The Story of Stuff

"The Story of Stuff" with Annie Leonard was a very compelling documentary about extreme consumerism in the United States. The numbers and statistics were over whelming, especially concerning the number of people that die and suffer for the sake of putting products, like I-Pods and cheap clothing, on the shelves of big corporations, like Wal-Mart. And the amount of waste we, individually, and as a nation put out is endless, unfortunately our resources are.
This video really got me thinking about how much I consume and waste, all the time. Through shopping and readily disposing of items that, I thought, could be easily replaced without consequence. But the consequences are real and extreme. From pregnant women working with chemicals to indigenous people being forced from there environment, to the destruction of our planet. It appears that the single action of purchasing massed produced products, over and over again has resounding impacts on the entire world.
From the perspective of our atmosphere its fair to say that all the toxins dumped into the products being produced in record numbers is really destructive to the air quality. Its extremely hazardous to the people that live in the area of factories that produce dangerous emissions, leaving them vulnerable to the onset of asthma and cancer.
I didn't hear many solutions offered in the video, probably because the problems are so huge and seemingly unsolvable without drastic change, its hard to pinpoint one solution. But the video is quite convincing about there being a really big issue about consumerism in the U.S.