April 22 is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Recently, I went to hear Annie Leonard speak on The Story of Stuff, her immensely popular web video that’s just been published as a book. She reminded all of us gathered at Seattle’s Town Hall that we cannot spend our way to sustainability.
Our consumer society may tell us the solution is to buy, buy, buy green, but a better way is to “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
She also said we cannot address sustainability issues individually—that’s just acting on our citizen’s duty—rather, we must work as a community to address larger systematic issues.
As an analogy, she told us that shopping responsibly will make us a better swimmer, but we’re still swimming against the current of waste and pollution, and we must instead tackle the problem upstream.
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I want to start by challenging the fear of sacrifice and describing one version of what life can look like when we focus on the quality of our life, rather than the quantity of our Stuff.
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Tags: Consumerism, Earth Day, Sustainability