Interview with Annie Leonard
By Anna Louie Sussman
For years, Annie Leonard used to lecture people about stuff. With a big sheet of butcher paper and a marker, she guided live audiences through The Story of Stuff, a critique of our culture of consumerism, waste and disposability, drawing as she went along. She turned it into a 20-minute illustrated narration, which went viral shortly after she put it online in December 2007. Since then, it has reached over 13 million viewers around the world.
This month, she released The Story of Broke, which explains where all of our tax money is going – and why the American economy is not actually “broke,” just broken. She describes how corporate interests influence policy, and how citizens can fight back.
Annie very graciously took time out of her relentless activism and educational work to answer Red Flag’s questions about, you know, stuff.
Red Flag Magazine: Thirteen million people. Wow. What do you think has accounted for their success?
Annie Leonard: To be honest, I don’t know exactly why it was so successful, but I have lots of theories.
I think the film touched people, more than taught people. It tapped into a growing sense of discomfort or anxiety in this country. Environmentally, socially, economically and in terms of health and education, it is increasingly clear that we’re not on a good trajectory. We received thousands of emails from people who said: “Yes, that’s what I was feeling” or “I knew that, but I just didn’t know how to say it.”
I also think the timing of the film helped. It came out right before Christmas, just as the economy was plummeting. So, while the economy is in freefall, we’re still bombarded with messages telling us to go shopping, to express our love with stuff, to go into further debt for more stuff, to seek happiness and meaning through stuff. On a pretty gut level, it didn’t make sense.
Finally, I think the cute animations helped. They are so inviting and refreshing that they balance out the severity and grimness of the actual data. I am guessing that if we had used real footage of trashed eco systems, poisoned workers and toxic waste, far fewer people would have sat through the whole 20 minutes.
Red Flag Magazine : The stories are very simple and easy to understand. Some might say you’ve dumbed the subject down or oversimplified. How do you respond to this?
Annie Leonard: Actually, the number one complaint I get about the film is that I left something out, to which I say “duh, it’s a 20 minute cartoon.” Yes, I left stuff out. Yes, I oversimplified. You can’t fit everything in an entire global system in 20 minutes.
If I had dumbed it down, I would have said to recycle and change your light bulb and everything would be okay, but to leave the real change making to the experts. Au contraire, the audience are the experts! The audience – all of us – are the ones that decide if we can turn things around in this country or not, by deciding whether or not to get involved.
RFM: The corporations are painted as uniformly evil and desperate to suck profits out of the environment and their workers at any cost. What kind of awareness of your work have you been able to promote at the corporate level, since companies are responsible for so much of the waste you discuss?
AL: While there are plenty of companies willing to sacrifice the planet’s, workers’ and community health for profit, thankfully not all are! At the end of The Story of Stuff, I run through a number of solutions: green chemistry, local living economies, clean production. There are companies all over the world that have embraced these very approached and are innovating as we speak. To them, I offer a nod of great respect.
There’s one that stands out for going even beyond high environmental and social standards in their operations to challenge the very consumer frenzy of today’s retail model.
Patagonia, maker of outdoor clothing and equipment, has recently taken the courageous and visionary step of encouraging its customers not to buy stuff unless they actually need it. Can you imagine? A retail company saying that?! It’s so cool! They actually ask customers to stop before buying and assess if they need the new item.
And if we customers do think we need a jacket or fleece or whatever, they invite us to consider buying stuff used. They recently partnered with eBay to launch a Patagonia used gear shop on eBay. Patagonia is asking people to dig out unused Patagonia gear from closets and storage and put them back into use – which is possible with Patagonia gear since the stuff lasts for years. They even link to it from their website, and don’t make a cent off the eBay used gear shop.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to collaborate with Patagonia around this program. Everyone I have talked to there is really clear: it is more important to have a healthy thriving planet than a bank account full of money on a dead planet.
RFM: The costs in the “Third World,” as you call it, of making lots of stuff are tremendous. How do politicians in developing countries justify their actions?
AL: Less industrialized, or “Third World” countries are not homogenous, so their thinking around this is varied. I can’t tell you how politicians justify their actions (isn’t that one of the great mysteries in life?) but I can tell you about some of the government officials I met in my own experience, traveling to 40 countries working on these issues.
Some politicians cater to the 1 percent, so just locate the polluting factories where the 99 percent live and probably don’t lose a night’s sleep over it. “National Sacrifice Zone” is a term for a location, usually inhabited by poor, marginalized communities of color, in which toxic industries are concentrated. People are often stuck there by legal restrictions (as was the case in apartheid South Africa), economic conditions or other factors. Those are the communities I had in mind in The Story of Stuff when I said that “it’s not just resources that are wasted but whole communities that get wasted.”
Then there are politicians who know there’s a better way, but are trapped by the dictates of current trade agreements, development program approaches and international aid. Take incinerators, for example. Incinerators are a highly polluting, wasteful and obsolete technology that meets huge resistance in the U.S. so the companies are targeting Third World countries to build these monstrosities. I went to India, where many incinerators were planned, and met with government officials all over the country to explain that there are safer, less expensive alternatives that create more jobs, conserve resources and cost less. They were shocked! They explained to me that World Bank officials had come offering aid money for incinerators without ever mentioning problems or alternatives.
So while there certainly are some uncaring politicians ready to write off the 99% in developing countries – just like we have here – it’s not that simple. Histories of colonial division of labor in which some countries supply stuff and other countries consume stuff, and encouragement for this toxic-laden development model through aid practices and unfair trade-and-aid programs all combine to pressure Third World Countries to follow the same mistakes we made here.
I’d like to see our development aid and technology transfer not be about moving factories overseas that we don’t want here, thereby replicating a flawed economic model. Rather, I’d like to see our development aid contribute to countries leapfrogging over this dirty development era and investing in clean industries with healthy jobs for the economy of tomorrow.
RFM: What experiences have you had or witnessed that have convinced you to keep spreading your message?
AL: Every day I get emails and letters from people, and when I am traveling about I met people, who say that The Story of Stuff Project’s films have inspired them to rethinking their relationship to stuff and to get involved in making the world better. There’s nothing that makes me happier than hearing these stories from kids, businesspeople, educators, faith leaders, parents, economists – all kinds of people. I am enormously grateful to them for feeding my sense of hope.
The lesson I have taken from all this is that those of us who want to build a better future are most of us. We’re not some fringe minority. In a way, the Story of Stuff inadvertently took the temperature of the public and found that we are millions and millions strong.
I am more convinced than ever that we have the people, the vision, the technology, the commitment to turn things around, to build an economy that is healthy and fair and is more about happiness than stuff. But to do this, we need to get involved. So, come on in.