Annie Leonard doesn’t want it all—and neither should you.
As evidenced by the number of storage facilities dotting this great country’s landscape, it’s apparent that we are stuffed to the gills with, well, stuff. Everyday bread machines, record collections crammed into peach crates, college textbooks, and all manner of otherwise useful things are squirreled away for that day that never seems to come. According to Annie Leonard, a woman who’s made a career out of studying and lecturing on the lifecycle and impact of stuff via her 10 million-hit website, The Story of Stuff (now also in book form), not only is all this excess stuff a burden, its creation—primarily in third-world countries—is toxic for the environment, not to mention the soul. Leonard theorizes that Americans are caught up in a never-ending cycle of working harder to buy more stuff that they mistakenly think will make them happy—all at the expense of nurturing personal relationships that would. What to do? For starters, you could live like Leonard and her Berkeley neighbors. They don’t have fences and share just about everything including tape measurers and cars. Hmm. Sharing cars? To see if I could be reformed from my materialistic ways, after a recent shopping binge at Target I called her on my brand new iPhone.
Paul Kilduff: In your ideal world, will we be living like you, with your friends and neighbors on your little block there in Berkeley? No fences, you share everything, you even share cars—do you see that as the inevitable future?
Annie Leonard: Well, I think there’s going to have to be more sharing. You’re already seeing that with explosions of things like the Zipcar and those bicycle-sharing things now where you swipe your credit card and you can borrow a bicycle. There’s definitely going to be more sharing, partly because it makes much better sense economically and when we have less dollars to spend, we’re more careful: like, do I really need to own my ladder and wheelbarrow and everything when my neighbor has one? So one thing is, economically, we’re going to be looking for ways to use our dollars more efficiently. Another thing is, as resources get more and more scarce and as companies are required to internalize their externalized cuts—so the price of things actually has to reflect the real cost of them—then things are going to get more expensive. But also, especially as you get past peak oil and need to figure out other energy sources, it’s just not going to make sense to have an economy built on such hyper-individualism.
PK: I don’t really see that happening in these new suburbs, where you get in your car and you go to the mall. Where does the social interaction happen?
AL: Well, I think it can happen anywhere. But I know what you mean by those new suburbs. My sister lives in one of those McMansions in a big suburb outside of Philly, and I went there with my kid once. Her next-door neighbor had this massive climbing structure. She has two kids and I was like, “Oh cool. Ask your neighbor. Can we climb over in their climbing structure?” And she said, “I don’t know them.” I said, “What? You have two kids and your next door neighbor has a giant climbing structure and you don’t know them?”
PK: Yeah.
AL: Like, we all have our keys to each other’s houses.
PK: What? Really?
AL: Yeah, really.
PK: Wow.
AL: And we all know where each other’s gas turn-off is and earthquake emergency boxes and we all have each other’s kids’ school’s phone numbers. We take care of each other. We got each other’s back. Even though we share a lot of stuff, we use way more resources than the average person on this planet and way more resources than the planet can sustain. Our main thing that we do that’s really not sustainable is we still all take airplanes regularly.
PK: Well, I was going to ask you about that. Al Gore and John Travolta and other people who have been talking about global warming have been criticized for this, flying all over the world using up all this jet fuel to talk about global warming. Is there a contradiction there?
AL: There is. I do my best at home. Like I have my whole house on solar power and I have a little neighborhood electric vehicle that is 99 percent of my driving so it’s powered by my solar system. I don’t use my dryer. I use a clothesline. I do as many things as I can at home. That said, I know that one flight cancels out all of that for a year. I try to consolidate my events so that I can travel as efficiently as possible.
PK: Can you just do video conferencing?
AL: I cannot keep traveling around the country giving this goddamn talk. And so I made this film so they can just watch the film—and it’s so funny. Now I have like 10 times more speaking invitations. We could use video conferencing and we do that a lot. There’s definitely more of a move toward that.
PK: Yes, you know what you can do? You can do what your enemy Glenn Beck does. You could just rent out movie theaters and give a big presentation. Maybe Glenn Beck can produce that for you.
AL: We do a lot of that and the video has reached over 10 million people so I didn’t have to travel all over for that. You can’t organize someone solely through the Internet or through film. I mean, organizing requires—
PK: Well, wait a second. Meg Whitman may be our next governor and she’s not doing much organizing. I mean, it’s all just TV ads, right? I mean bombarding people with it.
AL: That’s not organizing people. That’s mobilizing people. I’m talking about organizing people.
PK: But it’s working for her, isn’t it?
AL: It’s working for her to do what?
