to its story.

“The Story about Stuff” is a documentary about the production-consumption and disposal process of every item that we use in our lives. The narrator Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee with a envorinanmental studies degree, is the one who introduces us this story about what goes wrong in our production-consumption cycle and how we can improve it.


The 20-minute documentary is definetly worth of watching( Animations rule!). Video looks nice persuasive but I wonder if that story is actually the right one?

Actually, there are many critiques to the Story, a quick research in Google and I found interesting results

First, start with the good news. The new school of thinking that Leonard suggest, are mostly accepted without any hesitations. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with  “Green Chemistry, Zero Waste, Closed Loop Production, Renewable Energy, Local living Economies”.

Whereas the arguments of Leonard seem to attract more opposite views. For example:

From FrozenToothpaste.com
“Not everything about manufacturing is “toxic.” Make no mistake, I think there are plenty of dangerous chemicals in the things we produce, but you’re playing fast-and-loose with reality if you’re going to say that manufacturing is the simple practice of putting toxic chemicals onto stuff to produce toxic products.”
From Andybrain.com
“ Annie Leonard raised the freak-out level: We dip our pillows in BFR (brominated flame retardants), a horribly toxic man-made chemical, and we sleep on them!
Not knowing anything about BFRs, I did some research on this. I found two things:
One, BFRs are used primarily in electronics and electronics plastics. Things like computer circuit boards, the plastic casing around a TV set, around the rubber sheaths encasing wires in a computer, that kind of thing. And the BFRs are chemically bonded to those components. That means they’re not flying into the air, we’re not breathing them in.
Two, I was unable to find any evidence of companies dipping pillows or pillowcases in BFRs before selling them.”
There is even an Alternate Story of Stuff video series. It critiques Story of Stuff, on Youtube.

From my point of view, something bugs  me. This video cries out  “WE ARE IN CRISIS!”, it reminds me this quote from Michael Chricton:


“The media did  not make extensive usage of terms such as crisis, cataclysm,plague or disaster. For example during  1980’s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it  all changed.
These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic. “

Long word short, media sells catastrophe news and people buy it. That’s the thing that annoys me, I really can’t decide now. Does Anne Leonard really tells us the truth or sells some part of it?

I think the main problem about the Story of Stuff video is that, it lacks detail and explanation. I know, it's a full 20 minutes, but she needed to explain her points more. I guess she tought so, too. As of March 2010 the book of Story about Stuff is available. I hope this time we may really understand the story about stuff. 





Arda

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