A Critique on "Story of Stuff: The Critique"

This is a critique on the "Story of Stuff", an educational documentary of materials economy and its environmental effects, put in layman's terms, and the accompanying "Story of Stuff: The Critique". The "Story of Stuff" is a video by Annie Leonard, a former employee of Greenpeace. The video critique was done by Lee Doren, codenamed "HowTheWorldWorks". He seems to be a popular "disagreer" on YouTube, and already has many video rebuttals to his name. It would seem quite a few have a high regard of him - but I will focus only on this particular critique. I will refer to the critic as "he" or "him", and the Story of Stuff as "SOS".

Since this is a text critique of a video, it certainly wouldn't be as methodically effective as the subject (which is a video critique of another video). So before reading on, you'll have to watch the 5 videos yourself. See links below for the videos.1

Note: I realized just before finishing Part I that the whole critique is just too long, and the number of statements I want to react to just too many, so I will just skim through parts 2 to 4. I can’t have this critique take all of my time after all.

Part I ~~~ "It has caused 9-year-olds to fear that buying Legos will destroy the Earth." ~~~

So what? The thing is, he's manipulating his words to turn a fact in his favor. Here's the REAL article:

"... 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."2

A 9-year-old, already caring for the environment? I'd say Rafael's a better man than many others out there. It's amazing how he (Mr. Critic) has turned something so applaudable into something the world should somehow avoid.

~~~ “The fact of the matter is the Earth is compacted with tons of tons of resources we don’t even know how to use yet.” ~~~

What is he trying to say? He might have meant no harm, but no matter how I look at the statement and at how it was molded into an argument, a single unmistakable meaning comes out – “We should just enjoy our lives as we always did. After all, there are still “tons and tons of resources” we can take advantage of from this Earth.” Enjoy our lives, as in consume and consume from the environment and give nothing back? So we should just sit back and wait for those tons and tons to be somehow depleted, and only then take action? That’s a lot of rubbish! Actually, I personally don’t understand why that whole “Efficiency vs. Prices” argument was even mentioned here. Or maybe it was just explained the wrong way – stated inefficiently, so to speak.

~~~ “More than 50% of tax $ according to who?” ~~~I have nothing much to say about this since I know little of tax pie charts as used in the

video. All I can say is that if SOS used only a single source, and probably a biased one* since it is from an anti-military activist group, Annie should not have mentioned that part about tax.* No offense, but it is a popular notion that activists are biased one way or another

~~~ “I was curious where on earth she got the idea that it was the government’s job to take care of us, well, it turns out that it was a misreading of the Constitution.” ~~~

I ask you, what is the target audience of SOS? Isn’t it school children, elementary to high school? So for these younger ones, would you include in a video documentary quotations from the

Preamble of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Declaration of Independence? No, I doubt you’d even use the phrase “promote the general welfare” to describe the government’s “job”. “Take care of us” certainly is the closest thing you could get to translating “promote the general welfare” into layman’s terms.

Imagine, if a kid asks you, “what does she mean by “promoting our general welfare”?” Would you go into detail about the creation of the Constitution? Say, maybe, “James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, said that the words “general welfare” could be misinterpreted in unlimited ways that the creators were not able to contemplate.” Let’s assume that for some big chance, the child understood you. Wouldn’t that just mean that the Preamble is erroneous? And if the Preamble is erroneous, what would that make the Constitution? What would that make the civilization that was built on this Constitution? I believe it’s just safer to give the children that interpretation that the government is there to “take care of us”. Let them build on that theory as they grow up.

~~~ “So what, the fact of the matter is that this is based on sales that means the corporations are providing goods and services that the people need to survive, and it is a meaningless statistic.” ~~~

Preceding this statement, he admits that “country GDPs include some corporations’ sales”. This means that the SOS statistic, “Of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are corporations, only 49 are countries” may be even worse. If we were able to separate the country GDPs from the corporate sales, the ratio might turn out to be higher in favor of corporations.

