Evri + Twine Evri & Twine join forces! Read more.

Climate Change Climate Change / Items

Video Warning of Pitfalls of Consumption Is a Hit in Schools - NYTimes.com

Get Feed
Video Warning of Pitfalls of Consumption Is a Hit in Schools - NYTimes.com
Description

A Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that lag behind scientific findings on climate change and pollution. And many children who watch it take it to heart: riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos.

“When driving by a big-box store, you could see he was struggling with it,” his father, David Batker, said. But then Rafael said, “It’s O.K. if I have Legos because I’m going to keep them for a very long time,” Mr. Batker recalled.

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a ...

Original URL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/education/11stuff.html

Comments

  • Public Comments

    • Murray Peat Murray Peat
      10 months ago


      Great the message is getting into schools. We raised some of these issues in schools in China too. They had no idea...
      Energy

      • Geoffrey Ames Geoffrey Ames
        10 months ago


        The message that I hear all the time, is that parents who are so busy with life (i.e., making a living: building, buying, selling, using, wasting stuff...) remain oblivious to their everyday impact on the environment (and the long-term impact that will have on their children's children's children - "to the 7th generation" as North America's indigenous people would say...). When the kids come home from school and say, "Mommy, why don't you recycle that?" or "Daddy, why do you use so much water on our lawn?", this raises consciousness - and it's difficult to make excuses to one's children about the fact that one is destroying the planet they will inherit.
        Even an agnostic like me knows that our sins will be visited on our children.
        Energy
    Add a Comment
Report This

Twine is about discovering, collecting and sharing the content that interests you. Learn More

Stats

First Posted By

Geoffrey Ames

First Comment By

Murray Peat

Tags

Community Tags

Who's Interested In This?

Forgot your password?