by
Annie Leonard, Yes! magazine:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-human-cost-of-stuff/annie-leonard-more-than-a-mindful-consumer
Since I released "The Story of Stuff" six years ago, the most
frequent snarky remark I get from people trying to take me down a notch
is about my own stuff: Don't you drive a car? What about your computer
and your cellphone? What about your books?
To the last one, I answer
that the book was printed on paper made from trash, not trees, but that
doesn't stop them from smiling smugly at having exposed me as a
materialistic hypocrite. Gotcha!
Let me say it clearly: I'm neither for nor against stuff. I like
stuff if it's well-made, honestly marketed, used for a long time, and at
the end of its life recycled in a way that doesn't trash the planet,
poison people, or exploit workers.
Our stuff should not be artifacts of
indulgence and disposability, like toys that are forgotten 15 minutes
after the wrapping comes off, but things that are both practical and
meaningful.
British philosopher William Morris said it best: "Have
nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be
beautiful."
Too many T-shirts
The life cycle of a simple cotton T-shirt - worldwide, 4 billion are
made, sold, and discarded each year - knits together a chain of seemingly
intractable problems, from the elusive definition of sustainable
agriculture to the greed and classism of fashion marketing.
The story of a T-shirt not only gives us insight into the complexity
of our relationship with even the simplest stuff; it also demonstrates
why consumer activism - boycotting or avoiding products that don’t meet
our personal standards for sustainability and fairness - will never be
enough to bring about real and lasting change.
Like a vast Venn diagram
covering the entire planet, the environmental and social impacts of
cheap T-shirts overlap and intersect on many layers, making it
impossible to fix one without addressing the others.
I confess that my T-shirt drawer is so full it's hard to close.
That's partly because when I speak at colleges or conferences, I'm often
given one with a logo of the institution or event. They’re nice
souvenirs of my travels, but the simple fact is: I've already got more
T-shirts than I need.
And of all the T-shirts I have accumulated over
the years, there are only a few that I honestly care about, mostly
because of the stories attached to them.
My favorite (no eye-rolling, please) is a green number from the
Grateful Dead's 1982 New Year's Eve concert.
To me this T-shirt, worn
for more than 30 years by multiple members of my extended family, is
both useful and beautiful, not only because I attended the concert but
because a dear friend gave it to me, knowing how much I would treasure
it.
The label even says "Made in the USA," which makes me smile because
so few things are made in this country anymore, as brands increasingly
opt for low-paid workers in poor countries.
Who sews those Tees?
And that takes me back to a day in 1990, in the slums of Port-au-Prince.
I
was in Haiti to meet with women who worked in sweatshops making
T-shirts and other clothing for the Walt Disney Company. The women were
nervous about speaking freely. We crowded into a tiny room inside a
small cinderblock house.
In sweltering heat, we had to keep the windows
shuttered for fear that someone might see us talking. These women worked
six days a week, eight hours a day, sewing clothes that they could
never save enough to buy.
Those lucky enough to be paid minimum wage
earned about $15 a week. The women described the grueling pressure at
work, routine sexual harassment, and other unsafe and demeaning
conditions.
They knew that Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, made millions. A few
years after my visit, a National Labor Committee documentary, Mickey
Mouse Goes to Haiti, revealed that in 1996 Eisner made $8.7 million in
salary plus $181 million in stock options - a staggering $101,000 an hour.
The Haitian workers were paid one-half of 1 percent of the U.S. retail
price of each garment they sewed.
The women wanted fair pay for a day's work - which in their dire
straits meant $5 a day. They wanted to be safe, to be able to drink
water when hot, and to be free from sexual harassment.
They wanted to
come home early enough to see their children before bedtime and to have
enough food to feed them a solid meal when they woke.
Their suffering,
and the suffering of other garment workers worldwide, was a major reason
the end product could be sold on the shelves of big-box retailers for a
few dollars.
I asked them why they stayed in the teeming city, living in slums
that had little electricity and no running water or sanitation, and
working in such obviously unhealthy environments instead of returning to
the countryside where they had grown up.