Is this really such “a meaningless statistic”? I wonder, why then did he not support his statement as to how come it is, for him, a meaningless statistic? I think SOS was just trying to say that corporations are now more influential in terms of human welfare than the governments themselves. This just feels wrong to me. Yes, corporations provide goods and services for the people. But “goods and services that the people need to survive”? I disagree. Needless to say, the corporation is not the only form of business that can provide goods and services. My view of business corporations is that of a humanoid devoid of conscience, which is probably also its best advantage from the perspective of entrepreneurs. Corporations are run by a select circle of people, with a moderator to mediate which decisions are best for the business. And what is best for the business is what generates the most profit. These decisions might not have been possible had it been in the hands of a single person as it would weigh greatly on his conscience (as compared to when the weight of the matter is borne by several). In this way, governments and corporations differ. Again, from my own outlook, governments are “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. It exists for “the general welfare”, and here I agree that there are differences between this phrase and “taking care of us”. Corporations sell goods and services to “take care of us”, because we are customers and we are the source of profit. But who is this “us”, and who is this “we”? It is only for those with the capability – yes, money – to avail of those goods and services. Thus, it is not for the “general welfare”, but only for “the welfare of the moneyed ones”. Therefore, it is NOT meaningless to inform people of the current state of the top 100 economies. It is simply not right that the corporation has the upper hand over the government when it is the latter that really does “care” about its people.

~~~ “Unions… Environmental Organizations… Trial Lawyers…” ~~~As stated before, what sets SOS apart from counterpart documentaries is that it is in

“layman’s terms” – designed to be the most straightforward, yet simple and easy to understand. How can you include unions and trial lawyers and still expect it to be easily understood? I, myself, don’t even know how these work, but I know for sure that corporations have the largest influence on governments, even among these. Why? Unions work to provide security and acquire better working conditions for its members. Wouldn’t these work more directly on the corporations than the governments? And maybe I’ve been reading too much (this is an honest question), but aren’t trial lawyers in this case “owned” by the powerful corporations? And the most distressing,

“Environmental Organizations… that are having everybody buy wind plants and solar plants, and all this other nonsense.” Nonsense, he says! Building energy plants based on renewable resources like wind and solar energy, cutting down dependence on non-renewable resources like coal and oil, and in the process, reducing waste and pollution output; where is the “nonsense” in that? From a spendthrift’s point of view, the nonsense would be the cost of building these plants relative to the energy output. But let’s face it; we’re in an “environmental age”. People would not just stand down while their planet is being “trashed” (as Annie said) just to increase profits. It might even be better for countries to switch to renewable energy than find more oil sources, since we’re running out of oil, after all.

~~~ “Yes, we cut down trees and replant them to make life possible for most of the people on this planet… Waters have been cleaner than they’ve ever been in the last couple decades. And yes, people who eat meat do it to increase their standard of living and also to make life possible for people on this planet.” ~~~

He’s been saying that Annie’s words can be easily misinterpreted. He should have been more careful about his own words then. “We cut down trees to make life possible for this planet”? And again, “we eat meat also to make life possible for this planet”? He seems to have some sort of twisted perception that “life” refers only to “human life”. First, yes, we once needed, and for the less developed countries, still need, trees for wood to build our homes with. But just saying “we cut down trees” takes for granted the sheer magnitude of the logging industry. He even added “and replant them”, yet we can never replant enough to counterbalance the staggering amount of trees cut down around the globe in a year. Just to share some facts,

From 1990 to 2000, the net forest loss was 8.9 million hectares per year. From 2000 to 2005, the net forest loss was 7.3 million hectares per year - an area the size

of Sierra Leone or Panama and equivalent to 200 km2 per day.3

Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year.4

Though the net rate has decreased in recent years, 200 square kilometers per day is just way too much! It’s much too much indeed just to make “human life possible” in the demise of the inferior, unimportant, “non-human” species.

~~~ “As resources become more and more scarce, the supply of those resources decreases, and then the price of those resources increases. That makes people naturally not buy those resources and look for alternative resources that are cheaper. That is what’s going to happen once we start running out of resources, and nothing needs to be done about it.” ~~~

Now this is the right time for this argument to come onstage. It really doesn’t mean much in the context of the earlier part. I understand his point, but I still think something’s wrong. When SOS said “we’re running out of resources”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will completely run out of particular resources. In fact, I also believe we would never run out of any non-biological resource. But when we say that a certain resource has become so scarce that it becomes so difficult to extract, and in turn becomes too expensive, wouldn’t we consider it much the same as when it is completely depleted?

Next is the part about “nothing needs to be done about it.” Bringing back the critic’s model of an “unscratched Earth, with tons and tons of natural resources”, how are we ever going to extract those? He said that resources are not resources until we know how to use them. Yes, we know the Earth’s core’s composition, and we know that we can use it. But in this case, wouldn’t the definition of “resources” include “extractability”, or whatever term it is to describe any possibility of acquiring the said resources? The resources we are dealing with here are resources up to only a certain depth into the Earth’s crust. Why? Because it is only up to this point that we have know-how of resource extraction with a net cost lower than the resource’s worth. And because we’re dealing with a finite area of feasible resource extraction, we may just one day “run out of

resources” and have no “alternative resources” to look for. Unless, of course, if it’s our renewable ones.

