The Story of Stuff - The Local Truth of the Global Econony

You may remember the George Carlin routine about the absurd human attachment to stuff . . . about a house being "just a pile of stuff with a cover on it" and a suitcase (portable stuff) being a smaller version of that house.

The short film The Story of Stuff puts our mounds of stuff in a global context, showing how a culture's over-consumption affects so much more than the wallet and the waistline. The film is a clean, rapid-fire 20 minutes of cause and effect: this is how stuff begins, this is how it ends, and this is the unsustainable and unhealthy global economy it creates along the way.

Annie Leonard, writer and narrator of Story of Stuff lives in California and honed her perspective through environmental studies and in her travels around the world. Her narration makes the clear links between resource exploitation and the abundance of goods, between environmental toxics and the mass production process.

The film screened in Berkeley in early December and will show again at the Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists Hall (1924 Cedar) on January 18 (7p).

A free download of the 20-minute film is also available at the Story of Stuff website. The production company Free Range Studios (with offices in Washington D.C. and in Berkeley) cites 250,000 views of their film in the first week alone.

More about the Story of Stuff:

• Film Biography
• Annie Leonard Biography
• Story of Stuff Downloads

^{Image Courtesy of The Story of Stuff}