Summary/Strong Response essay

James Gartland

Mr. Eric Earnhardt

English 151

4 March 2011

In Response to The Story of Stuff

The materials economy is the process in which materials are extracted, produced into goods, distributed to consumers and disposed. This is a fundamental system to the global economy which has been used for many years, but is the system broken? Although the materials economy has made it easy and convenient to obtain various goods at affordable prices, it needs to be reexamined and reorganized.

The Story of Stuff is a brief animated video by Annie Leonard, published on December 4, 2007. In the video, she argues that the materials economy is a broken, linear system which needs to be reformed into a cyclical system. She separates the system into five stages, extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. She then goes through each of the stages and explains the problems in each stage. Although the video is easily understood and provides many good arguments against the current system, it misrepresents many of its stages in order to simplify the explanation.

Leonard begins her description of extraction by providing terms which she claims are synonymous to extraction. She says extraction is another way of saying natural resource exploitation, or trashing the planet. It is understandable to try to put extraction in simple terms to make the video comprehensible to a large audience, but opening the section in this way is needlessly biased against the system and “trashing the planet” is a terribly inaccurate explanation of the extraction process. There is some truth to the explanation because of the negative impacts extraction has on the environment, but Leonard misses the point of extraction completely. She then says that this process is when “we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals” (Leonard 2). This essentially opens the video by arguing that the purpose of the first stage of the materials economy is to commit acts of evil against nature. In this simplified explanation, Leonard is being unfair to the current system by failing to mention any positive side of extraction, which is that it is the process by which the world collects resources and without it there would be no food, water, or any material goods. In her attempt to simplify the information, she left out the purpose of extraction when stating its environmental consequences. Although the inaccuracy of the opening explanation of extraction makes Leonard appear to lack a good understanding of the materials economy, she actually follows it with intelligent arguments which support her thesis well and shows that she knows what she is talking about.

Leonard has the same problem when discussing the next stage of the materials economy, production. She says that production is when “we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products” (Leonard 4). This again fails to mention the purpose of production and harshly reiterates that step two of the system is to be evil. She ignores that production is how natural resources are made into our food and material goods and instead portrays it as the process by which the materials economy poisons the consumers. Leonard's continued insistence that the materials economy only exists to damage people and the environment destroys her credibility.

Her explanation of the next step, distribution, restates that the products are toxic and contaminated, but unlike the previous two stages, she mentions the actual goal of this stage, which is to sell the products. Although she has a better explanation of this stage, its purpose is only mentioned very briefly, and then she goes back to ignoring the positive aspects of distribution. Even though this section of the video also fails to give a fair chance to the current system, it argues her thesis better than the previous sections. This is because Leonard claims that the goal of extraction is destroying the earth and the goal of production is poisoning the resources, but when she describes distribution, she says that its goal is to sell everything as fast as possible. Unlike the first and second stages, this one has a believable purpose which makes her argument seem more credible than simply stating that it is evil.

The Story of Stuff is a concise and easily understandable video which argues that there needs to be changes made in the current materials economy. It presents many valid points ina simplistic manner, but some parts of it are oversimplified to a point which they simply misrepresent the actual facts. Although Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff offers many good examples and convincing evidence against the current materials economy, the presentation of most of the stages is damages to the credibility of the video and is detrimental to the persuasiveness of its arguments.