~~~ “If they were true, life expectancy projections would be decreasing rather than increasing.” ~~~

Yes, it would seem from SOS’s statement, “… we are trashing the planet so fast that we are undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live here” that they meant that people should be dying off at an alarming rate all over the globe. Both parties are partly wrong here in that they used too generalized ideas. Cutting off the SOS exaggerations a bit, that would have been the right ideas to tell young students. It most certainly isn’t a projection of a developing country’s life expectancy average, since women has an average of 80 years and men 74 years by 2010.* In this case, he should have used a life expectancy chart of a third world country since, in this century, these countries suffer the most from “trashing the planet”. They do it to try and stay alive – bad, but understandable since their only choices are likely “to live or to die”– but what makes matters worse is that developed countries have to take part in the trashing of the poor countries. To be more specific, it is the corporations that do the manipulating from the shadows; with some smooth talk and a “little” money, they can somehow become law-proof. This I learned from my own research project.* He explained in a later part that the chart was a projection of average global life expectancy.

~~~ “Okay, that quote that she just gave* is a blatant falsehood and should disqualify this video from being shown in classrooms throughout America because it’s patently not true… * “We have less than 4% of our original forests.”

From the footnotes of SOS, the actual statements go “Ninety five to ninety eight percent of forests in the continental United States have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans” and “1 to 2 percent of original forests in the U.S. remain undisturbed”. “He” says that Annie’s quote was a “blatant falsehood”. I can’t see how it is a “falsehood”, much less “blatant”. He even followed up by “it doesn’t mean they’re gone forever, it means they can be logged multiple times when the trees are planted again.” Apparently, whether accidental or on purpose, I don’t know, he didn’t notice that Annie said “We have less than 4% of our original forests.” I’d say they just got the average of “2-5% left” for the first statement and “1-2% left” for the second, played it safe and said “less than 4% left”. See? If there was any error here, it was the propaganda of using an alarming percentage as 4% to smokescreen the fact that it was a statistic of “original forests left” and not “actual forests left”.

~~~ “She says* “have become undrinkable”… You go to any river 200 years ago and drink out of it, you’re gonna get sick.” ~~~*” 40% of the waterways have become undrinkable.”

Excerpt from the footnotes, “Today, 40 percent of our nation’s rivers are unfishable, unswimmable, or undrinkable.” It IS wrong that SOS stated this statistic as something factual when their resource didn’t indicate exactly what they said. From common sense though, when you say that a river is unswimmable, it could either be that it is too small for swimming, too dangerous because of the creatures there, or too hazardous to health because it is too polluted. When you say a river is unfishable, it means there are little or no fish there to catch because of pollution or probably some other kind of human intervention. Let us assume that the majority of these cases would be caused by pollution, as I would estimate. This means that majority of unfishable or unswimmable rivers are also undrinkable.

I wonder about that part of “getting sick from drinking from any river 200 years ago”. Why 200 years ago? Why not go further back? Maybe because it is along that era that industries began polluting rivers, so that we really will get sick when we drink from it. And one more thing, I don’t think SOS meant that “undrinkable” as “not being able to drink from the river directly.” That’s assuming too much. People still have to do what they can to clean the water, like boiling it, as the

critic advised. But when boiling doesn’t work, that is, for industry-polluted waters, only then it would be considered “undrinkable.” ~~~ “This is another worthless statistic. The United States uses resources more efficiently than any place on the planet, we use resources more productively than any place on the planet, and we happen to feed half the population. We should be using these resources because the rest of the world will be dead if we didn’t.” ~~~

Do I even need to do any critique on this one? He’s practically asking for trouble here… No, maybe, war? I wonder what the other leading countries would say about this. I also wonder how gross efficiency and productivity is calculated for a country as big as the United States. AND I sincerely doubt that “the rest of the world will be dead if the U.S. didn’t use resources.” What are we? Newborns perpetually dependent on the U.S.? Maybe quadruple amputees? And what are they? The U.S., our super hero and knight in shining armor? I have nothing against Americans. Only those, American or not, with just such a high-and-mighty attitude over the rest of the world.

