The Core Knowledge Blog

“The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption on the environment has become “a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation,” the New York Times says.  “More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version,” the paper reports, and hundreds of teachers have written to the film’s producer to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

 

Produced and hosted by activist Annie Leonard, the video is chirpy and upbeat.  An Inconvenient Truth, it’s not.  To put it as benignly as possible, Leonard has a definite point of view.  She defines extraction, for example, as ”a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet.  What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”    The video is rife with similiar broad-brush assertions, such as Leonard’s contention that as people, “the primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we consume.”

Critics complain that the video is stridently anti-capitalist and even anti-American.  “My friends tell me I should use a tank to symbolize the government and that’s true in many countries and increasingly our own,” Leonard says at one point, “After all more than 50% of our federal tax money’s now going to the military.”  The video’s line-drawing animation then shows a figure representing the U.S. government on its knees shining the shoe of a large, top-hatted figure with a dollar sign on its chest, symbolizing corporations.  “As the corporation has grown in size and power, we see a little change in the government where they’re a little more concerned in making sure that everything’s working out for those guys than for us.”

Subtle, it’s not.

Equally unsubtle is the reaction of the Heritage Foundation which lambastes the video as “the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America.”

Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it. For example: after implying that the radios for sale in Radio Shack are assembled by 15 year olds in Mexico, and by purchasing one, you contribute to the exploitation of the third world and the eventual end of the Earth, the film’s creator and narrator Annie Leonard says: “So MY country’s response to this limitation is simply to go take somebody else’s. THIS is the third world. Which SOME would say, is another word for our stuff that somehow got on somebody else’s land. So what does that look like? The same thing, trashing the place. (capitalized emphasis ours).”

Heritage asks how “The Story of Stuff” has found its way into so many classrooms.  “While nobody denies liberal Greenpeace activists their point of view, even if factually wrong, surely airing a 20 minute political ad to little kids wouldn’t be supported by mainstream outlets, would it?”    The popularity of the video has led to a debate about academic freedom and the video’s appropriateness in at least one school system in Missoula County, Montana.  After getting the New York Times treatment, more will surely follow.

Sounds like another test of those 21st Century skills in critical thinking and media literacy our children are supposed to be developing.