As I pinball my way through the sustainability game, I wrack up points and pointers but rarely hit the big bonus. This time, though, I think I did.
For all the focus on cars and gas and coal and electricity and on and on, we tend to lose sight of one thing that drives them all--consumption. I know I touched on it earlier in posts about our unsustainably wasteful industrial processes and the like. And I've waxed sentimental about how we disregard our planet's natural cycles and are slow to learn its lessons. But then, waxing is not nearly as interesting a way to make a point stick as is...entertaining...right?
That's where Annie Leonard comes in. She tells a story that needs to be told and does it with a creative flair that had me entranced. And agitated. And defenseless to resist the urge to blog about it. The 'it' is The Story of Stuff, her 20 minute expose/lesson on the material economy and all that it superbly hides from our view. But wait. How about hearing it in the words of her site itself...
"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."
To this I would add that while many have You-Tubed effective and snappy sustainability messages, few have wrapped them in an enlightening and resource-full web site of its own. Kudos to Annie, her various partners, and the creative folks at Free Range Studios for bringing us their good stuff. My eConsciousness is most grateful, and yours will be too.
p.s.: The Story of Stuff clip and graphic shown here is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work 3.0 Unported License. Thanks Annie.
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