A Look at Sustainability Day

A few weeks ago, my seventh-grade daughter’s school put regular classes on hold for a “sustainability day.” One of the things they did during this reprieve from the rigors of math, history and English was watch a video titled “The Story of Stuff,” starring Annie Leonard and lots of animated illustrations. The video has been around since 2007. It has had about 2 million YouTube and goodness knows how many voluntary and involuntary classroom viewers. Leonard even bagged an interview on “The Colbert Report,” though she was so humorless that Colbert appears to have cut the interview short.

If you haven’t seen the video, here are a few highlights:

• Our materials economy (extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal) is a linear system on a finite planet and that does not work (Is that because the planet is round and a line is straight?)

• Extraction equals natural resource exploitation equals “trashing the planet”

• Over just the last three decades, one-third of the earth’s “natural resource space” has been consumed (So is the earth one-third smaller than it was in 1980?)

• Less than 4% of the original forests in the United States still exist

• The United States takes other people’s stuff

• Production involves mixing toxics with natural resources to make toxic products

• The highest level of toxics occur in human breast milk (though it is somehow still safe to drink)

• Victor LeBow (you can look him up on Wikipedia) invented conspicuous consumption

• The point of advertising is to make us unhappy so we will consume more stuff

• Low prices, at the expense of low wages and no health care for workers, keep us buying more stuff

You get the idea. We are destroying the planet because we have been convinced that the only way to have value as human beings is to consume as much or more than the other guy. By way of illustration, Leonard explains how women are duped into constantly buying new shoes. (Hint: it has to do with the size of the heels.)

But that’s not my favorite part of Ms. Leonard’s version of “Apocalypse Now.” The best part is this: “It is government’s job to watch out for us, take care of us, that’s their job.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/what-my-seventh-grade-daughter-learned-during-her-schools-sustainability-day/#ixzz1j91hKOZL