All over the United States taxpayer funded public schools are teaching this little lesson? It’s from a documentary, The Story of Stuff, and it’s about how the developed world, especially America, destroys everything it touches to make stuff no one needs and then dumps it and kills all the animals.
We’ll start with extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals. — The Story of Stuff
This and other ‘teachable moments’ are being brought to a classroom near you by The Story of Stuff. According to the New York Times it has been watched by over 7 million children in the US. Annie Leonard, the filmmaker, says she spent 10 years traveling the globe collecting the information contained in the 20-minute film.
It’s hard to know where to start with Leonard. Is it the fact that she had enough “stuff” to spend 10 years on the film; or the amount of stuff she used making the film; cameras, computers, planes and cars; or the fact that everything about her life is based on the very “stuff ” she so abhors; or is it that pretty much everything she says is false.
For now lets ignore Leonard as another spoilt idiotic Californian (whose life has been gorgeously enriched by “extraction” and who conveniently ignores that in this anti-extraction sermon) and concentrate on how a documentary that has so many factual inaccuracies is being shown to so many impressionable children by their teachers.
Lets look at a few simple facts.
All our buildings including our schools and Annie Leonard’s home in San Francisco are built from “stuff” that has been either mined or grown. That’s a good thing, right? It’s important kids know this and appreciate this.
Extracting or growing this stuff is subject to rules called laws, which exist everywhere. Leonard is particularly harsh on corporations because they are big, she fails to mention that a great thing about them being big is that they are subject to lots and lots of rules (some of the rules are silly, but no matter) and also because they are big journalists are always investigating them to make sure they don’t break the rules and that’s very good too.
Problem is when children see Leonard’s film in the classroom they don’t get to hear about all the good things stuff does. Stuff gave my Dad a hip replacement at 91; I think that’s good. Hospitals use loads of stuff so people don’t die really young like they do in places where there’s very little stuff. Your bicycle is made of stuff and your computer is made of loads of stuff not to mention your car. Artists use lots of stuff to make other stuff that they hope someone might like, like jewelry or movies or sculpture or paintings. Lots of stuff allows us to travel much further than our bicycle will take us, it allowed 45,000 people to travel from all over the world to Copenhagen in December 2009 to campaign against other people traveling across the world.
Stuff builds homes so people are protected from the elements and don’t die just because it rained for a week. And stuff is nice to eat. I like sushi and chicken pie and avocado, not necessarily together. People who don’t have access to enough stuff die all the time in places like Africa and that is really not good. Stuff brings water to places that would never ever, ever get water otherwise and that’s good because you can’t live without water.
Making stuff, even silly stuff gives someone somewhere a job that didn’t exist before and that allows his kids go to school and people to get all the other stuff that makes life lovely.
So children you see stuff is great, stuff makes life bearable, beautiful, long, healthy and free. Now there’s a lesson we all need to learn.
The Story of Stuff has been shown to seven million children in classrooms. If your children have not seen it the chances are that they will someday soon most probably on Earth Day later this month. Or they have seen that other error-ridden documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I have even heard from parents whose children have been forced to watch The Day After Tomorrow in their science class.
Children are receiving a very unbalanced education about how their world works and parents are getting angry and demanding change. To meet that demand we have decided to make our documentary Not Evil Just Wrong free to any school that will agree to show it.
The documentary examines Global Warming hysteria and some of the bigger flaws in Global Warming science. It also looks at how making stuff needs energy from fossil fuels and how that energy means life for billions of people across the planet.
To find out how you can help restore balance and debate to your child’s classroom go to www.balanced-ed.org.
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