PK: She might be our next governor. She’s not shaking anybody’s hand. She’s not kissing babies.
AL: Yeah, but that’s not organizing. I’m talking about organizing. It’s different. It’s one thing if you want to get them to vote for you. That’s just mobilizing. You can do that by buying a bunch of ads. I’m looking for something much bigger. I’m looking for inspiring people to engage in a political process in a long-term meaningful way to redefine how we live in this society. I can’t do that by blasting them with commercials.
PK: Okay, well why don’t you run for some office then?
AL: I might, at some point.
PK: Oh come on. You would be good.
AL: There’s two things. I don’t have enough experience and wisdom. I’m so mortified with the low caliber of our recent mayoral candidates.
PK: Well, forget mayor. I mean, you don’t need to be mayor of Berkeley. How about being assemblyperson or [in] the senate or something?
AL: You know, I might at some point.
PK: We need you. We need somebody like you, Annie. You organize people, you’ve got a motor mouth. I mean, come on, you could do it.
AL: Two things. One is, I need more experience.
PK: I don’t agree with that. I think you have plenty of experience.
AL: I’m a single mom with a 10-year-old kid. And when you’re a single parent, especially one that works and travels as much as I do, it’s a challenge. I feel like she is having to have a lot of nights staying with her friends. And so she and I have made a deal that I won’t run for office until she goes to college.
PK: What office in particular?
AL: Oh, I don’t know. Wherever I can make the biggest change. I’m not sure where it is. It might be office, it might not. But I’m really positive that we can turn this society around and so whatever way I can help do that, I want to do.
PK: Obviously, a big part of your message is combating mindless consumerism. How does that become cool in our society?
AL: I love that lots of people are beginning to question themselves. Like I’m sure you’ve heard about Warren Buffet’s recent pledge?
PK: Right, yeah. Giving all his money away.
AL: Did you read his actual pledge letter?
PK: No, I didn’t.
AL: It’s on the Web and it’s a beautiful letter. And he says he knows that he amassed great wealth, partly it’s a little bit of the gene pool, but [also] because of opportunity, because of living in America. He said being white and male helped a lot. He is not [saying], “I think that I’m rich because I’m better than all of you.” He said, “I had some really good luck and it’s time to give back.” I think that high-visibility rich people who perpetuate a different kind of value system are really wonderful and I’d like to see more of them.
PK: Is what’s driving mindless consumerism that people just get bored with stuff and want to replace it?
AL: I don’t think you would if you got something really timeless. But if you were soon bored and tired, I would not advocate buying a new pair of shoes. I’d advocate go on a hike, take a class, go to the museum. There’s a lot of other things you can do to stimulate and excite and continue to grow and evolve as a human being that don’t involve consumption. And those things provide a much longer-lasting kind of happiness. It’s really interesting—if you look at the studies in the field of happiness science, over and over what all these studies find is that across economic groups, across ethnicity, across age groups, across cultures, once your basic needs are met, once your stomach is full and you’ve got education and health care and food, the roof over your head, once your basic needs are met, more stuff doesn’t actually make you happy. The things that make you happy are the quality of your social relationships, having a sense of purpose beyond yourself and the act of coming together with others toward shared goals. One of the things that I think is most important is to develop an internal metric of satisfaction, so I say my shoes are fine, regardless of what shoes Angelina Jolie has.
PK: Don’t you ever get tired of them? Just want to toss them?
AL: I have a few of these Dansko clogs, you’re just going to wear them forever. And I’m tired of just having too many shoes in my closet so I can’t shut the door. I feel like we used to own our stuff and now our stuff owns us. Getting rid of stuff is cathartic. I had to go to Target the other day . . .
PK: Wait a minute! You went to Target?
AL: I’m not against stuff. I’m against stuff that trashes the planet.
PK: And what happens when you go into Target? I mean, people give you strange looks?
AL: I walk in and look at the prices of stuff and watch people to just get a sense of how they shop and what they’re doing.
PK: That is America. What did you need at Target?
AL: I’m trying to remember. I know, it was a bag of candy for the Easter basket. That’s what I needed.
PK: Well, you’re excused. You can get that.
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For more Kilduff, go to thekilduff-file.blogspot.com.
Age: 45
Birthplace: Seattle
Astrological sign: My sign? I’m a Virgo, can you tell?
Planet you’d emigrate to and why?: I wouldn’t. I would stay right here. I’d actually rather fight to make it so that we don’t destroy the systems on which life depends here.
I mean, what if Mars opened up? Man, there is nothing like looking at the tree outside my window right now.
Website: thestoryofstuff.com
