The Story of Stuff

I believe the video does a great job in achieving its purpose as an eye-opener. It definitely makes you think more about the consumption cycle we are in. It is a lot like Jensen's article "Forget Shorter Showers" in that it is going to make you a little angry because it makes you feel helpless. I do think the video does a great job in simplifying the situation we've created so that the viewer understands. Annie Leonard brings up great examples to make her point. One of the statistics she brought up the stood out in my head was that we have used up 30% of the planets resources in the past fifty years. Thats a staggering number and a tremendous rate of waste. Another point she made that caught my attention was that for every barrel of trash I bring out to the end of the street, that there is approximately 70 barrels of trash in the production of the waste I'm throwing away. Sometimes we become very product oriented and neglect to look at the process and how we get all this stuff. A lot of different people and environment come into the picture of the production and its important not to overlook that. People like to put things we don't want for someone else to deal with and in any case that's not a great plan. All in all I thought it was a good video, a little strong, but it definitely gets its point across.