They said the countryside
simply couldn’t sustain them anymore. Their families had given up
farming since they couldn't compete against the rice imported from the
U.S. and sold for less than half the price of the more labor-intensive,
more nutritious native rice.
It was all part of a plan, someone
whispered, by the World Bank and U.S. Agency for International
Development to drive Haitians off their land and into the city to sew
clothes for rich Americans.
The destruction of farming as a livelihood
was necessary to push people to the city, so people would be desperate
enough to work all day in hellish sweatshops.
Their proper place
The next day I called on USAID. My jaw dropped as the man from the
agency openly agreed with what at first had sounded like an exaggerated
conspiracy theory. He said it wasn't efficient for Haitians to work on
family farms to produce food that could be grown more cheaply elsewhere.
Instead they should accept their place in the global economy - which, in
his eyes, meant sewing clothes for us in the United States.
But surely, I
said, efficiency was not the only criterion. A farmer’s connection to
the land, healthy and dignified work, a parent's ability to spend time
with his or her kids after school, a community staying intact generation
after generation - didn’t all these things have value?
"Well," he said, "if a Haitian really wants to farm, there is room
for a handful of them to grow things like organic mangoes for the
high-end export market." That's right: USAID's plan for the people of
Haiti was not self-determination, but as a market for our surplus rice
and a supplier of cheap seamstresses, with an occasional organic mango
for sale at our gourmet grocery stores.
By 2008 Haiti was importing 80 percent of its rice. This left the
world's poorest country at the mercy of the global rice market.
Rising
fuel costs, global drought, and the diversion of water to more lucrative
crops - like the thirsty cotton that went into the Disney
clothing - withered worldwide rice production.
Global rice prices tripled
over a few months, leaving thousands of Haitians unable to afford their
staple food.
The New York Times carried stories of Haitians forced to resort to eating mud pies, held together with bits of lard.
But that's not all
Whew. Global inequality, poverty, hunger, agricultural subsidies,
privatization of natural resources, economic imperialism - it’s the whole
messy saga of the entire world economy tangled up in a few square yards
of cloth.
And we haven't even touched on a range of other environmental
and social issues around the production, sale, and disposal of cotton
clothing.
Cotton is the world's dirtiest crop. It uses more dangerous
insecticides than any other major commodity and is very water intensive.
Cotton growing wouldn’t even be possible in areas like California's
Central Valley if big cotton plantations didn't receive millions of
dollars in federal water subsidies - even as some of the poverty-stricken
farmworker towns in the Valley have no fresh water.
Dyeing and bleaching raw cotton into cloth uses large amounts of
toxic chemicals. Many of these chemicals - including known carcinogens
such as formaldehyde and heavy metals - poison groundwater near cotton
mills, and residues remain in the finished products we put next to our
skin.
Well-made cotton clothing - like my 30-year-old Grateful Dead
T-shirt - can last a long time, providing years of service for multiple
wearers before being recycled into new clothes or other products.
But
most retailers are so intent on selling a never-ending stream of new
clothes to their targeted demographic that they quickly throw away
clothing in last season's style.
And here’s one more problem with stuff: we're not sharing it well.
While some of us have way too much stuff - we’re actually stressed out by
the clutter in our households and have to rent off-site storage
units - others desperately need more.
For those of us in the overconsuming parts of the world, it's
increasingly clear that more stuff doesn’t make us more happy, but for
the millions of people who need housing, clothes, and food, more stuff
would actually lead to healthier, happier people.
If you have only one
T-shirt, getting a second one is a big deal. But if you have a drawer
stuffed with them, as I do, a new one doesn’t improve my life. It just
increases my clutter. Call it stuff inequity. One billion people on the
planet are chronically hungry while another billion are obese.
Citizens, not consumers
The problems surrounding the trip from the cotton field to the
sweatshop are just a smattering of the ills that not only result from
the take-make-waste economy but make it possible. That’s why striving to
make responsible choices at the individual consumer level, while good,
is just not enough.
Change on the scale required by the severity of
today's planetary and social crises requires a broader vision and a plan
for addressing the root causes of the problem.
