The Story of Stuff

A couple days ago, I started the book The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. It is mainly about the overconsumption of resources on our planet and its effect on places around the world. Throughout the piece the author also presents thoughts on solutions to these problems. In the beginning, she talks about our three most basic resources—trees, rocks, and water—and the ways they are overconsumed. Because Leonard is an environmentalist, she wants us to feel attached to trees, rocks, and water even though they are so plentiful around the world. For each one, she uses certain techniques to make us share her opinion that we need to work on saving our resources.

In her section about trees, Leonard shares her personal experience with forests in her childhood. To avoid confusing readers with the complicated issues of cutting down trees, she explains her appreciation of forests when she was a kid to show the most obvious reasons forests are worth saving. “One big reason I loved forests was the many animals that lived in them,” she writes. “Forests provide homes for about two-thirds of the species on earth.” She follows that with examples of examples of animals like parrots and monkeys. This connects us to trees because animals are very likeable and we would hate to see them disappear by deforestation. As a kid, I can relate to the author’s childhood as I also am an animal fan. Another thing the author does to connect us to trees is show the mind-boggling numbers on the rates at which our forests are being cut down. “Globally, we’ve been losing more than 7 hectares a year or 20,000 hectares—almost 50,000 acres—a day.” And to make it more reader-friendly, she provides a comparison to give us a picture on how many trees we are losing: “This is equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris each day, or about 33 football fields worth every minute.” Just thinking about how we lose a football field of trees every two seconds gives us a great understanding of the rapid loss of trees and is persuasive enough to make us strongly consider her opinion.

In the next section, to give a picture of the importance of water, Leonard compares water from a strong, healthy forest to the water from a clear-cut forest. The water from the intact forest was clear, healthy, and free of chemicals. The water from the clear-cut forest was the opposite: “The rivers below a clear-cut were cloudy, full of muck and debris, with fewer fish, bugs, and life of any kind.” Now that we know how much deforestation there is, we can imagine all of the rivers and water sources that are contaminated in those clear-cut areas. The author also connects the water in these forests to us. “The rivers in the North Cascades feed multiple watersheds from which Washington state’s population draws water for drinking, washing, and irrigation,” Leonard writes. “The health of those rivers impacts the health of bodies of water—as well as bodies of fish, birds, and people—hundreds of miles away.” Now that we have a connection to these rivers and animals, we naturally feel a little more concerned about our water.

In the section about rocks, Leonard does something different to sell us on her ideas. She takes a simple piece of jewelry—her small, gold ring—and explains its history. She starts by theorizing that the ring came from South Africa where a good portion of the world’s gold comes from. Then she presents a very surprising fact about the background of her ring. “Mining enough gold for just an average gold wedding ring creates about 20 tons of hazardous mining waste, which is dumped in rivers or the sea, or sometimes just left right where it was created, as I saw in South Africa.” By presenting this fact, she gets readers thinking about how much mining waste is produced for small pieces of gold jewelry, and how gold should rarely be purchased. This directly relates to her opinion that resources should be conserved. After that, the author explains the long and complicated process of extracting gold and all the various toxins, like cyanide, that are spread into the environment. By detailing all the damage that one gold ring can do, she gets the reader to agree that we should be making and buying less gold.

In conclusion, the author uses facts, comparisons, and personal experiences to prove her point that we need to conserve our trees, rocks, and water. For the rest of the book, I expect more references to those trees, rocks, and water that she wants so much to conserve. Just the beginning of this book has taught me a big issue in our world of which I was barely aware.