What is the Story of Stuff?

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From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

by The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

It often feels a little bit like a well done geography film, but that may just be because it is not pitched to my demographic. In any case, it’s an effective way to speak ‘consumer to consumer’ about the production processes of U.S. capitalism. I particularly like the way the site and video is organized around the ‘material economy’: Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, and Disposal.

The problem, as always, is that consumption cannot fix consumption. You can counter capitalist marketing with green marketing but the effect is necessarily limited. In the end, you have to reconsider property. If your cell phone ends up in the dump, pouring toxic chemicals into the soil and then eventually the water, that’s not your problem, it’s everyone’s problem. There’s nothing private in that sort of property.

The limits of the approach are clearest when it comes to the list of organizations included on both the resources page and the “Another Way” call to action. The resources list is remarkable mostly becuase it’s easy to forget how many advocate groups exist. It’s an interesting exercise, too, to group them according to the ‘material economy.’ model. Groups working to protect the Amazon are under extraction, for example; groups working on foods issues under consumption.

What’s missing, of course, is a direct critical challenge to assumptions about property. A different idea of property, for example, might demand cradle to grave responsibility for certain particularly hazardous products. A car, for example, is full of all sorts of materials that should never be allowed in the dump. There are also no unions on the list, and no challenge to the work day, which is, after all, the very heart of the consumer economy.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Union, Writing

Suburbia is a Cyborg

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Suburbia is a cyborg. It is a techno-industrial grid within which its human residents are trapped, conformed, dependent units in a vast, entropic feedback loop. It is also — as a whole — dependent on an inconceivably extravagant and uninterrupted inflow of materials from across the globe. Without that uninterrupted inflow, Suburbia will convulse and perish.

The process of consuming these materials creates the Suburban consequence of waste. Volcanically growing islands of landfill — so vast that there is now a global import-export industry for trash, for all that abandoned technomass; and we live in an ever more micro-toxified environment.

Cyborg: an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems.

Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.

Middle class angst: The politics of lemmings, part 1
By Stan Goff

This is the sort of piece that, at first glance anyway, I tend not to like. The word ‘lemmings’ in the title is a red flag. Too often these critiques of suburbia are written by prosperous academics or journalists living in the gentrified inner-city and working out some Oedipal drama from their childhood. It’s easy to be angry writing away in your loft and planing another long weekend on Long Island. This is different.

First, it’s rooted in a persuasive historical argument that sees the suburbs as the White community’s social and political response to the Civil Rights Movement, starting in the 1950s and continuing on into the struggles over busing in th 1970s. I was raised in one of these suburbs– in the 1960s and 70s in Houston– and I have taught many students raised in these racial enclaves here in the Midwest and elsewhere. The descriptions ring true.

Obviously, this also resonants with my recent post on social networks, which seem to be duplicating the ‘lunchroom racism’ of the suburbs. It also helps to explain the profound ambivalence the U.S. public has towards the war. On the one hand, polls have shown again and again that Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq; on the other, there is no sign of a mass mobilization. One explanation is the suburban fear of falling out of the middle classes, due to their profound dependence on oil.

I am never quite sure that things are ever so easy to explain, but its a suggestive way to think about the material basis for the contradiction. You can add to that mix the problems caused by the collapse of the housing bubble, the erosion of real wages, and the xenophobia associated with the growth of a new minority. White flight is unlikely to be an adequate response to Hispanic immigration.

The suburbs are in a defensive posture; the War is in defense of the gated (White) community. The piece is long (part two is here) and it ends with what seems to me a futile appeal to Christianity, but it is worth reading. I don’t want to imply, by the way, that I disagree with Goff’s reading of “the ideals of the Jewish Palestinian anarchist our culture often claims to follow.” But I don’t think the Christians of the suburbs, with a few exceptions, would ever recognize him as the central figure of their creed.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, War, Writing

Class, Race, Gender and Moblity

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Washington, DC – 11/13/2007 – Two-thirds of American families are earning more today than their parents did a generation ago, yet their likelihood of moving up—or down—the economic ladder still depends in large measure on their parents’ position, according to a new report issued by The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Comprised of a Principals’ Group of experts from The American Enterprise Institute, The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation and The Urban Institute, the project seeks to investigate the status of economic mobility in America.

The project issued three reports today, each authored by Julia B. Isaacs, Child and Family Policy Fellow at Brookings, examining economic mobility across generations. The first looks at how families have fared over the last 30 years, while the other reports investigate differences in mobility by race and gender.

American Families’ Ability to Climb the Economic Ladder Still Depends on Parents’ Income, Pew Press Release

This is one of those reports that seem to be fairly positive but once you start looking at it more closely you realize are also pretty depressing. According to Issacs, for example, “two-thirds of Americans saw increases in income, adjusted for inflation. At the same time, Americans live in smaller families, so higher incomes are spread over fewer people.” That sounds good.

Then you read on: “Forty-two percent of children born to parents at the bottom of the income distribution remain at the bottom, while 39 percent born to parents at the top, stay at the top.” That does not sound so good. “So, there is considerable mobility but it’s also the case that a child’s economic position is heavily influenced by that of his or her parents.” Class is always tied to family, but this suggests a certain rigidity in the system.

The Brookings Institute report suggests that the glass may not be half-full at all. “The report found that only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the middle-income group have family income greater than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children in the same circumstance.” So the rigidity in the system has racial ties, too. Even worse, black middle class families have a harder time harnessing whatever economic advantage they may have earned for their children.

“Further, nearly half (45 percent) of black children in the middle-income group,” the reports goes on to say, “fall to the bottom of the income distribution in one generation, compared to only 16 percent of white children.” The Urban Institute provides the worse news yet, and it’s about gender, although it impacts all of us. “The report on the comparative economic mobility of men and women, highlights the fact that the growth in family incomes is largely due to the fact that far more families now have two earners.”

“The overall trends are generally upward and positive,” writes, Pew’ Managing Director, John E. Morton, “but there are significant numbers of Americans for whom this is not the case, and for whom the American Dream seems to be out of reach.” This seems an understatement, at best. Morton tries to sound positive, but these numbers simply reflect that change is slow to come if it ever comes at all.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Writing