To do that we must stop thinking of ourselves primarily as consumers
and start thinking and acting like citizens.
That's because the most
important decisions about stuff are not those made in the supermarket or
department store aisles. They are made in the halls of government and
business, where decisions are made about what to make, what materials to
use, and what standards to uphold.
Consumerism, even when it tries to embrace "sustainable" products, is
a set of values that teaches us to define ourselves, communicate our
identity, and seek meaning through acquisition of stuff, rather than
through our values and activities and our community.
Today we're so
steeped in consumer culture that we head to the mall even when our
houses and garages are full. We suffer angst over the adequacy of our
belongings and amass crushing credit card debt to, as the author Dave
Ramsey says, buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have, to
impress people we don't like.
Citizenship, on the other hand, is about what Eric Liu, in
The Gardens of Democracy,
calls "how you show up in the world."
It’s taking seriously our
responsibility to work for broad, deep change that doesn’t tinker around
the margins of the system but achieves (forgive the activist-speak) a
paradigm shift.
Even "ethical consumerism" is generally limited to
choosing the most responsible item on the menu, which often leaves us
choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Citizenship means working to
change what’s on the menu, and stuff that trashes the planet or harms
people just doesn’t belong. Citizenship means stepping beyond the
comfort zones of everyday life and working with other committed citizens
to make big, lasting change.
One of our best models of citizenship in the United States is the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It’s a myth that when Rosa Parks
refused to move to the back of the bus it was a spontaneous act of
individual conscience.
She was part of a network of thousands of
activists who mapped out their campaign, trained to be ready for the
struggles to come, then put their bodies on the line in carefully
planned civil disobedience.
Consumer-based actions, such as boycotting
segregated buses or lunch counters, were part of the campaign, but were
done collectively and strategically. That model has been used, with
varying degrees of success, in the environmental, gay rights,
pro-choice, and other movements.
But consumer action alone - absent that
larger citizen-led campaign - isn't enough to create deep change.
So yes, it is important to be conscious of our consumer decisions.
But we're most powerful when this is connected to collective efforts for
bigger structural change.
As individuals, we can use less stuff if we
remember to look inward and evaluate our well-being by our health, the
strength of our friendships, and the richness of our hobbies and civic
endeavors.
And we can make even more progress by working together - as
citizens, not consumers - to strengthen laws and business practices
increasing efficiency and reducing waste.
As individuals, we can use less toxic stuff by prioritizing organic
products, avoiding toxic additives, and ensuring safe recycling of our
stuff. But we can achieve much more as citizens demanding tougher laws
and cleaner production systems that protect public health overall.
And
there are many ways we can share more, like my community of several
families does. Since we share our stuff, we only need one tall ladder,
one pickup truck, and one set of power tools.
This means we need to buy,
own, and dispose of less stuff. From public tool lending libraries to
online peer-to-peer sharing platforms, there are many avenues for
scaling sharing efforts from the neighborhood to the national level.
We can't avoid buying and using stuff. But we can work to reclaim our
relationship to it. We used to own our stuff; now our stuff owns us.
How can we restore the proper balance?
I remember talking to Colin Beavan, aka
No Impact Man,
at the end of his year of living as low impact as he could manage in
New York City: no waste, no preprocessed meals, no television, no cars,
no buying new stuff. He shared with me his surprise at journalists
calling to ask what he most missed, what he was going to run out and
consume.
What he said has stayed with me as a perfect summation of the shift
in thinking we all need to save the world - and ourselves - from stuff.
"They assumed I just finished a year of deprivation," Colin said.
"But I realized that it was the prior 35 years that had been deprived. I
worked around the clock, rushed home late and exhausted, ate take-out
food, and plopped down to watch TV until it was time to take out the
trash, go to sleep, and start all over again. That was deprivation."
Fortunately for the planet and for us, there is another way.
Annie Leonard wrote this article for
The Human Cost of Stuff, the Fall 2013 issue of
YES! Magazine. Leonard’s
“Story of...” series started with the 2007 “Story of Stuff” and now includes eight titles.
