The story of stuff - EXACTLY how it is.

Close your eyes, you need to concentrate. Wait, don't. You won't be able to read this. So don't close your eyes, but eliminate all distractions from your environment. Turn off the music, let the dog outside, placate the children, do whatever you have to do to create twenty five minutes of free time.

Do it, it's important. This concerns your life, and the life of your children and their children. This is about the very future of mankind itself.

Imagine the planet as a train. Imagine that as the train gains passengers (population), it picks up speed. Over time, it gains more passengers, and picks up more speed. I suppose you'd want to know it's eventual destination right? It's destination is a wall.

Do you really want to be in that train when it hits?

We live on a planet, with finite resources. This means that nothing (other than solar radiation and a bit of space dust) comes in, and nothing goes out. What's on this planet is all we have, and when we run out, it's gone.

Consider how you live. What do you do when you don't like the colour of your kitchen cabinets anymore? When your shoes become unfashionable? How many bags of garbage do you put to the curb every week?

And where does it go?

If you answered, I buy more stuff, I put lots of garbage out, and it goes to the landfill, those are the answers I was looking for, those were the truthful answers.

Let me ask you this. If the earth is a finite system, and all it's stuff is filtering through you to the landfill, what happens when the earth runs out of stuff?

Haven't thought of that did you. You were too busy enjoying all your stuff, and shopping for new stuff.

That's the problem. We're complacently running ourselves faster and faster into that wall, towards certain doom, and the best that we can do is put it out of our minds and go shopping, for more stuff.

But don't take my word for it, I'm just an amateur. Luckily, we have someone out there batting for us, someone who's done the research, someone who knows the straight goods. That person is Annie Leonard, and she gives us the story of stuff.

Go to her website here. Watch the flash movie. And please, pay attention. If you don't want to navigate away from this page to watch it, I have it for you below, albeit in a lesser quality version than is on her site.




I hope those of you that have watched this have taken it seriously. Please do, because in the end, it applies to us all.

Go to www.thestoryofstuff.com. Check out the resources. Develop an active interest in taking true, meaningful steps to saving our planet, and all of us that live on it. Most importantly, spread Annie's message to as many people as you can. Knowledge is power, and there is power in numbers.

Let's make a difference before we hit that wall, shall we?

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We're the problem, ok?