The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard grew up in the 1970s in Seattle, America. As a child, one of her favourite times of the year was when she and her family would go camping in the summer in the North Cascades Mountains. This was when she first noticed that the green forests were slowly shrinking and gradually being replaced by concrete ones, such as shopping centres and residential housing. It would take much longer for Leonard to discover the cause of what was happening.

When she began a course in environmental studies at New York’s Barnard College, she noticed that the streets were overflowing with rubbish, especially waste paper, and that trees were being cut down, (just as they continue to be cut down today), in order to keep producing more and more of it. She began to analyse our consumerist society by studying waste, the last chain in the production process, and started to work on a project that would last 20 years. She studied every link in the chain, in order to identify everything that happens before and after we use products, but also to try and understand what we can do to change the way we produce and consume goods, and why we so often fail to think about the consequences of our behaviour on the planet. 

Leonard visited landfills and shopping malls around the world and found that ecological matters cannot be addressed as single issues, but must be considered as part of a whole system of connections, in which they are also linked to the economy.