Okay, back to the logic. Here we go again with the “worthless statistic”. SOS said, “We have 5% of the world’s population, but we’re using 30% of the world’s resources, and creating 30% of the world’s waste.” How could this be “worthless”? The critic answered the quoted paragraph above to explain why it is worthless. It has the warped idea that only those with power have the right to use resources. In effect, the popular “Might is right”, and maybe even Machiavelli’s “The end justifies the means”. The end – that the U.S. uses resources most efficiently and productively – justifies the means – which is taking over other countries’ share of the world’s resources. Well then, let us create a fictional event. What if an alien race visits the Earth – an alien civilization much, much more powerful and intelligent than humans. They give the United States a choice: run your land as inefficiently and destructively as you’ve always done, or let us “help” and run your land for you. What would they choose? My best guess is that they’ll try to drive away the aliens because they know the latter is only trying to take over their land. But the aliens believe that humans are just too stupid to think of what’s best for their own sake, so they ignore the puny insignificant things and proceed taking over the land. Tell me then; how much difference is there between this story and the story of America’s take over of the poor people’s land?

~~~ “This is such a tired leftist dogma. It’s called “trade.” We give them capital and our new technology and they provide labor and resources and both parties are better off than they were before.” ~~~

Is ignorance a fault? Maybe yes, but what about ignorance that could have been prevented? In many cases, I’ve read about this propaganda that developed countries (and corporations) use to lure the underdeveloped countries into agreeing to their side of the deal. They tell the people only the positive aspects that the poor people would obtain from their side of the deal, and keep the negatives to themselves. If asked why, they’d answer “they wouldn’t understand anyway.” That’s no excuse! As they say, hiding things can be the same as lying. In this case, it is. Maybe the poor people would understand enough to see that the deal is in favor of the corporations (though it’s most likely that if they can see it “in favor” of the corporation, the truth would be closer to “heavily in favor”), but without education, they would never see the negative impacts of such deals. For example, people are asked to leave their farmland to give way to a hydroelectric facility, a dam. The constructors tell the people they would be given better homes in another place, as well as electricity, thanks to the dam. The people then leave, expecting a better life somewhere else. They find themselves in a small village of stone houses, with neither land to farm nor water to drink. They would have to travel a long way to the next village for water, and be thankful if there IS water. Sometimes, people are just forced from their lands, like in the documentary “Flow”. The corporation party would be better off of course, but how about the poor they took advantage of? Best case, they would also be better off, but will have no other choice but to work for whatever deal was pushed on to them.

~~~ “What is an original forest, are we starting at Pangaea?” ~~~

This was wholly unnecessary, for a person with common sense, at the least. Maybe “original forest” means the forest that existed during their people’s first step on their land? Or maybe it IS starting at Pangaea. How stupid.

~~~ “It shouldn’t be surprising when there’s no property rights in the Amazon, the people don’t replant the trees. Stop having the governments control the resources.” ~~~

Actually, what’s happening to the Amazon really isn’t surprising.* No one said so. At least, SOS didn’t. But so what? Annie just said that “we’re losing 2000 trees a minute” in the Amazon. And why not have the governments at least try to control the resources? If they would not, who would? The corporations? Oh yeah, probably when they already own the whole Amazon Rainforest.*Seven football fields a minute really IS surprising. What is not surprising here is the fact that people would take advantage of the huge forest in the Amazon and not bother to replant it. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons.

~~~ “Again this is ridiculous. Those people’s lives are significantly improved by trading resources and labor for capital and technology.” ~~~

“In this system, if you don’t own or buy a lot of stuff, you don’t have value.” This is what he was ridiculing. Again, the people’s lives may have improved, but they would most likely have been stripped off of their choices. Yes, by staying on this path, they would steadily become better off than before, but conversely, it is just a masked system of slavery. The corporations will always gain more power from the “trade”, and the poor will become their “capital.” The poor will never get free from such a system.

End of Part I

Parting WordsWhat's the major difference between this and "his" critique? He used an objective approach

to a subjective video, a huge mismatch of sorts. I used an objective approach on "his" objective video. Why would he use objectivity on something subjective? Because using subjectivity on such a topic would be trying to cross an enormous minefield: you notice a mine, you carry your foot across it safely - only to strike another. It is a minefield of taboos on ethics, responsibilities, religion. He's already got a reputation to protect, so he must not lose, else taint his other rebuttal works. That much I can understand. But pinpointing general ideas with such specific facts is, in effect, asking for trouble. It is that much easier for his work to be countered by another objective critique.

The subjective "Story of Stuff" video is open-ended, welcoming discussions and encouraging opinions from self-reflection. It runs for only 21 minutes; some say that's for the video to be easily fit into a class discussion. Some person made a comment on YouTube. Anti-SOS would say "her words are too misleading" and "she should have included 'this' and 'that'" (like what "he" said about labor unions). Mr. Commenter might as well have said, "You activists (Pro-SOS) would say 'well, the video is too short for all that', yeah, yeah." Guy must have been proud of himself for nothing. Why? I'm no prejudiced pro-SOS, but I'd say it IS too short to include much more. Anything wrong with that? AND, I would add that I can't think of any better choice of subjects than what the SOS group has included.

1 - Story of Stuff video, http://www.storyofstuff.com/ The Critique,

Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5uJgG05xUY&feature=channelPart 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZzHU3ZfTtYPart 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgLrZc7cws8Part 4, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XeW5ilk-9Y

2 - For the complete NY Times article, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/education/11stuff.html?_r=1

3 - UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)http://www.fao.org/forestry/30515/en/

4 - Raintreehttp://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm